Twitter has had a recent nasty string of outages, technical gaffs. Ouch, poor little blue birdie. While I have taken my cheap shots at them, I am liking pondering why, in the fickle fast pace high expectations web 2.0 days we live in (and knowing the “we” there is perhaps not all that inclusive of the world at large), that people are staying with it?

The latest one on Saturday, was summarized on the twitter-blog (love how running a Google blog they are putting their tech efforts into their code):

Around 11 am in San Francisco, our main database db006, crashed because of too many connections. We have to put the service into an unscheduled maintenance mode to recover. Folks will see degraded service for the next few hours.

What jumped out at me was the fact that poor db006 (obviously not the database that is shaken, not stirred) is referenced as singular. Reading the comments are plenty of cheap shots like “buy another server dude” or “just hire someone who knows databases”. The one from ‘Phil’ places me in my armchair with a dose of rationality.

So it’s not like they are lounging on the beach while db006 is up in smoke. So why don’t the masses mass elsewhere?

Google’s genesis was in well executed back-end server stuff (those precious search algorithms, they KO-d Altravista, Yahoo, Lycos) and at the time of ad-cluttered busy sites, it’s stark simplicity design of plain text, one colorful logo, on a white background was the antidote to the web status quo. But hey, its 2008, and there is […]

TentCam Originally uploaded by cogdogblog Back in the day when I was a free wheeling no responsibility grad student herein Arizona, I spent a lot of time doing solo backpack trips, especially out in the Superstition Wilderness Area and up on the Mogollon Rim. It sure seemed time to get back to nature, and my […]

Most people who have reached the high vistas of the Twitter Life Cycle curve have at least one, if not many small stories where they got information, a contact, a resource from twitter that they would not have gotten anywhere else. Or in such a timely fashion.

So here is one more, how I long shoot tweet in the air got me technical info I needed.

The NMC web site runs in drupal (no snark today). We use the TinyMCE module to give our users, and our office staff who create a lot of the content, a visual text editor. But I have had this nibbling problem which will likely seem nothing to a drupal-ista. I have our CSS styles include classes for hyperlinks, so that adding something like class=”pdf” to an href tag will insert a small file type icon:

It is as simple as

(See the press release) 

I have a few classes for quicktime links, word docs, rss feeds, they all look something like:

.pdf {
	background: url('images/pdf.gif') no-repeat;
	padding-left: 14px;
}

But the problem was I would edit these in the drupal plain text editor, since I love seeing the HTML code, but if someone else in our office went to edit the content (like to fix one of my typos), when they went into the TinyMCE text editor and then saved their work, the damn class would be stripped from the source.

Wow, what a great day it was yesterday to be back at my old stomping grounds but this time as an invited speaker for the Maricopa Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference which has become a great regional event, as they had attendees from Arizona State University, Coconino Community College, I heard even people came from Texas (?).

Mike Wesch was an amazing speaker, and beyond his YouTube fame are some amazing projects he is doing with students generating learning content (check out the world culture sim) in all the good Web 2.0 ways (love his use of netvibes). We got interviewed by Veronica Diaz for a podcast that should appear somewhere on the maricopa conference site.

Mike’s morning keynote was a great leadoff for my Being There presentation, the first of two I did yesterday.

Usually when I get emails about offers to advertise on my blog (which is a rather off thing to ask for), I just delete them. But for fun, when I got this recent one: Hello, We have a client in the e-learning sector who is interested in advertising on your blog. We find it relevant […]

So I finally have my magic card to get out of the Alltel Jail of Poor Service and Unrelenting Contracts Last week I was down in Phoenix using the new UM150 USB modem they sent me. It worked fine for the first stop. Then, I had 5 disconnects in less than 2 hours, from 2 […]

I have an interesting/weird presentation opportunity tomorrow, traveling all the way to Mesa, Arizona to do two sessions at the Maricopa Community Colleges Teaching & Learning with Technology Conference. It’s “weird” because I worked 14 years at Maricopa, nine of those years running the conference that was the predecessor, though I must say I never […]