Hungry Gustav - Life Nonpareil

Why I love Twitter?

Just a few months ago twitter used to be something completely unknown to me, something that only geeks would know how to use it properly. What has happened to me since? Well, as always it is lack of understanding on which fear grows best so I decided to conquer the fear and have a try with twitter. The rest is history but I've got to share some of the most peculiar experiences I have with twitter. It's the only social networking site that I am aware of that is truly liberating. You see unlike facebook or other similar sites twitter followers or following are predominantly random people from all over the globe. I mean stop and think - random people from all over the world I said! Can you see the revolution? Now think again, would you tap random people on a shoulder somewhere in London or New York and ask them what and how they're doing? Of course you wouldn't but that's exactly what twitter is all about. All of my followers on twitter apart from three are random people who share my interests. Even the three that I know have completely surprised me with their interests. I also managed to find excellent professional photographers, chefs, speakers, writers, architects, fashion designers, actors and many more. These people are there not to hide from the rest of the world, they are instead looking for interesting people like them who share their interests and are willing to connect with random people. This is far beyond facebook and many other similar sites and with only 140 characters allowed you cannot rant about nonsense forever though many over exploit twitter for marketing purposes with the use of various bots. But even that is in a way self-regulatory. You can simply unfollow or block abusers and start forming relations with, as I said, genuine random people from all over the world and god knows where this may lead! True revolution in my opinion.

Gathera + Firefox 3.5.3 + Vista = ?

For some time now I was searching for a web tool that could bring at least some of my major web accounts (including social networking sites) under the same roof. There are quite a few that promise to deliver what but I guess the real future in this segment is awaiting Google's Carnegie Mellon experiment with SocialStream to yield some meaningful results. Until then Gathera proved at least to me to be the closest you can get to integrating all of them... well not really as there is a limited number of sites they support but most of the main ones are there including AOL, digg, facebook, flickr, LinkedIN, myspace, twitter, youtube, windows live and Yahoo mail.

So off I went and first installed it (mind you, it is in the form of either IE or Firefox add on) on my wife's computer with WinXP. Installation completed, she registered and then one by one included all of her major sites. Excellent or so I thought! I hoped to achieve the same results on my monster with Vista. Ah, well, not really! The installation was spotless but then the problems appeared out of nowhere which is a kind of my usual experience with Vista. I restarted Firefox as instructed and clicked on the "G" button next to the address line and it simply reported "Gathera was not installed successfully". Oh come on, we all know this not to be true but it is Vista that complicates things by being smart - so much for the smart systems! I contacted Gathera developers and they suggested using IE instead but in an unprotected mode. Whatever the case, I didn't like the prospect of working in that mode and I also don't like IE. The decision was made in an instant, I've got to figure out how the whole thing works and so I did and now want to share this with you. By the way, make sure you clear cache in Firefox before installation. Here it is:

1. Do not click on "restart Firefox" when download is complete as prompted! Simply ignore it and close down Add-ons window and then close down Firefox as you usually do.

2. Believe it or not but you've got to restart your computer, start Firefox and click "Allow" when prompted. Firefox will start, so click on "G" for Gathera just next to the address line.

3. Gathera sidebar will open and you should then register and do the rest as instructed.

Here you go, simple and I have no idea why it doesn't work if you DO press "restart Firefox" button. Just one of many signs that Vista is already dead. I hope Windows 7 is really better. I shall report on that too.

MultiTasking is bad and I'm not alone!

Wow, first of all I'm just realizing how I haven't written anything since July. Shame on me, really. Well, I've got something to knock your socks off to pay back for my absence.

I am finally liberated and able to speak out openly because it's not only me that thinks that way. No worries, I am a pretty confident person but didn't really think it's worth it shouting out loud to people who by default wouldn't agree. That would be energy wasted. I always considered Multitasking as a good excuse for being busy but in reality it is you're stuck and disorganized that forces you to Multitask and become even less efficient but busier and even less efficient - vicious circle in fact.

But I've got support no! Lira Vaughan has been brave enough to speak out and say it, MultiTasking sucks and is far less efficient than batching. I found Lira on Twitter, one of the most liberating social networking application ever but more about this next time.