ME: Hot atheists and agnostics http://bit.ly/b37g57 Aren’t Agnostics just Atheists with a fear of commitment?

(Meant to be humorous)

Other Person: agnostics = there is a god! Athiests = there is no such thing as this god nonsense

To which I stupidly reply:

ME: Agnostics are just-in-case Atheists. You can’t have God without religion. Like believing in Huck Finn without Mark Twain.

Which in turn opens the angry floodgates:

OP: uhhhh… I’m agnostic. Yes, you can have spirituality without religion. You can’t be Christian without Christianity though.

OP: it’s more about abandoning religion than anything. Don’t tell me what I am.

OP: people don’t understand that spirituality and religion are two totally different things.

Oh, I had a reply but I refrained from comment there. I mean it’s twitter! Land of the quick comments not long discussions.

OP: that is like saying people of earthly (pagan) religions are athiests because they don’t believe in the Christian God.

My eyes are glazing over here…

OP: or that I am an athiest because I believe in and thank the universe for what I am blessed with. I am not Christian…

Fine, whatever you say dear. Go eat a cookie and calm down.

ag·nos·tic: (wishy-washy)

• One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.
• One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.
• One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something.

Friday night was the usual #evfn, except E and Sheila weren’t there and neither was the guy they had organizing it in their absence. So of course I take up the slack and try to make sure everyone is taken care of and the newbies are introduced around. I don’t think I did a very good job as certain people walked out. Oh well, there’s always next week.

Kira and I hung out Saturday night and this morning we wandered over to a new (for us) McDonald’s, shopped at WalMart and took the light rail to downtown Tempe (yes, I live here but I’d promised Kira we’d take the train one day) to check out #comiccreate.

And tonight I get a following notification on FourSquare (a social geolocation application) for Earl Newton! Now I’ve met the man at D*C a couple of times, and maybe he would friend me on twitter where you’re getting occasional light-hearted updates/comments from people. And maybe on Facebook which is pretty much the same thing. Likely because of my connection to Evo and less on my own merit I think. Twitter/Myspace/Facebook are places you “friend” anyone you’ve ever met and then some. But wouldn’t you only follow people on a location-based application that you might, maybe, kind of EVER thought you’d actually want to know where they are? Earl Motherfucking Newton wants to know where I am? That’s soooo fucking cool. I feel like somebody now.

And Earl? If you’re a googling fool and come across this post, please don’t explain or get freaked out or delete me or anything. This is me after a couple of drinks – FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because someone of your caliber clicked on me as a connection somewhere, that’s all. Let me have this. Carry on and I’ll never bother you again.

Oh yeah, I got paid for work I did! Actual money instead of possibilities.

What a great weekend.

What am I talking about? There are applications to keep track of where your friends are and to let them know where you are. Hey, sometimes you’re  hanging out somewhere and you think, “maybe a friend would drop by and hang out with me if they only knew where I was!” Voila! Or if you’re meeting up with a group they can see who is already there.

I use FourSquare because it let’s you sort of compete with your friends and earn points and mayorship of places, stuff like that. But if a place isn’t already in their database you have to manually enter it, which is a pain in the ass on your phone. Asking a business what their complete address is so you enter it right, and then making sure you spell and get the name perfect? Nope.

So then I turn to Brightkite because it pulls it’s information from google. You can almost always find where you are with few clicks. But there’s no extra incentive.

I’ve noticed people using Gowalla, which seems like a combination of both. A searchable database of locations so you don’t have to enter the information yourself AND points and great icons and it says you get perks from the places you visit. I dunno.

And all these link with your twitter/facebook so you can get the information out instantly. I think they all have regular text access too so you don’t need a fancy phone for them.

So before I sign up for Gowalla I thought I’d check with you. Which do you prefer?

Someone posted a link last night to an article praising twitter for having the headline/story out HOURS before CNN! OMG CNN dropped the ball! We’re all smart and superior for knowing half a story before actual reporters you know, report!

I love that regular twitter users get the first heads up about important events like plane crashes and earthquakes, but I think the gossip factor about other “news stories” is out of control. It’s almost as bad as junior high girls trashing each other.

Don’t believe it just because everyone is talking about it on twitter.

This morning the story is a little more fleshed out. Apparently Tiger was fucking around on his wife which may/may not have anything to do with his accident. He somehow crashed into a fire hydrant in front of his house and his wife busted the SUV’s back window open with a golf club and dragged his sorry ass out. I’d have let him sit there for a while. That is, if I gave a shit at all about his private life. Why do you?

My point is SHUT UP TWITTER. Calm the fuck down. Don’t haphazardly retweet headlines of unproven gossip. Let’s try to be better than TMZ or FOX News.

Anyway, it was a day filled with WordPress information. It started off with some woman I’ve never heard of calling her self the Diva of WordPress and yet preaching “we don’t care if you have bad spelling or grammar, we just want to hear what you have to say!” Cue immediate disrespectful twittering from many people. Then another all-about-me presenter and more cranky twittering. Then some kid who looked 12 but seemed to know a lot. The morning was filled with more motivational type speakers – all about content. The afternoon leaned more to the technical side, the guy who created WordPress in the first place, and local WordPress magicians Chuck Reynolds and Josh Strebel had a Q&A panel. Another guy got all geeky with step-by-step widget coding that was way over my head. Merlin Mann was highly entertaining, and Brent Spore was great. All-in-all a nice motivational day, but not what I expected.  Props to my friend Chuck for organizing the 500 seat sold-out WordCamp.

Saturday and Sunday were this year’s PodCampAZ, the one I’m involved in planning. I spent most of Saturday working registration with Rachel so I got to meet lots of new people. I helped Evo with his panel (I clicked the slide advance button) and helped set-up and take down. Yesterday I set up registration, but spent more time in actual panels. Brent’s panel on social media almost immediately got intense when the packed room divided between the let’s-keep-it-to-ourselves side and the we-need-to-bring-in-new-people-side.  He wanted to get people talking and it certainly did. Another friend Katie had a panel on social media but it was more what you should and should not put out there. The best panel I went to was a WordPress panel, where Josh skimmed over the best settings and must-have widgets and plugins – which was the information I’d been looking for from WordCamp.

So expect some changes to this site as soon as I’m rested up. I’m still tired as hell and I have a lot of notes to expand on while the information is fresh. We all learned that GeekWeek is toooooo much at one time. Information overload + planning anxiety + RL stress = exhaustion. There were other conferences earlier in the week that some people attended too. Thursday was the Entrepreneurship Conference, there was a design camp somewhere and I think one other thing and some people hit them all. Each event was successful but running them all within a week is too much which is likely why the PodCampAZ ending wasn’t attended by as many people as we expected. Our numbers were much lower than registered though there were a lot of walk-ins.

I was surprised at how many of our speakers failed to show up! When I checked with our speaker coordinator Lawrence, only about half of the n0-shows bothered to contact him with an explanation beforehand. It’s fucking rude as HELL to have a roomful of people waiting for you and not show up.

Twitter just started this listing thing. You can assign the people you follow to various lists. I got about halfway through and gave up.

Certain people are older Internet friends from the McCaffrey boards and BPOI. Some of those I’ve met in real life and a few are actual real friends now.

Certain people I’ve met through podcasting. Some of those I’ve met and are real friends, some are just fans (which is freaky in and of itself) and some I’ll never meet and really have no connection to, but follow because.  A handful are writers I’ve met through podcasting who have become both semi-celebrities and semi-friends.

And then there’s the real life family, friends, kid’s friends, etc.

It’s weird enough when, because of some interesting banter or retweet, person A from list B starts following person R from list D.

Right?

This completely freaked me out today:

Katie Berry is one of my daughter’s friends we’ve known since Kindergarten. Seth Harwood is a published author and podcaster and cute as hell. They cannot know each other! Coincidence has made my mind explode.

________________________________________________________

Kira’s vocabulary has exploded too. In the last few days she’s started say things like, “Just listen to me, LISTEN to me! Be very careful out there so the monsters don’t get you.” She’s so insistent. And today in the car when I asked her if she was going to behave in the store she answered with the most nonchalant “of course” I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Casey’s friend Charlie tells me Kira got up at the crack of dawn the other morning and proceeded to (attempt to) wash her dishes.

At this very moment she’s dancing to Funky Town in Shrek 2. I wish my camera had batteries. Crap.

If you are an established or aspiring blogger, podcaster, video blogger, or social media advocate and want to meet hundreds of people with the same interests, head over to podcampaz.org to get more information about this exciting event. And above all else, register to attend PodCamp AZ!

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Okay, I blogged the quasi-official blurb. On a more personal level, y’all need to come. It’s fun and informative and FREE! I’m one of the planning committee members and I’m planning big things. If you want to speak, register and say so. If you want to sponsor, register and say so. If you think you might want to attend, REGISTER and pencil in the dates on your calendar, November 14-15. PodCampAZ is the final event in Geek Week (actually more than a week) so keep watching for details on other AZ events in that time frame.

If this all looks too good to miss and you’re not in the PHX area, we will soon have hotel deals and some of us are willing to put people up just so they can come.

Seriously, you NEED to come. Conferences, parties, tweet-ups, and more conferences.

@nathanfillion/ is on twitter.  And he already has more than 13,00o followers! I really hope he follows through and actually uses it. I love his sense of humor and I think he could have some fun with it.  We’ll see.

It was fun semi-observing the process and being just a little bit of an insider.

1. Avoid the public stream.  There are a few people in the world who want to keep up with the goings on of billions of twitter users but I don’t think any of my friends will want to.  Find and follow your friends, see who they respond to, and follow the ones that seem interesting.  There are some celebrities on twitter but only follow those that actually appear to have conversations.  Because twitter is about communicating both ways.

2. Do not accept follow requests from people without checking their page.  If they only post business links, have only posted once or twice, follow hundreds of people but only have few followers – AVOID.  Don’t sign up for any autofollowing crap.

3. If you want to respond openly to a specific person: @theirname with no space.  Most clients (twhirl, twitterberry, tweetdeck, etc.) highlight your @name.  If you want to talk to someone privately: d theirname with a space – that’s a direct message that won’t go out on your timeline.

4. Use your real face for your avatar.  Seriously, twitter is about communication and real people.  Us local Phoenix users meet up all the time and it’s easier to identify new people by face than wonder if that person over there is a new member of your group or just some random guy – who we inevitably get on twitter anyway.

5. Don’t use 4 or 2 or U or any of that crap unless you absolutely HAVE to. We get that 140 characters ain’t a lot so shorten your comment rather than shortening your words.

6. Tell us what you’re doing, what you’re watching, what you just found that is amusing or interesting, or just that your sox don’t match today and you just figured it out.  Send out questions.  Report when something interesting happens in your neighborhood or town.  Just not all at once.  Don’t go on and on and on about nothings.

I imagine twitter as a giant cubicle zoo and you know how you might pop up and mention something funny or something interesting to the person in the next cube?  That’s twitter.  Short, quick and to the point.

Welcome and have fun.  Any questions?  Anyone have any other pointers to add?

PS. Twitter seems to be having issues over the last couple of days. It’s not usually this slow or problematic.  They’ve come a long way since it started. Hang in there and have patience and pretty soon she’ll be back to normal.

But . . .

If you’re going to commit to a cause, especially one with such simple guidelines and instructions, do it as asked.  Don’t add your own cute little embellishments, your own personal thumbprint, your cute little whatthefucks.

Don’t know what I’m talking about?  That’s okay.  Go here: http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html

They simply ask that if you want to be supportive, change your internet avatars to black and post why along with the link.  Period.  Does that sound difficult to you?  Nope, me neither.

And then wander Facebook and twitter and other social sites, and see what SOME people feel is commiting to the cause.  Adding their own person “brand” to a black background?  What the hell is that?  First of all, people seeing your internet avatars on Facebook and twitter already fucking KNOW you so you don’t have to advertise. Secondly, the whole thing is over at the end of the month.  Do you really have to personalize your black avatar?  So stuck on yourselves that you can’t let it go for a few days?  Ever heard of the saying Lip Service?  Dunno what you’d call it online.

If you’re going to play along, then play along.  If you don’t believe anything will come of it and it’s all just a waste of time, then fine, don’t play along.  Whatever you decide is up to you, but if you’re going to play along THEN FOLLOW THE FUCKING DIRECTIONS.

Seriously, I don’t know why this is bugging me so much but I feel better now.  I posted a couple of comments on twitter earlier.  A couple of my friends are doing this half-assed and I thought veiled snark would maybe change their mindsl.

I thought the whole idea behind the blackout was to have a completely blacked-out avatar. Not to be cute about it. http://is.gd/jDKz

I think it’s like embroidering your logo on a pink ribbon. Why bother pretending to be supportive when you’re just paying lip service.

We’ll see if this makes any difference.  If not, oh well.  Tomorrow is another day.  Oh wait, it’s after 12.  Today is another day.