Aaron Hoffman's Blog

I find it more and more difficult to attend a conference without the assistance of Twitter.  It allows me to quickly get a feel for the room.  The quotes that landed well with people, what they disagree with, the interesting side stories of the day.  I've often thought the Twitter Search function lacks much of what I wish it could do/should do.  How would Q & A sessions be improved if Twitter was used to crowd source the questions (or the answers for that matter)?  This idea, of course, can be applied more broadly and is not just relevant to conferences.  Analyzing tweets based on #hashtags, instant polls of crowds - How would our world change if this data was put to use? Now this may be considered a bad  example (in every way) of what I mean, but let's take a look at some of the most occurring @mentions in Tweets that can be related to the Thinc Iowa closing party.  One reason I would consider this a bad example is because numbe...

-- Scott Hanselman ( http://www.hanselman.com/ ,  http://twitter.com/shanselman ) recently tweet'd, " I need a keyboard with an "http://www." button. " To which I replied, " @shanselman you still type the "http" part? I didn't think you had to anymore... "  Oooh, hahahaha, how smart and funny am I!?  ....Apparently not very... :-) shanselman responded (as well as to others with the same smart remarks), " @aaron_hoffman in tweetdeck or Twitter, you do. "  --Aaaah, I get it now, he's not in a browser! okay, he has me in Check . Now I just had to solve this problem.  Well automation/degree in laziness (with years of laziness experience) to the rescue!  At first I thought PowerShell  - but since I am on a WinXP SP2 machine, that wouldn't do.  I'll have to fall back to the console app & desktop shortcut combination of yester-system. Steps to Simple Keystroke Automation (w/ WinXP SP2 Handicap) 1. Create .N...

Ever notice how similar a lot of the "English" alphabet's characters look? The guy who put this together must have really phoned it in that day. He really could only come up with these: ABCDEFGHIJK_MNOPQRSTUV_XY_ and then just flipped a few around a bit to get up to 26: J L M W S Z And it isn't just those three, a lot of the original list look eerily similar to each other as well, but I guess we'll count them: B R E F H K M N O Q U V T Y Y X but then he needed to come up with 10 more numbers... well none of those are unique! 0 O 1 I 2 Z 3 E 4 P 5 S 6 G 7 L 8 B 9 P So in the end, if you are looking for unique characters that you can use, that will not be confused with any other characters, you're only left with: A well that isn't very many... -