Tweeter Feetchers

I swear, I put off being a Twitter user for a long time (despite my signing up for it very, very early to get a premium username before I'd eventually be relegated to being "AaronSk8erboi839191_4") but I had to build in some Twitter-related features to some websites I was doing for clients and work and that put the bug in me. It's ridiculous how easy it is to make custom applications to fetch and display tweets of any classification.

And then I moved here to Chicago and I felt like the people from back home would probably have a slight, slight interest in what was going on with me, but with a full time job it was hard to find the energy to write full-on blog posts, so Twitter it was.

When I decided that I was comfortable with it and that I wasn't going to drop it, I decided to make my tweets get pumped directly onto my blog here so that I wouldn't have to explain to my parents what/who/how/why/where a Twitter was, and just to generally make life easier. Also because I like to make things that do things with data from other places. It's my thing.

So I took some code I'd made for a client website to pull in tweets, changed a few things, and plopped it onto this site here.

That's worked out pretty well, but my nature doesn't allow me to let a good thing remain good when I could screw around with it and make it better, so I just added a few more features:

Firewall Bypassery

A few people whose workplaces have firewalls that block Twitter have told me that this prevents the display of Twitter content here. That makes sense, because my script is just telling your browser to get a data feed from Twitter and then interpret it, but it also cheesed me off pretty hard. I didn't like the idea of my website breaking for people at work because of IT policies put in place to prevent secretaries from wasting time at Friendface and Twitbook and such.

So I've added a thing that tries to detect when the script is having trouble fetching the tweets, and then will (unobtrusively) ask the user if they're behind a firewall. Answering "Yes" will attempt to bypass any firewalls using a homespun proxy. I may remove the whole confirmation thing and just attempt the proxy automatically if the first attempt fails, but I liked the look of the confirmation message...

Geolocation/Stalker Enhancements

Twitter recently started allowing for tweets to be encoded with the geo-coordinates of whereever you happened to be when you sent that message (if whatever you're using to send the message allows for it). My phone allows for it, so when I tweet from my phone it includes the location. Even though it kind of creeps me out, I thought it was cool enough that I now display any geo-location information that may exist along with a tweet. You may, on certain messages, see something like this:

The general location of the message is displayed in text form, and if you click the location (or the little pin icon) it will take you to a Google Map showing exactly (exaaaactly) where I was. I think this can supply a little context to messages, the benefit of which should hopefully outweigh the creepiness. Please do not use this information to murder me.

Image Auto-Thumbnailing

Basically, if I link to a TwitPic or Flickr image in a tweet, the script will try to generate a thumbnail for them. Yeah. Fancy stuff.

We Need Better Superhero Grammar Education

Ardent fans of this site (quick question: why?) may remember that some time ago I laid out the rules for superhero nomenclature.

Therein I state the following to rationalize the correct formating of Tony Stark's alter-ego, Iron Man:

He's not Ironman or Iron-Man, though. He's not half-iron, half-man and he's not just a guy who is really into iron. He is an iron man.

Clearly one of the film series' stars needs to read that post (or read it again!), because she doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on the rules.

In her weird half-blog, half-magazine (blog-magazine), Gwyneth Paltrow cannot remember how to format the name of the movie she's starring in. In this startlingly detailed article about how she got in shape for her return to the role of Pepper Potts (the only female comic book character with red hair!), she screws things up from line one:

I have just traversed the globe doing promotion for Ironman 2, getting asked the same question repeatedly: how did I get in shape for the movie?

No.

Wrong.

Iron Man 2.

Simple.

I Have Super Powers

If you polled everybody who knows me in real life and asked them to think of the most annoying thing about me, and you discarded the most common answer of "caustic, self-absorbed jerkface," most people would probably come up with some variant of "mumbles a lot, can barely hear what he's saying."

Growing up, my older siblings and other people whose job it was to highlight my flaws would very often tell me to stop mumbling. A lot of times, I'll say something incredibly funny and anybody who isn't within four feet of me will see the other people laughing and say, "What, what did he say?"

I speak at a rather low volume. I won't deny that. There are various contributing factors to this, but key among them is the simple fact that I have super powers.

My hearing and vision are above average. My eyes see at a higher "framerate" than most people, and because of that I can often see things that other people aren't supposed to. No, not ghosts. Halogen lights have an unusual pulsing flicker going on all the time. Other people don't notice it, but to me, they tend to make everything look a little bit like a strobe light. This doesn't really bother me anymore, and it doesn't affect other people in any way more significant in that they occasionally don't understand when I try to explain why certain department stores give me headaches.

My hearing is what causes the most problems. I can hear slightly higher frequencies than are typical (those dog whistle things sound like a mosquito flying past my ear), but I also just generally hear better than most. Because of that, when I speak at a volume that seems appropriate for my superhero ears, nobody else can hear me.

If I talk at a volume other people seem to talk at, I feel like I'm shouting. To me, most people seem like they're shouting all the time.

I'm not alone in this. My sister seems to be the same. Her and I can have a conversation in public that, to any observer, looks like we're either whispering or somehow reading eachother's lips. Somehow she learned to speak at a reasonable volume around other people, and I did not.

So, I get a lot of "what?"s and "stop mumbling"s. After a lifetime of this, I've grown to become pretty sensitive about being asked to repeat myself. I hate it. If I tell a joke (and if my mouth is open, I'm telling a joke) and somebody asks me to repeat it because they didn't hear my subsonic vocalizations, I almost always have to stop and let a bubbling range simmer down before then deciding if I can handle the shame of repeating myself for an audience of non-superhumans.

I can't decide if my intense negative reaction to being asked to repeat myself is a product of my sense of humor, or some kind of shame that I'd spoken incorrectly in the first place. As I've [over-]established, I make a particularly large deal out of being spontaneously funny. I don't tell "jokes," as it were, as much as I just say funny things appropriate to the situation. People tell me I should be a comedian at times, and I tell them that I never could, because comedians have to tell the same jokes over and over, and I feel like I've failed as a human if I use the same line for a laugh more than once.

If I crack off a one-liner and a few people didn't hear it, my repetition of will have lost half of its oomph because the context changed.

Or, as I said, it could be the shame. I have a weird mental self-defense protocol that tries to stop me from thinking about, or being aware of any negative aspect of myself. From 6th grade and all through high school, whenever someone made a fat joke to or about me, my brain would lock down for a moment and go through a little process of, "wait, he wasn't talking about me, because I'm not fat. He was talking about another guy, a guy who isn't here, because he's in another universe, but he looks like me, but he isn't me, but-- hey, pumpkin pie!"

It never actually hit me that I was fat until about a year ago when my doctor (of all people ) told me I could lose twenty pounds (or lose sixty pounds, as I eventually did).

Without the context of a joke to wash it away, there was no way my stupid brain could divert my attention from that.

And now that I'm working in an office where I sometimes have to tell people things that aren't jokes, them not being able to hear me becomes an actual problem. Only now do I have a volume problem that I cant rationalize away as other people simply not having super-hearing.

So now I have to remember, whenever I open my mouth, to talk about 20% louder than I think I should, even though it feels incredibly wrong.

I think I need a lozenge.

Inline Tweeties

Since I moved I've been Tweeting a bit more often, so I decided to throw together some javascript to include my latest tweets on the blog here. They get mixed in along with blog entries based on their timestamps so everything appears chronologically.

This only works when you actually come to this page. People reading via RSS won't get that amazing new feature.

Ape Willful Stay

I'm from outer space.

For serious. I'm an alien.

Meep morp.

I just said, "this banana smoothie needs fewer ingredients" in my planet's language.

Well, one of my planet's languages. Like yours, my home planet hasn't united into a common creed, so we all bunch up into communities with our own languages and customs. It can get pretty annoying, like how where I'm from it's normal to hold one of your proximal appendages up to your carapace when meeting someone new, but if you travel to Tfonk (as many people do between levels 178 and 179 of their primary education), they take grave offense to such a gesture. I'm not sure why. And don't get me started on their food.

Anyway, I just wanted to say what's up. Earth is cool, I guess. It was difficult adjusting to an oxygen-based atmosphere, since oxygen is a noxious and highly combustible element (where I'm from, it's like our gasoline), and your 7 PSi of air pressure was a bit of a hurdle, not to mention the fact that my perception of 7 dimensions can make it a little difficult to interact with you people and your meager 3, but I try to adapt.

OK, you got me. I'm not really an alien. April Fools and junk.

Unless I am an Alien and our equivalent of April 1st is when we are morally obligated to reveal any and all secrets. If that were the case, I don't know what would be the deal.