Twitter is good i tell you!

So i'm a twitter user, http://twitter.com/nathan_m

A number of people I've had conversations with don't seem convinced on the awesomeness on twitter so thought I should post about it.

The general view I get is that many people have been burnt by the promise of myspace and facebook. What started as a great social tool or place to post photos became a crazy spam pit of mess and bloat and having to deal with friend request from people you hadn't spoken to in years, and probably never actually would again. What's that another app called twitter? that's just another facebook wall no thanks.

I must say when I first got on the twitter bandwagon, i tried it out and didn't really like it. Every time I loaded twitter up it would ask "What are you doing?" to which the truthful uninspiring answer would be checking the internet. So i didn't post that. Everyone one else had such interesting things to post about didn't seem something i wanted to share with the world was that i only ever checked the internet. Sure i did other fun things, but in the midst of those it hardly seems appropriate to run off to you're laptop and write about it for the faceless masses of web. The thought never really crossed my mind: if it had, would really be a bit to sad to consider it.

But then... dah Dah DAH! i gots me an iPhone :) And my word does it revolutionize the twitter. Now it allows me to tweet what i'm doing WHEN I'M ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING! Wouldn't seem like much of a difference would it? Except whenever you're out having fun, there is invariably a minute or two there where you find you must amuse yourself: The person you're talking to has to dash to the bathroom; you're waiting in line for something; one of the many other times when you would otherwise pretend to check your messages so you can look busy :) Instead you now have a chance to tell the rest of the world what you're up to! It may sound a bit self indulgent, but its no more so than blogging, and actually gives you a more raw voice rather than the mass editting and thought and thus checking one does when one rights a blog (enjoy the royal pronouns there).

So I would say, twitter is really only realised if you can harness it on a mobile device. Indeed one of the cool features of the twitterfon twitter app on iphone is to insert a google maps link of your current gps location. A friend who was camped out on top of kangaroo point cliffs for riverfire tweeted his location so we could use google maps on my phone to find him.

Another very cool things was to use it on the snow trip. We had 10 guys at Thredbo a few months ago, almost all with iPhones. We all tend to split off into smaller groups heading out at different times, some off to do lessons or different parts of the mountain. Usually try to meet up for lunch or schnappy hour. So you finish a lesson and think lets try call people to see where they all at. For that, you need to have reception... so does the person you're calling. Then you need to hope they can answer. If they manage to hear it, they need to be able to stop, take off gloves, find phone and answer it. If wearing a helmet, speaker phone is best bet. You could try SMS, but once again you could send to 9 other people and then wait to check replies.

...or use twitter :) Would finish a lesson, check twitter. Someone would have tweeted where they were all having lunch, so could get over to join them easily. One morning went up early with skiiers but the conditions weren't good for snowboarding so went for hot chocolate on top of mountain to warm up and dry out. Other guys yet to head up saw tweet, knew i was somewhere where i had gloves and helmet off and could take a call, so rang to get a weather report. Handy to see where abouts people were on mountain as most people would tweet whenever they took a break. I call it passive communication, and it's a great form lacking on traditional phones which was so useful on the mountain! Instead of sending a message to many people to request information, you can instead leave a message once with latest information for anyone who might wish to read it.

And finally, if you're not convinced yet, i'll just say that you can also follow dr karl on twitter! http://twitter.com/DoctorKarl . Some days work is just going slow so a quick check of twitter can let me get some brain spark from some of the random factoids posted by the good doctor. Learnt a cool new word today http://twitter.com/DoctorKarl/status/5224195107 petrichor which means the smell before rain. Awesome, never knew there was a word for that :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

That's enough about twitter. Scuse this post for being a bit rushed. i had a much calmer tone when i first wrote this on the iphone but then stupid blogpress deleted it all so just rewrote it all now rather than start a new rant on the stupidness of the app

Words to remember - Demonym

So I was watching a movie the other day (one of those set in WW2) and noticed that Jewish people were called Jews but German people were called Germans. Found it odd/interesting that in a few rare cases we have a different word between the generic adjective for things that come from a place, and the people that come from a place. I found I could distinguish the two by saying:

A [x] is [y]

So a Jew is Jewish

But a German is German.

Using this to stop myself getting context confused, I started running through different countries to try and figure out how often this occurs.

Australians are Australian, Americans are American, Canadians are Canadian. Seemed like most places I could think of were all boring and used the same variants.

Then I though to Great Britain and surrounds:

An Enligshman is English

A Scottsman (or Scott) is Scottish

An Irishman is Irish

A Frenchman is French.

Not as boring as being the same, but still pretty boring.

So I wanted to look this stuff up, but couldn't think what to look up.

Then stumbled across this on wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym

Turns out Demonym is the word for a name of a person derived from their location name. Quite interesting reading on that page, recommend it. For instance, sometimes the reverse is true, and a place is named after the inhabitants, such as Thailand. Never made the connection before that Thailand is the land Thais inhabit.

Anyway, found all this a while ago... then forgot the words demonym, so now i've posted it somewhere i shouldn't forget again!

Reverse Dictionary?

So writing my last post, I wanted to put some useful labels on it.  Became rather distraught upon realising: I didn't know a word which meant "the name of the seemingly epic epiphany one has when under the influence of alcohol".  I can look up a word in the dictionary and see what it means, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way to describe something and find a word for it.

Anyway, my searches on google didn't find it.  I'm stuck thinking up a decent word to sum it all up to, which i would really like as it would make a great tag for a number of posts to come.