Of Cars, Friends, Email and Twitter

My car died on Mon­day. The tim­ing chain broke and caused the pis­ton heads to hit the top of their cylin­ders, in turn caus­ing major dam­age which would have cost more than the car was worth to repair. So yes­ter­day after­noon I met the tow trunk and got paid for it. K and I had grabbed almost every­thing out of it the day before, so all that were left in it were memories.

Mom got the Intre­pid because she knew I liked them. I’ve always called it the “Pisces” in my head because the design looked very fish-like to me. It was a good car, one we got from Enter­prise, and it put many miles into its ser­vice for the fam­ily. I’m sad to see it go but I’m also excited about hav­ing a car with AC when I get my next car (more on that in another post, this is just for lunch break.)

Last night K and I met with an old high school buddy and part­ner in crime, Matt. Matt and I were attached at the hip through high school and had we gone to the same col­lege would have most likely con­tin­ued to be but when I went to GT and he went to FSU (then UF) we began drift­ing apart. Well last night we met up with him and his lady and had a deli­cious din­ner at the Vil­lage Tav­ern which was pricey but deli­cious and a won­der­fully fun evening out. We’re hop­ing to do a monthly get together but that is depen­dent on how life sched­ules work out. Regard­less though it was a won­der­ful way to respark a dear friendship.

I’m try­ing to min­i­mize my online dis­trac­tions. Funny, I know, con­sid­er­ing the life I lead. But cur­rently, as an exam­ple, I have si..err…seven email addresses where peo­ple might con­tact me. As of this morn­ing I had four places I had to go to check them. I’m in the process of try­ing to merge many  of them into my main Gmail account. The humor here is that a few years ago I was try­ing to get away from Gmail due to some spam issues (I receive an absurd amount of spam daily, their fil­ters catch the vast major­ity of it though.) So I’m try­ing to get Google Apps and nor­mal Gmail to coop­er­ate. When all is said and done I will hope­fully come down to just two places to check my email. In theory.

Speak­ing of Gmail, I twit­tered this yes­ter­day. If you use Gmail, you need to go into your set­tings and set it to always use https. The rea­son being that while the login pro­ce­dure is done via https (mak­ing it secure) the nor­mal usage after­wards has a vul­nder­abil­ity that if you do so over wire­less it opens a pos­si­bil­ity for hack­ers to steal your account info and once they’re in your email they can very eas­ily infil­trate banks, invest­ments, web­sites, blogs etc. Pro­tect your email, use https and use a long password.

As for Twit­ter, it’s shock­ing how core it has become to my exis­tence. K laughs because she’s grown used to my tweet­ing things as they hap­pen. She’s espe­cially grown fond of being funny and get­ting quoted in tweets. I’ve also today trans­ferred myself over to Tweet­Deck rather than Twhirl the rea­son being that the abil­ity to group peo­ple I fol­low and incor­po­rate key­word searches is a fan­tas­tic tool I can’t let go of.

It’s novel, for a while Twit­ter was for me and my friends from Dragon*Con and some other online geeks I kept track of. Mind­Comet is deeply wired and a great num­ber of them are on Twit­ter as well so it offers a novel way for the office to com­mu­ni­cate. When I was stuck wait­ing for the tow truck yes­ter­day my boss was in a meet­ing so I couldn’t tell him I’d be run­ning late, so I tweeted my predica­ment and that way at least some­one in devel­op­ment knew what was going on. In the­ory at least.

Man, lis­ten to that rain come down! I’m so glad I didn’t break down while Fay was hov­er­ing over­head, thank­fully it was sunny while I waited for that tow truck.