Forever Young I Cannot Stay...

...well, maybe. But listening to tracks like this at least allows me to feel like I can postpone the inevitable. Ironically I wasn't much of a fan of this track, or this band, back in 1983, but I've been playing it an awful lot recently and now, as I said when I blipped the track a few days ago, I love this song so much it hurts.

the alarm

sixty eight guns

declaration 1983

I reckon I've got a few sensible - adult - decisions to make in the very near future, mainly concerning my future. Perhaps I'll blog about them, when the time comes.

Dear Diary, In 140 Or Less...

I'm still here - still around, although I know it's been a while since I wrote anything here. Hell, even the guy who tries to leave comments with Japanese porn links in them has noticed it's been a while!! I've been really busy over the last half-moon though, mainly due to some very heavy working days. That's been caused by the UK general election which is almost upon us, so hopefully things will slacken off a bit then. Hopefully *crosses fingers*

While sitting down and writing a blog entry can take some time, updating Twitter can be done in just a moment, so at least I've been keeping my followers there updated. Although it's sometimes hard to express yourself fully in just 140 characters - indeed the reason I originally started this blog was because sometimes 140 characters is not enough - I do try my best. The fact that I can update there from my phone helps as well.

I recently discovered a site called Twitario which "turns your tweets into a diary" and does it rather well, I think. Simply give the site your Twitter name and they'll pull your most recent updates and display them like an old-fashioned paper diary. You get the last 200 as standard, but if you sign into the site (using OAuth, so no worries about telling anyone your Twitter password) that gets increased to 1,000 - which in my case takes us back to the beginning of January. You can also save the results to a .pdf file if you really want to keep an archive. It seems to discount all your replies and retweets from the final result, so what's left is all you - just like a real diary. Indeed, you can print the .pdf out if you want, and have a real paper diary for that old-fashioned effect :)

I have to admit, I like the result - particularly on the website as it's rendered in a "handwriting" typeface. I can see myself doing a Twitario maybe once a month, perhaps occasionally copying the results into a Textedit file and adding comments on the tweets - essentially just like the diaries I used to keep as a teenager, except a lot lower maintenance as I'm effectively doing the job "invisibly", since it's being written as I update Twitter in the normal course of events. And then, maybe I'll post the "annotated" copy as a blog entry and kill three birds with the same digital stone...or maybe not.

I recently posted to Twitter that since it's possible to make these Twitter "diaries" perhaps I should think more carefully about what I post up there. I tend to use Twitter mainly to record things that happen to me anyway - I'm not sure how many people actually read my updates, but my guess is it's fairly low, given most of my followers are themselves following hundreds of others, I'd say most of what I post is lost in the noise (as is most of what everyone posts on Twitter, in my opinion, but that's a story for another day) Because of the "immediacy" of Twitter, you could argue I shouldn't be putting stuff up "for the ages" on there anyway - that's what a blog is for.

So, If you're on Twitter, why not give it a go? (But not all at once, as I don't want their servers getting overwhelmed...heh heh)