Twitter favourite

"I have decided to become a tiny woman from the Philippines."

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Stopped for the night on a gravel road surrounded by spinnifex, cooked tea on a fire and used my shower bag for the 1st time."

- twocrowsdown, Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Rode my bike on a 25 mile loop over lunch. Bicycle broke down at mile 12.555555555555555. Yep."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Cold dark winter morning

I'm sitting here at the computer, 05:06 am in a cold dark winter morning, and apparently I'm awake.

My phone got a message from Twitter/EQTW at 04:23 am and it said this:

EQTW: {EQ&TW} Loc
al Tsunami Informatio
n:
TSUNAMI INFORMA
TION STATEMENT N
UMBER 1
NWS PACIFIC TSUN
AMI WARNIN..
http://tinyurl.com/5nx7
3x

I don't know how to make the phone stop doing the line breaks like that.

I only noticed this tweet because I was already awake and hadn't gone back to sleep. My phone rings on silent/vibrate because all the available ringtones are so hideous, and the sound of the vibration is so loud I can hear any call from hundreds of kilometres away anyway, though usually that's not enough to wake me from sleep.

Anyway. Tsunami Information Statement. I didn't want to get out of bed to check the information online because:
(a) it's cold;
(b) last time I got out of bed to check a tsunami information tweet online it was about nothing and said no action was required;
(c) there had been no earlier tweets about earthquakes (except this objection was easy to overrule - Twitter is so unreliable there could have been 50 earthquakes and it might not have told anybody);
(d) it was only 04:23 am and it's a cold dark winter morning.

Finally I did get out of bed because:
(a) maybe there was a real tsunami;
(b) if there was a real tsunami and everybody on low-lying areas (e.g. my sister and her family, or my parents) were killed, that'd make for a pretty bad day later on;
(c) maybe there was a real tsunami.

But there wasn't a real tsunami. The relevant earthquake was only a magnitude of 3.0 (3.0?!) off the coast of Hawaii, and presumably tsunami notification peoples there were being hyper-vigilant about letting folks know there's NO ACTION REQUIRED.

That's good. Of course.

And now it's 05:23 am and outside it's dark dark dark and inside it's cold cold cold. And I will now have another cup of tea.

This has been my morning. Welcome to it.

(Brought to you by 22 minutes of rewriting and editing. Should it have taken that long? Why, no! Now where's that cup of tea, then?)

Twitter favourite

"Up at 4:45 to watch the meteor shower, I carry a folding chair out on to the driveway and look up: nothing. Clouds. A raindrop hits my face."

- Morning_Porch (Dave Bonta), Twitter

quote

[Aunt Dahlia] "Have you ever heard of Market Snodsbury Grammar School?"

[Bertram Wooster, narrator] "Never."

"It's a grammar school at Market Snodsbury."

I told her a little frigidly that I had divined as much.

"Well, how was I to know that a man with a mind like yours would grasp it so quickly?" she protested.

- P. G. Wodehouse, Right ho, Jeeves, Project Gutenberg e-book

Twitter favourite

"I'm not a native speaker and it snows."

- ttseco (Theo Tsecouras), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"Four priests at the Requiem Mass yesterday and none of them spotted my heathen soul. I'm calling bullshit on their magic superpowers."

- munki (Sarah Wedde), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"sad to read on Facebook that 'George Orwell has no recent activity'"

- cpev (Charlie Peverett), Twitter

Twitter favourite

"OMG, I wrote a derogatory tweet about some random person I heard on the radio and it turns out he follows me. This is my finest hour."

- matthewbaldwin (Matthew Baldwin), Twitter

Twitter favourite

Me, to the two wild turkeys wandering the Oakland Rose Garden: "Hey, jive turkeys!"
Turkeys "Wobwobwob."
Bystander: Quickly looks away.

- evany, Twitter

vi.sualize.us

This morning I saw ReadWriteWeb's 3 cool sites to bookmark your favorite images on the Web, and now I'm trying one of the sites: vi.sualize.us (my account).

As the article says, "You can think of it as the Delicious for images", and vi.sualize.us really is very Delicious-like, complete with a Firefox extension, tags, and a history page for each item.

When you see an image you'd like to bookmark (and provided you have the Firefox extension - I don't know how it works with other browsers), you just right-click it and then fill in the details on a little pop-up window. Each saved image links back to the original, and vi.sualize.us does encourage people to look for the author's name - which is more than can be said for any other site I've seen. (Take a look at some Delicious links, for example; hardly any of them name the author.)

There are probably hideous and horrible copyright implications, but bah phooey. Cite your sources. Share your work. Cross your fingers.

Twitter favourite

From Splendour in the Grass, a music festival at Byron Bay:

"Disappointed with BlueJuice. prob better before singer broke arm and leg."

- jxe520 (Ed), Twitter

discovery

Notice anything unusual about those tins?

Answer: both labels use the same blue. I was absurdly proud of myself for discovering that.

And in further news, did you know that "WD-40" (the name of the product on the right-hand side) means "Water Displacement, 40th formula"? It was invented by Norman B. Larsen in 1953. See Wikipedia: WD-40 and Norm Larsen

UPDATE
From its own website, WD-40 was created by the Rocket Chemical Company and its staff of three (two of them unnamed). Plus if you want to get technical about it, the name WD-40 actually stands for "Water Displacement perfected on the 40th try".

Twitter favourite

"On Twitter, one must be pithy, succinct and concise. Brevity counts, too. Avoid verbosity, loquaciousness and redundancy. Get to the point."

- howardowens (Howard Owens), Twitter

Twitter favourite

'I love ending bedtime stories for my nieces and nephews with "..and they haven't caught the killer to this day. Well, goodnight!" [CLICK]'

- Tony_D (Tony Delgrosso), Twitter

quote

"That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold."

- Moby Dick by Herman Melville, installment 51 of 260 from DailyLit