…in Kingfisher, flooded on Sunday thanks to Tropical Depression Erin:

Red Cross...more than just a charitable organization

Never having had any first hand experience with what I percieved to be one of the world's most charitable and necessary organizations, I only knew on a high level of their noble mission to help those in need, whatever the circumstances and wherever that need existed.

But to me, on that day of cleaning, when I was knee deep in mud and muck and sweat and I found myself standing beside a Red Cross station and their table filled with pretzels, bottled water, crackers and sandwiches, complimentary to any or all who needed an energy boost -- a shallow memory emerged from the movie set cobwebs of my mind and I found myself saying out loud, "hmm, good crafts service."

And the sandwiches were good indeed.

I'm surprised they didn't charge for the goodies, but glad they didn't.

(Via Yet Another Small Town Moment.)

Updated May 2008. See here.

Please read this before sending me a "friend" request or you'll almost certainly be denied.

Yes, I Twitter.

For a while, I couldn't figure out why I kept getting "friend" (or now "follower") requests, not only from people I hadn't told about the tweeter, but from people I didn't even know. I finally figured out that a few people on my list have public lists and several dozen followers each. Gruber alone had over 2600 followers as of this post's original date of 2007.08.21, and as of the 2008.05.15 update, has over 10,000 followers.

When people who follow me reply to something I tweeted using the "@name" syntax, a lot of people see it. This took a while to figure out because at the time, IconFactory's almost-too-minimalist Twitterific did not display "reply" tweets from people I follow unless they're addressed to people I also follow. Now Twitter itself largely does the same thing, though they seem to be working actively on how to make it better.

So, as an example, I didn't see this tweet from Gruber to Steven Frank—Twitterrific never displayed it to me. This doesn't really bother me too much, but I hadn't expected it at the time.

Anyway, that's how people see my name, and I get follower requests, but I generally turn them down. I mostly use the tweeter-thing to keep friends and family up-to-date on what's going on with me, since they worry about me and not entirely without reason. It's a kind of persistent message that makes a lot of sense for me to send to family and friends rather than E-mail (too formal, not checked often enough), but more flexible than a phone call (they'll see it when they look instead of having to answer the phone or listen to a message). I use it to let my folks know when I'm going to bed or getting up, when I'm headed out for errands, when interesting things happen—and yeah, sometimes for Mac-related stuff.

But because it's mostly a personal thing for me, from what I'm eating to where I'm going, I don't want to share it with the entire world—just with family and friends, the people who I could call and yell at if I wanted to and they wouldn't block my number. Basically, the people with whom I'd also share my cell phone number. I keep that information private because that way, when the cell phone rings, I know it's not a telemarketer or salesman or up-seller or "help you win government contracts now!" call.

Those have drained so much time since the heart failure diagnosis that when I'm in the office, I now basically don't answer the main phone at all and, in fact, have it rigged so that it only rings for a very small group of callers. There have been a couple of failures of this the past few days, perhaps because an 8-hour power outage on Sunday morning might have affected the screening mechanism, but otherwise it's been working well. This is one way things are getting back on track around here, and I'm not going to repeat it with my cell phone number and have it ringing at all hours of the day and night with people who just want to waste my time.

So, yeah, it's nothing personal, but unless I'm comfortable enough with you to give you my cell phone number or tell you when I'm going to sleep or leaving the building, I'm not very likely to add you to my Twitter list. We're considering doing a separate Twitter account for MDJ and MWJ-related news, but that's not in the Top Ten priority list right now (the mailing list is back, and back in a way that doesn't easily translate to Twitter access). Not everything that can be public must be public, even in the age of The Internet Tubes.

Update: So, basically, it's been about nine months since I posted that, and this post is my "Web site" on the Twitter page, so people who don't follow me and are scoping me out should see it as a link and, I hope, read it.

That doesn't seem to happen very often. I still dozens of follower requests, and I deny almost all of them, because I'm not really comfortable telling everyone when I'm going out, when I'm going to sleep, etc.

But with Twitter, it's even worse than it seems. Since I keep my updates "private," I must follow you for you to see my updates at all. Unfortunately, if I follow you, I see all of your updates whether I want to or not. I can control whether your updates go to my cell phone or not, but I can't stop them from showing up on the home page or in Twitterrific.

This is a major deal-breaker for me in a lot of cases. By nature, Twitter is interrupting: you're supposed to stop and look at the messages as they arrive. If you get 10 new messages every three minutes, you'll never get anything else done. Plus, I want Twitter to be interrupting. If my family or close friends send an update, I want to see it immediately.

But, you know, God bless Bynkii and I love him dearly, but one day last year, he was debugging something and sent 40 tweets in an hour, so many that he crashed my iPhone when I turned it on. (I'd been out-of-range for a while, and when I got back in range, I needed to look at a Web page, but I couldn't: I got a new modal dialog box for each incoming SMS about his debugging, and couldn't even get to the settings to try to turn it off. After about 10 mins of failing to get anything else done on the phone, it simply crashed and restarted.)

This was not his fault. It's a bad design in Twitter—by conflating "following" and "followers" for people with private updates, it means I must follow you if you want to see anything I tweet. If my updates were public, you could follow me but I wouldn't have to follow you. No such luck in the world of private updates: there's no way to tell Twitter "Let Bynkii read my updates but I don't want to see his." It's everything or nothing.

Because of this, I had to prune the Twitter list to remove the most prolific tweeters. It's just a rough start to my day on my schedule to get to the office and find 60-100 mostly-irrelevant tweets, since the Twitter API (as seen in Twitterrific) only allows it to display the 20 most recent tweets. Most days I still have to go to the Twitter site and read about one page (or less) of catch-up tweets, but that's manageable. Three to six pages is not.

So, for the past six months, I've basically denied every follower request unless I recognize (or think I recognize) the name, and then I just let it sit there, not wanting to be rude by denying requests, but not wanting to get more tweets either because it's hard enough to get things done around here. Today I gave up on that and cleared out all the requests, denying them all. And there were some people I'm quite fond of in that list, but not people I need to hear from 6X per day. (About a third of my Twitter list are family and friends who never update, but I keep them on there in case they do, because there's no impact.)

From now on, if you're not someone I'm likely to call at an odd moment just to chat, I'm probably not going to accept your follow request even if I know you. This is not rudeness, it's just self-defense to keep the incoming information flow manageable. I already have about 3000 news items and 200 E-mail messages in an average day; I can't afford to add 300 new tweets to that as well.

So, yeah, trying to keep interruptions to a minimum makes me seem like a jerk. I apologize. I screen calls, too, and have aggressive junk mail filtering on the server for the same reasons. And I still may have to prune back my follow list somewhat to reduce the messages, especially from the people who have thousands and thousands of followers. Once a tweeter gets to that point, it seems his tweets become less like communication and more like performance art. That's valid and all that, but I don't need to be interrupted by performance art.

I hope Twitter fixes the problem so that private updaters have the same privileges as public ones in choosing both whose messages they get and who receives their own messages. Until then, it's gonna have to be this way. The whole thing's irrelevant when Twitter isn't working right, and that seems to be the direction of the platform anyway, so maybe it won't be such a big deal soon.

Apparently, even after the brouhaha noted here and here, the city of Asheville, NC is still not quite willing to recognize your First Amendment right to disagree with the president:

Asheville is the closest North Carolina comes to San Francisco - the mountains, the culture, but that is where the similarities end. There is a very belligerent and ultra sanctimonious right wing in Asheville. Years ago, there was a rally to pray to boot out “paganism.” Last year my wife and I happened visited town while a horrific anti-gay protest was in progress sponsored by local area “churches.” This past week, Asheville saw one of it’s own arrested for holding a protest sign.

On Wednesday August 15, I was standing alone with my sign for about 10 minutes, when I was approached by Police Officer Russell Crisp. He asked me how long I was planning to stay there and I told him just a few more minutes because I had to go to work at 8:00. He asked for my ID and I obliged. I asked him if I was doing something wrong, and he said that his Sergeant was on the way and he was going to wait for him. SO, I went back to my sign holding over the interstate.

A few minutes later Sergeant Randy Riddle showed up with a paper in his hand. He spoke briefly to Crisp, then walked over to me and told me to put down my sign, put my hands behind my back, and that I was under arrest! I was shocked and almost thought he was joking until he told me again to put down the sign and put my hands behind me and I was under arrest. So I peacefully agreed and he cuffed me. I asked him why I was being arrested, he told me I was in violation County Ordinance 16-2, (the print out in his hand that he didn’t bother to read to me or show me.) He told me I was obstructing the sidewalk. I told him I was not and that officer Crisp had witnessed a guy walk by me moments before.

Riddle yelled at me, “You were obstructing the sidewalk!” and “I’m sick of this shit!” then he said, “Here’s your 15 minutes of fame buddy!” I looked back to see his name plate and he said in a mean condescending tone, “Yea, that’s ‘Sergeant Riddle’ get it right!” He then put me in Officer Crisp’s police car. Riddle took my sign with him and I was taken downtown and booked by Crisp. I was never read my Miranda rights.

Someone needs to call Mayor Bellamy and ask her when Civil Rights will be reestablished in Asheville? Or does she intend to allow the gestapo to operate freely in [her] city?

Click through to read the daily comic strip A Town Called Dobson, whose author is quoted here (the outer quote), for contact information in Asheville, and for the daily satirical look at life in stereotypical "Red State" Amurka.