Can it get better? After this "challenging" winter, these warm spring days are just too amazing. Was looking at my green snake of a garden hose, happy to see it again after it was lost in piles of snow for so many months. It's like an old friend back from a long trip.

Trouble @ Twitter in Fortune

The May 2, 2011 issue of Fortune Magazine features a beaten-up bird on the cover with the headline Trouble @ Twitter, complete with a baby blue bird with bandage on its beak and a little crutch under one wing. I am not sure the article by Jessi Hempel really gets to the heart of the matter. It wobbles a bit.

Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009. (Twitter disputes this, pointing to Quantcast data that show a 50% increase in worldwide traffic in the past five months.)

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You'll do better if you want to know more nitty-gritty stuff about Twitter by reading Ben Parr on Mashable. Check out his piece "Why Twitter Wants to Acquire Tweetdeck"

Also, Nova Spivak on Techcrunch has much to say about Tweetdeck as well, in "How Twitter Can Save $50 Million" here.

Photo Credit: Fortune: Ben Baker/Redux

Good Friday Bright Garden

Wednesday Happy Hump Day

Who made that goofy expression up btw? I have always thought it sounded completely stupid "Hump Day" if not rude. Maybe Hump Day is like Business Time here?



The amazing, magnificent, hilarious, Flight of the Concords from some way far away place called New Zealand. They are the extraordinary Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement.

How to sound like a real person in social media

I really shouldn't have to say this after all these years of social media -- blogging, tweeting, facebooking, etc. But I'll say it anyway.

Please, try to sound like a human being.

I don't want to read 15 tweets from you on Twitter than sound canned. I want to hear from the REAL you in REAL language on Twitter. That's why I go there.

I am sitting at my desk in my house in Arlington, MA. I've got the broom, the vacuum and the mop leaning against the stove in the kitchen downstairs, waiting for me, because I'm going to do a serious floor washing after I finish here. Sand from the roads after the snowy winter, mud from the spring rains, even old bits of leaves from last fall, has been tracked in the back door onto my kitchen floor, so it needs a full sweep, then a vacuum, then a on-my-hands-and-knees scrubbing.

I am a real person with a real kitchen floor I'm planning to scrub today. When I talk to you, it's really me talking. Later, when I talk on Twitter, it will be me with slightly wet knees in my blue jeans, my hair jammed up and out of the way in some baseball cap, just the real me, smelling of bleach and Mr. Clean after scrubbing my floor.

That's all I ask, just be real out there. Tell us what you are doing. Tell us how you are feeling. Let us get up close and personal. It's not a reality SHOW we want, we want reality.

*photo credit: Jacqueline Tinney, Flickr

New Day New Week New Season

Spring is all about fresh -- fresh starts, fresh air, fresh feelings. It was Palm Sunday yesterday, Passover begins tonight, Easter Sunday next weekend. Even the weather has been fighting a brave battle -- talk about FRESH -- nearly 30's on Saturday with rain and wind, brrrrr! But 60's today and sunny as these bright yellow daffodils.

Oh yes, another "fresh" seasonal phenomenon -- young men can act rather fresh in spring when they are finally feeling free to be out and about and they can get a little amorous ... what's that old quote, about a young man's fancy ...

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn.

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.--

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

(continues ... )

-- Locksley Hall by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

* Picture Credit: Theresa Thompson on Flickr

Patriots Day in Lexington, April 15, 2002

by Halley Suitt

I saw a Minuteman,
Get in a minivan,
Down by Battle Green.
I saw a Redcoat,
Chatting on a cell phone,
Press one for land, two for sea.

The Regulars are coming!
The Regulars are coming!
To our town on a regular basis,
On a regular day in April
They bloom in colors bright
Poppies red,
Crocuses blue,
Snowdrops white,

They've come complete, with fife and drum
Just to remind us
That behind us, at Buckman's Tavern
They'd had enough of April Tax Time.
And from that day, as shots rang out,
Tea would pour free
And brave they could be
To make a new place for you and me.

Move It!

Amazing piece in The New York Times today about the most unhealthy thing you can do, called "Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?". Horatio Salinas' smashed chair photo tells all. Stop sitting, start moving!

People don’t need the experts to tell them that sitting around too much could give them a sore back or a spare tire. The conventional wisdom, though, is that if you watch your diet and get aerobic exercise at least a few times a week, you’ll effectively offset your sedentary time. A growing body of inactivity research, however, suggests that this advice makes scarcely more sense than the notion that you could counter a pack-a-day smoking habit by jogging. “Exercise is not a perfect antidote for sitting,” says Marc Hamilton, an inactivity researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

The posture of sitting itself probably isn’t worse than any other type of daytime physical inactivity, like lying on the couch watching “Wheel of Fortune.” But for most of us, when we’re awake and not moving, we’re sitting. This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese.

So try this today with me. Don't sit. Try not to sit the entire day. Your family will think you're crazy, but try it. It will show you how much we're all sitting around. It's almost impossible to keep from sitting a little bit, but keep log of how many minutes you do sit today. Try to keep it under an hour.

*Photo Credit: Horatio Salinas, The New York Times

Visit with Vizit

Check out this cool digital frame called Vizit from the TODAY Show the other day. They did a segment on Cyber parenting: Tech-savvy ways to connect with kids. Vizit is one of these cool new things I wish I had when my kid was little. Now he's old enough to start inventing stuff like this. I definately have one of the Wright Brothers living under my room.

(Picture Credit: Yahoo web life editor Heather Cabot shows TODAY’s Natalie Morales some high-tech ways to stay plugged into kids’ lives.)

Lambchop Sings Queen

Honestly, can you imagine the world without YouTube?! I guess there WAS one, but it wasn't nearly as fun!



Here's a perfect little ditty for lamb lovers. And I love lamb. Also love Queen big time! Mash-up mashed potatoes and 2 legs of lamb. She's a cutie. Nice.

Link: YouTube

The Wolf and the Lamb

WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf's right to eat him. He thus addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me." "Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born." Then said the Wolf, "You feed in my pasture." "No, good sir," replied the Lamb, "I have not yet tasted grass." Again said the Wolf, "You drink of my well." "No," exclaimed the Lamb, "I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me." Upon which the Wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, "Well! I won't remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations."

The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

From About.com

Photo Credit: Wolf and the Lamb

Old Dogs / New Tricks

Blogger is offering me "5 New Views" and other cool new stuff which is probably very cool and new and all, but when I come to this page, I don't want to focus on anything but WRITING.

I have 26 cool, but not so new, tools ... a, b, c, etc. You've seen them around, I know. You can do some pretty incredible things with those tools. In fact, one of the best things I read this week used them. It was an e-version of Aesop's Fables. I asked my teenager son to guess when it was written. He's not a literature major, so it wasn't really fair. He told me what all kids his age say, "look it up in Wikipedia, Mom!"

He knew the fables were written a long time ago and guessed ... 1850. [Only glad he didn't say the year I graduated from college which he considers ancient history as well.] He was off by a few years, but he let me read him the tale and we talked about the moral. It was called the Wolf and the Lamb. He remembered the other ones -- Ant and the Grasshopper and others. I did go to Wikipedia:

Aesop's Fables or Aesopica refers to a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. His fables are some of the most well known in the world. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many stories included in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom "sour grapes" derives), The Tortoise and the Hare, The North Wind and the Sun, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Ant and the Grasshopper are well-known throughout the world.

So yes, maybe I'm an old dog who doesn't want to learn new tricks and upgrade my Blogger experience. Or maybe I know the old tools are good tools and the stories they let me tell should be the place I put my attention.

Picture Credit: Aesop's Fables

sNoW?! April Foolishness!

Are you kidding me? It's April! It's Red Sox Opening Day! And it's SNOWING! More later, gotta go dig the kid and the car out.