stutopia.com

I’ve just broken a year of being a twitter user according to twitterholic.com. Since then the top-followed twitterers have evolved from internet celebs to hollywood ones. I’d say with these two recent events, twitter has really ascended into the mainstream spotlight:

• Ashton Kutcher reached over 1 million followers [link]
• Oprah has featured twitter on her show [link]

I don’t follow these new world celebs for a couple reasons. One is they are not interesting or don’t really have anything of real interest to say. I’ve heard and can reasonably guess that some PR assistants are managing these folks’ social networking sites like facebook or myspace. My guess is that most celebs are interfacing with twitter more directly than traditional mediums. Sure, celebs are real persons too, but for some reason, their twitter feeds do not seem anymore interesting than the next person’s. The idea that a million strangers want in on this stream-of-randomness is a bizarre concept. Maybe the same driving force behind the tabloid sales drive flocks of followers to these celebs. They want whatever they can get straight from the source.

Twitter really is the delicate art and science of microblogging.  You following someone is like subscribing to their RSS feed. It’s personal.

Reason two is I believe they have hijacked a service that was once personal and have pimped it out myspace-style. I don’t even think businesses joining twitter was a disservice. In fact it proved to make some companies add a personal touch to their customer service. I feel like we have sacrificed something here when the news-media’s perception of twitter has become a followers-race. Although Ev Williams has not sold twitter to Google yet (like he did with blogger), one cannot help but feel like twitter has already sold out.

I am glad that that such a business can thrive in these times. Web 2.0, nonetheless. I guess I feel that twitter was one of those web applications that brought you closer to people and not farther away. With the twittersphere expanding out to the stars, so to speak, maybe that cozy pond feeling has been lost in an ocean.

Looking forward to calling my health benefits provider on my only day off this week (please note the hint of sarcasm), I was sorely disappointed that my Ooma phone system was down. The status tabs were blinking red on both the Hub and the Scout. I thought that my crap-connection Cox provides us had gone down again. After the fact, they posted a brief explanation of it later on their blog. It was your generic RFO with some sand-castle projections:

Rest assured that we are taking this outage very seriously. Discussions have already started on how to make the service resilient to a similar event in the future. ooma currently has one data center located in west coast. We have planned to light up a second data center in the midwest or east coast this year, and this outage has served as a stark reminder for us to get moving on that. This has also served as a good opportunity for us to re-evaluate our contingency and business continuity plans.

This makes me a little happy as I have not heard much press about my phone company. If they are, indeed, planning to add an additional data center then it would seem that the company is doing okay. You never know with these tech start-ups.

Over the past month, I’ve picked up reading a small graphic novel series named “Scott Pilgrim,” by Bryan Lee O’Malley. I’m in the middle of book 4 at the moment, and am loving it! The story is a romantic-action-comedy where video games are a superb cornerstone. When I heard there was going to be a live-action movie made based upon this story, I was estatic. When I read that Michael Cera would play the hero, Scott Pilgrim, I was completely sold. So I definitely encourage any of you with some spare time to pick these up and read em. I feel like I’m @levarburton doing my own Reading Rainbow plug, but don’t take my word for it.

I purchased the graphic novel, Watchmen, last year sometime in anticipation of its film adaptation debut. I read it in about three days and finished right in time to catch the movie on Monday. Since the material was so fresh in my mind, it was amazing to view what many have said, is the closest adaptation a comic book movie has ever come to portraying the true heart of the material. It was as if the script were the book itself. Pane sequences were framed in the exact manner as some of the scenes of the movie. I listened to /filmcast review of the movie with Kevin Smith which I thought covered most of the major points. I thought that the movie did great justice to the source material. The majority of cast choices were spot-on. The tone matched that of the book. My only quams were these:

• score/music choice for the owl ship rescue and then over-the-top sex scene
• time that was spent on character backgrounds/histories (it needed more but we would have been seeing at least a 5 hour movie)
• missing halloween/Hollis scene
• missing hover bikes in the snow
• casting of Adrian Veidt as he didn’t match the build of his character 
• change of young Rorschach fight with 2 bullies (no cigarette in the eye)
• missing parallel storyline of the Black Freighter as I enjoyed this so much in the book

Apart from these things, the movie still stands as one of the truest reflections of an author and an artist’s original work. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you have seen the movie and not read the book, I implore you to read up on the select few details that were compromised or otherwise missed in the movie.

Darlene just participated in her first 5K run on Saturday, the Second Annual Read and Run for Your Health for the Henderson Library. She finished the 3 miles within 37 minutes which is pretty amazing for a new mom! It started out fairly early so her littlest supporter stayed home as morning’s here are still cold. This event is one of her stepping stones towards participating in the 2009 Mud Run coming up on June 13. Good job honey!

My brother, Brenton Ho, has his first photography spread in March 2009 issue of Modified Mag for his coverage of the 2008 Red Bull Drifting World Championship. If you get a chance to check it out, his photos are the ones which capture all the drift action, or the equivalent of about half the feature. Congrats man!

My mother-in-law and both my brother-in-laws are currently on a plane over the Pacific headed to their second layover, Taiwan. For four weeks they’ll be gone in their own reality show, “The Thai Born Lao-American Bachelor”. My brother-in-law is going to find a wife there. I told him to look for twins and hook his older brother up. Who knows what might happen. Exciting stuff for them though. It’s the first flight one of them. They also embarked on this journey the same day that this whole “Miracle on the Hudson” flight 1549 incident occurred. Crazy stuff.

In their limited english, they bid their farewells to their grandson/nephew, “I miss you…I miss you.” The new parents are about to forego 1 whole month minus one baby sitter grandma. Goodbye sweet sleep, extra gym time, happy hours, reading time, etc, etc.

Media-wise, they are well equipped with a digital camera and a DVD camcorder. They are capable of taking over 4000 photos. I am interested to see what they will capture. Hopefully they will get some good footage of Edison’s great-grandma as she is the one close family member that me and him will never meet in person.

Happy 2-yr anniversary honey! I have to say that dinner was a nice change in pace. Love you!

Driving home from Thanksgiving dinner at my folks, we encountered some unique weather. Rolling fog. In Las Vegas nonetheless! Thank goodness the Black Friday brick and motar ads were nothing spectacular enough to stand in the mist/rain for.

It’s that time of the year again to list out what one is thankful for. So many a co-worker of mine agrees that this year has gone by lightning-quick. I have to concur as the 9 months we had to wait for our new baby seemed to go by in an instant. Here are a few things that I am certainly thankful for:

• My family and its latest expansion pack
• Less-than-impressive Black Friday paper ads despite the harsh economy = less spending for me
• Gears 2 as it is the first FPS that I won’t get sick from
• Good friends, that while I don’t see them daily, weekly, or even monthly are always good to see