craniac’s place

Took this on the way to work the other morning, one-handed with my compact held out of the car window while waiting for a traffic light to change.

I’ve blogged before about Verity, a singer from Cape Town, who is taking the unusual route of raising money for her first album by pre-selling copies rather than signing her soul away to a record company.  I was prompted to post about this again after receiving her latest newsletter, in which she says;

My first single “Angel” is starting to get playlisted by various radio stations around SA so I am looking forward to seeing how it does. You can find the song available to   DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN HERE…  and I would love to hear what you think.

I also have a web interview that my good friend Bruce Muzik did for his website that you might ENJOY WATCHING HERE…

We are in the final push to sell the last 185 copies on my site. If you enjoy listening to “Angel” and the interview inspires you, then please mail the links to your friends so that they can see if they would like to join the Future Owner family and help us get the album ready to post by the end of May if all goes well!

Please buy a copy of the album.  Help this brave and talented woman to meet her goal and remember that by doing so you are also helping her to help others.  That’s right, a portion from each sale goes to charity.

Coming back from dropping my mom-in-law at home I got stopped by the robot (traffic light for the non-Saffers) at Somerset Mall.  I was maybe six or seven cars back from the line and watched a young black guy walking towards me trying to hand out advertising flyers.  Not one of the drivers in front of me was prepared to take a flyer; I did.

The way I see it is that people handing out flyers are probably paid very little for being on their feet all day, dodging cars in sun or rain.  I’m sure that they are expected to hand out all the flyers they were issued with and may be paid less if they don’t.  So I always take a flyer to help them get their day’s work done.  I urge all drivers to do the same.  I’m not suggesting you must support the businesses doing the advertising, I could care less if you even read it; just take the flyer and toss it in the bin when you get home and you will be helping someone.  So what if you have the inconvenience of opening your window, most of us have electric car windows anyway.

It seems to me that there are several types of accounts/people that might follow you on Twitter.

1. “twiends” have with similar interests to yours and you may wish to reciprocate by following them too.
2. “twollowers” have a legitimate interest in what you have to say but you have no interest in following what they have to say.
3. “twollectors” aim appears to be to follow as many people as they can with no apparent regard for commonality of interests.  You probably don’t want to follow them.
4. “twammers” act like “twollectors” but almost every one of their tweets contain links to the same sort of sites that can be found linked in spam e-mails.  You definitely don’t want to follow these.

“twollectors” and “twammers” are likely to feature on The Twitter Blacklist, which may have a bearing on your decision to block them or not.  If you are a Firefox and Greasemonkey user there is even a Twitter Blacklist script that displays a nice big red banner at the top of a “twacklisted” user’s page.

The question is; which of these do you block?  I have previously always blocked “twammers” and sometimes blocked “twollectors”.  The question is whether there is any advantage to the Twitter community as a whole for them to be blocked.  If you don’t follow them their updates are not seen on your profile page, but they still appear in your list of followers.  Twitter says that blocking someone has the following effect.

• You will no longer show up in the blocked person’s list of friends.
• Your updates won’t show up on the blocked person’s profile page.
• The blocked person will not be able to add you as a friend.

I suppose that there may be some value to your reputation in not being associated with them, in which case you won’t want to appear in their list of friends and not have your updates appear on their profile page.  But is there any tangible value to them if you do appear on their list of friends or you updates are seen on their profile page?

Update (2008-05-01)

First tweets below found with SUMMIZE.

• twiends first tweeted by kathrynjones
• twollowers first tweeted by dkr
• twollectors first tweeted by strandloper
• twammer first tweeted by martinbowling

In all my forty-five years I have never donated blood; not being a fan of either pain or needles, I have always shied away from doing so.

Today the WP Blood Transfusion Service is holding a donation clinic at our offices so, knowing how important it is to be a donor, I decided that today would be the day of my first donation.  I filled in the forms and presented myself to the “vampires”, only to be told they didn’t want my blood.  Seemingly the fact that I had my gall bladder removed in January means I can’t donate until August.  Great, now I have to go through working up the courage to make my first donation another time.

Michelle drives a classic old Landrover and despite her love for Olivia (the Landy’s name) she lusts after something sleeker, faster and more fuel-efficient. Her first lustlove is the Ariel Atom but her eye is now turning towards the Caterham Superlight R500. Perhaps something like the Ferrari FXX would be more suited for someone that runs Virgin Earth, whose site states “We strive to minimize our impact on the planet while providing quality services and products at affordable prices”.

Nic started this off with 20 albums to educate your children with and Melissa followed up with her top eleven albums.  So here are my all time faves.

1. Live, Throwing Copper
   
2. The Clash, London Calling
   
3. Pavlov’s Dog, Pampered Menial
   
4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
   
5. Queen, Live Killers
   
6. Bad Company, 10 From 6
   
7. Def Leppard, Pyromania
   
8. Chris de Burgh, Spanish Train and Other Stories
   
9. Neil Young, Harvest
   
10. Rodriguez, Cold Fact
    

So what are your favourite albums?

I am not feeling too happy right now as I have a big abscess in my chin.

It started off last Wednesday (four days ago) as an apparently infected hair root. By Thursday an abscess had started to form and it has just gotten bigger and bigger. I had hoped that it would develop a head near the surface that I would be able to open and drain myself. As this hasn’t happened I will be going to the doctor tomorrow so that I can get some antibiotics, and hopefully get the blasted thing drained.

This is really getting annoying as I have had several of these large abscesses in the last year or two; with this being the third that is going to need lancing this year. In January I had one on the back of my neck lanced, in February one on the inside of my thigh and now this one on my chin. Both my sons have also had them and while some have presented as spider bites with necrotic tissue rather than a pus-filled abscess, others seem to just be regular abscesses. Fortunately Mela hasn’t had any as she has more than enough medical worries of her own without having this sort of thing.