Tag Archives: twitter

Another Day At the Dentist

General,

My day started with a trip to the dentist … scheduled … where he replaced a bridge in the top front of my mouth and put a crown on another tooth. Then this afternoon at 4 p.m. I was back (again, a scheduled visit) for him to fit a partial plate to fill a gap until I can get an implant put in place. I’m not done with all this dentist stuff, although today was a significant milestone. Next Thursday is the Big Day where he attempts once again to get my lower right jaw numb instead of my tongue.

Starting today I’ve moved my twittering to a new blog, links on the sidebar on the right, dedicated to my tweets. These tweets are quick looks at a moment in time as to what was happening, but they seemed to be taking over my regular blog! We’ll see how that works. The latest tweets will still be down on the right sidebar.

All the activity with the dentist, besides the genetic inheritance from my dad, date back to when I was in the 2nd grade in Soda Springs, Idaho. I got into a fight with an older kid across the street which degenerated into us throwing rocks at each other. He threw one that hit me right in the mouth, breaking off the top front left incisor tooth and splitting my top lip open. It was a pretty bloody and very painful experience. The tooth was not repairable. The doctor sewed up my lip which required two other operations over my teenage years to get it shaped reasonably correctly. The dentist pulled the root from the broken tooth and I wore a partial plate (which was very useful for grossing out the girls when I played with it in my mouth) until I was in the Air Force.

While we were stationed at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas, the Air Force dentists put in a bridge that allowed me to get rid of the partial plate. A few years later the k9 tooth on the upper left finally fell out (it was a baby tooth … the permanent tooth had impacted in the roof of my mouth and the dental surgeon had to remove that when I was 16), requiring a new bridge to fill that gap. In dental terms, teeth 9 and 11 were missing. The Air Force bridge went from 8 to 10 and the new bridge anchored on 12 and rested on 10.

Eventually that entire system began causing a lot of problems, so in 2000 while we were living in Colorado Springs I cashed in some stock options and had all my teeth capped and new bridges put in place. That dentist engineered a bridge that anchored on 8, 10, and 12 filling in the gaps for teeth 9 and 10.

By the time we moved to Pocatello, that bridge was loose. The dentist here checked it every time I had my teeth cleaned until this fall when he told me they needed to figure a better system and also determine why the bridge was loose. They popped off the bridge (much more difficult and painful that that sounded) and found that tooth #8 had a big cavity. Further, because the bridge kind of went around a corner, the tops of 10 and 12 were wearing because there was too much stress on the bridge. At the same time they found that #13 also had a big cavity under the crown. So, root canals were done on #8 and #13. A new bridge that would only go from 8 to 10 was put in place today along with a new crown for #12. That left a gap for #11 which the partial plate the dentist put in this afternoon fills temporarily until I get an implant done (very expensive).

Still to be done is to put a new crown on #13 and fill a cavity on #30 on the bottom right (the one that he couldn’t get numb last week). Then I need to do the implant which takes about six months to heal after putting the titanium screw in place (the healing time also includes a calcification process where new bone material deposits on the rough surface of the titanium). After that a crown is put on the implant and I should be done for a while. I’m right ready to be finished with the dentist!

Playing With My Blog

Computer Stuff, General

Nina left this morning at her usual 7:30 a.m. time to go to the prison for their Sunday morning meetings. A few minutes later she called to ask if I was supposed to be at a meeting this morning at 7 a.m. at the Stake Center. I was supposed to be there, of course. Priesthood Meeting had completely slipped my mind. I wish I could blame it on age, but that really doesn’t work for this one.

One of the fellows I follow on Twitter sent an update a bit ago saying, “At church … An hour early … Forgot about the time change last night!” At least we didn’t forget about the time change! I set all of the clocks that don’t know about daylight savings time before we went to bed last night. All of the computers that do know about daylight savings worked correctly. My cell phone switched correctly. However, the big “atomic clock” up on the wall did not switch correctly. It’s a pain to set the time on that clock. Oh well.

Since I had a few hours before going to Church this morning, I decided to do the code to put my Twitter updates on the sidebar of my blog. I wrote a script that every fifteen minutes goes to Twitter, downloads the last ten tweets that I’ve sent to Twitter, formats them, and puts them into my blog area so that they’ll be displayed whenever someone reads my blog. I originally thought to go get the tweets and include them on the blog anytime the blog page is displayed, but the Twitter Interface documentation says that they support a maximum of 70 downloads per hour per userid. I only update Twitter every few hours (unless exciting things are happening) so there’s no need to grab the updates each time the blog page is displayed. The process seems to be working correctly. The next step will be to insert the timestamp on these updates as well. Real Soon Now….

Shot

Computer Stuff, General, ,

I am actually quite paranoid (a disturbed thought process characterized by excessive anxiety or fear) about needles. But, I still go get a flu shot most every year. Today was the day this year. Nina told me that a local pharmacy was giving flu shots today for $15, a very good price. So I made my way to the pharmacy this evening, paid my money, sat down, and closed me eyes to make sure that I did not see the needle. So what did the nurse do? She gave me a countdown before the jab! Ugh. I was not happy. Then as she was putting on the band aid she said, “Oh, you look a little pale! You better sit here for a minute…” I told her it would have gone much better had she not said, “Ok, here it comes … 3 … 2 … 1 … JAB!” But I did sit there for a couple of minutes before standing up. I still felt a little wobbly-kneed, but got out of there without going down. Next time I’ll make sure to give some instructions first.

I’ve mentioned Twitter before. I’m finding it quite interesting. I try to send an update every few hours, most are bland and inane. I’m following a couple of family members (one of whom has never “tweeted” .. hint, hint littletwerp) and a few other people that I know or know about. A couple of them are very interesting and they often send links to interesting stuff (in addition to sending just inane, bland updates). Twitter also has a capability of “tracking” keywords. Any tweets that contain that keyword come to me even though I’m not following that person. So, I’m tracking three keywords: Idaho, Utah, and Mormon. That has also been very enlightening. This afternoon about 3:30 I got a tweet from the U.S. Geological Service that there had been an earthquake on the Wasatch Fault at 3:06 p.m. this afternoon. It was a magnitude 1.2 quake just down the hill from Heather’s house! That’s probably not strong enough to be felt, but still that was pretty close to hearth and home! One of the people I follow (Phil Windley … teaches IT at BYU, former CIO for the State of Utah, host of the monthly Utah CTO Forum) somehow grabs all of his updates that he’s sent to Twitter and puts them on the sidebar of his blog. I’d like to figure out how to have that automatically happen (it’s kind of cool!). There are so many interesting web things going on!

The company I used to work for here in Pocatello today did another round of people cuts. The company is having some serious problems and it’s being taken out on the people who work there. I’m very happy not to be associated with them anymore. Their idea of culture and ethics are a very long way from my idea and a very long way from those held by the Pocatello community (where the company is still the 800 pound turd). Woodrow Wilson said, “Never murder a man when he’s busy committing suicide.” Unfortunately, my former company seems to be high on the list of companies busy committing suicide … they can’t even release their third quarter earnings because of inventory valuation accounting issues. Meanwhile, no one in senior management is getting shot … for now they are doing the shooting. But, they should be warned: what goes around comes around.

Being Followed….

General,

A bit ago I wrote that I was trying out Twitter and had started following a couple of folks that I knew about, knew of their reputation, and liked what they were on about in the world (Phil Windley and Dave Winer). That has turned out to be interesting. Both of them send little “tweets” fairly often. For instance, I know that Phil Windley gave a talk to the LDS Church’s computer department this morning on digital identity. Dave Winer has been working this morning on bugs in his TwitterGram application. Dave Winer sends lots of little tweets, most referencing interesting information he’s come across. Phil is not so prolific.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sending my tweets to Twitter. Essentially that has been sending this stuff to the big bit-bucket in the sky. The only person receiving them was me. However, I’ve been learning a lot about the system. I mostly send these updates from my Sprint PCS phone as an SMS message.

All well and good, until this morning when I got an email from Twitter that a particular person (who for now will remain unnamed) started following ME! I don’t know the person. I’ve checked out his profile on Twitter and verified that he’s an unknown person to me. He is also just starting to use Twitter and playing with it. All of a sudden, I had to stop and think about this. Someone is following what I’m sending to Twitter. I now have to start making some sense! I have to stop blathering! I need to say something important! Oh my. Then I re-thought and decided that I’m not going to change anything about what I do with Twitter. My follower can continue to follow me or not as he chooses. It is a bit of an upper, though, to know that someone whom I’ve never met and probably never will is getting my little tweets!

So, here’s how to join my following:

You can set up a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/ and then specify who you wish to follow. I’m known on Twitter as “rolandksmith”.

Or, using your cell phone, send a text message to 40404 stating: “follow rolandksmith” (I think this will work … but you may have to set up a Twitter account first).

The tweets will start rolling in….!!

Sometimes I’ll send a picture with some text. The picture process uses Dave Winer’s TwitterGram capability. That process is this:

1. I take a picture with my phone and then send it to my account in Flickr.

2. The Flickr account is set up to tag any pictures coming in on a specific email address with the tag “twitter”.

3. I’ve signed up with TwitterGram and told it to look at my Flickr account for any pictures with the tag “twitter”. Any photos it finds, it creates a “TinyURL” and sends the subject line of the picture (which in my case is always “You have new Picture Mail”) along with the TinyURL of the Flickr photo as a tweet to my Twitter account.

4. A few minutes later, the tweet shows up as an SMS message on my phone with the link to the picture. It also appears in all other channels that the tweets get sent out on to whomever is following me. Clicking on the link in the message brings up the Flickr picture along with the text that I sent to Flickr with the photo.

It’s an interesting process and pictures sometimes add a lot of context to a tweet.

Next is to add my own capability to this process. I’m working on a way to send video clips from my phone to my server and then automatically post a link to these clips as a tweet to Twitter. I can do it manually. Next is to build the application to do it automatically.