And everything will work out fine. » the internets

Twitter: not just for narcissistic jerks anymore!

Vero — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:39:11 +0000

I know there is a lot of hate out there for Twitter. I have a Twitter account. I’m not on there promoting my business. I’m not on there to network (although it sort of just happens). I’m not on there to have millions of followers. I’m on Twitter to share anything and everything about my life with friends, acquaintances and random strangers. I’m one of those stereotypical Twitter users who tweet about what they’re cooking and eating, and I’m not apologetic about it. If you don’t want to read it, then don’t follow me.

Well about a month ago I caught wind (on Twitter, obviously) of a Twestival event being organized in Fredericton – and they were looking for volunteers.

I figured the following: I love Twitter, I’m pretty new here, and volunteering is always something I’m looking to do more of.

Oh yeah, and raising money for charity = good.

So I signed up to help Susan and Tim, the organizers. A little over a week, a super generous outpouring of prize donations from the Fredericton community, and some super speedy event planning later, we had the first-ever Fredericton Twestival on Thursday September 10th.

Over 20 people came out (keep in mind that the Fredericton metropolitan area has only 85,000 residents), we had Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6 come talk to the crowd about social media, and raised over $500 for the Fredericton Food Bank. Pretty successful if you ask this gal.

As always, I have some photos of the event up on Flickr. Check ‘em out!

Well I’ve certainly learned my lesson

Vero — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:51:35 +0000

As a preface to this post: I suck a lot.

Yesterday I inadvertently deleted my blog’s database after having assumed that I had backups (I meant to delete an other older wordpress installation). I can picture the virtual cringing happening from my more backup-diligent blog readers. Yes, I suck, and yes, I’ve learned my lesson. Here, I even made a lolvero for your enjoyment.

Anyway, thanks to the magic of my RSS feed and Google Cache, I was able to manually recover all my posts last night. The only thing I lost were all my comments from the past 14 months (well, I can still view them on cached pages, but I have no way of importing them).

The experience was painful enough that you can be sure I won’t just assume when it comes to backups anymore. You would have thought that I might have learned something from the great hard drive crash of January 09? I guess not!

RSS feeders: sorry if you got spammed with all my posts again last night. Google reader seems to have picked up on the fact that I reinstalled wordpress in a different directory (root directory instead of workoutfine.com/wordpress), but I’m not too sure this magic carries over to other feed readers.

My new feed address is http://workoutfine.com/?feed=rss2, just in case.

Yup, I suck, you can stop shaking your head now.

Everyone has a blog, seriously, even George Orwell

Vero — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:58:50 +0000

It seems like everyone and their mom has a blog these days. Well now it even seems that some people are blogging from beyond the grave. I just discovered through the CBC that “Beginning Aug. 9, the diaries of George Orwell will run online, one entry a day, 70 years to the day after the author [...] wrote them.” How cool is that? The Socialist in me (which pretty much consists of my entire being) is beaming with joy. You can read George Orwell until 2012 by checking out The Orwell Diaries.

On the topic of blogs, I’d like to build up my blogroll. I read certain blogs, but am always looking for more to add to my list. In the past I’ve found that some of the best blogs I’ve found were suggestions from friends and cowrokers. So, tell me which blogs you read!