Tag Archives: family

On College Reunions

Posted on by
1

Apathy and death among Hofstra University’s Class of 1982.

Yesterday’s mail brought a big white envelope from Hofstra University, my alma mater. May 20 was the 25th anniversary of my graduating class, the Class of 1982. Although I was tempted to make the cross-country trek to Long Island, NY from my home in Arizona, I’d scheduled a helicopter rides gig for May 19 in Yarnell and preferred to do that. I’m glad I did.

A few months before the event, Hofstra’s Alumni Association sent out a survey form requesting bios from class members. Proud of what I’ve done since my college years, I promptly filled mine out and returned it to the school. They wanted a digital photo to go with it, but I forgot to go online (as they requested) and upload a suitable image.

My College Years

Understand this: my college years were among the most difficult yet enjoyable years of my life. Difficult primarily because of the expense. Hofstra, a private school, was getting about $120 per credit in those days. While I know that’s nothing compared to today’s tuitions, that $1800 to $2200 per semester tuition bill (plus books plus room and board) was killing me. The deal I cut with my parents was that each of them (they were divorced) would cough up 1/3 and I’d put in the final third. I consider myself lucky for being able to get that much from them. I also consider myself lucky for getting two scholarships that knocked more than $1000 off the annual tuition fee. So yes — I only had to come up with about $1200 a year. But I had to work two part-time minimum wage jobs (at less than $3/hour, if I recall) to make that and the money I needed to keep my car running and food in my mouth. I was 20 when I graduated and, by that point, I’d already worked harder than anyone else I knew.

(I was also incredibly thin at one point, weighing in at only 105 pounds. I ate little and worked hard and simply couldn’t keep the weight on. At 5’8″ tall, I looked terrible — absolutely skeletal. It took the school’s meal plan and those delicious hot rolls at dinner to fatten me back up.)

I’m not complaining about the hard work or financial situation. I believe in working hard to get ahead. And 25 years later, I still believe it. Too many people are looking for a free ride. Too many people spend more effort trying to get away with as little real work as possible than actually doing the work they’re being paid to do. And then they wonder why they’re not getting anywhere in life, why the promotions are always going to someone else, or why they’re first in line for layoff when their company starts sending jobs to India and Pakistan.

I also think that everyone should be a little needy at least once in their life. Back in those days, having $20 in my pocket made me rich. The money I made went to my tuition bill, to feed myself (until I got on that meal plan and my parents picked up 2/3 the cost), and to put gas in my car. (I drove a 1970 VW bug and gas cost 70¢ per gallon.) Most of my friends were in a similar situation, although I think I was the only one footing part of the bill for my education. We learned how far you could stretch a dollar and how important it was not to waste money on things we didn’t really need. I think that’s a lesson many of today’s kids could learn from. When you have to earn every dollar you spend, that dollar becomes a lot more valuable.

As for my college years being the most enjoyable of my life — well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s mostly true. It gave me my first taste of real freedom — and real responsibility. I learned how to have fun and take care of the things I had to do to stay in school, get decent grades, and earn enough money to get by. I had a lot of friends — mostly people like me. I never joined a sorority, but I did become part of the yearbook staff as a photographer. I spent my off-hours during the day in the school’s game room, shooting pool with some friends and becoming a reasonably good pinball player. In the evening, we’d head over to a local bar, which had excellent french onion soup for just a buck and cheap beer on Thursday nights. We also hit the Ambassador Diner in Hempstead periodically for greasy but excellent batter dipped onion rings. Almost all of my friends were guys, but there was no sex between us. (I’ve always been “one of the guys” and I still am.) I dated two different guys while in college and, unlike so many of the girls at Hofstra for their “MRS” degree, wound up single when I graduated at the age of 20 with a BBA in accounting. That was fine with me.

Affection for My Alma Matter? I Don’t Think So.

I never really felt any affection for Hofstra. It seemed like every time I turned around, they had their hands out for money. I nearly got kicked out for late payment of tuition twice, yet they never failed to send requests for donations to my family. I get those requests now. They come to my house with full-color booklets about the newest on campus building and latest event, along with a summary of what the entire alumni student body has been up to — well, at least those members who bothered to provide updates. I used to provide updates once in a while, announcing a new book or providing information about my latest endeavor. They even featured my helicopter charter business in one issue. But the way I saw it, I struggled enough to pay them when I was a student and they never cut me any slack when I had trouble coming up with the dough. I didn’t owe them a thing.

I’m Not the Only One Who Doesn’t Care. But at Least I’m Still Breathing.

But when the reunion material arrived, I decided to fill it out and return it. I was curious about my classmates, curious about what they’d been up to all these years. I even toyed with the idea of blowing off my helicopter gig and going out for the reunion.

But when the reunion materials arrived today, I was glad I’d made the decision I’d made. Accompanying the “sorry we missed you” letter and donation request form was a thin booklet titled, Congratulations to the Class of 1982 on your 25th Anniversary. In it were photos as “bios” from 59 students (including me). I’d known two of them well — one of them is my step cousin. The photos were right out of the yearbook, with current photos added for the folks who had bothered to send them. Few had. Most bios lacked any amount of imagination, simply stating what degree the person had earned during his stay at Hofstra and whether he had gone on to earn additional degrees. Marriages to college sweethearts were mentioned more than a few times. Women were sure to mention how many kids they had. It was pretty boring stuff; only about 5 people wrote bios that actually brought readers up to date. (I was one of them, as you probably guessed.)

What was more tragic was the “In Memoriam” page after the bios. It listed 54 classmates that are no longer walking on this earth. 54! Sheesh! Almost as many dead ones as ones who bothered to respond to the reunion notice. And remember, this is a 25-year anniversary — not a 50-year. Most of my classmates are under 50. That means that at 54 of them died before their 50th birthday.

Now I don’t know how many people were in the class of 1982. I know that the School of Business, which was my slot at the graduation ceremonies, had hundreds of students in it. There had to be at least 2,000 students in the entire class. And the alumni association got reunion responses for just 113 of them — 54 of which were dead. Can you say apathy? And I thought I was alone in my feelings — or lack thereof — for the school.

And how many people actually showed up for the May 20 party? I hope they didn’t rent a big hall.

Twitter Spam

Posted on by
2

Turning a fun thing into more marketing crap.

I’ve been using Twitter for about two months now. It’s part of my daily routine. Unfortunately, other people have also been using it — for their own selfish purposes.

How I Use Twitter

I start up my main Mac and Twitterific automatically appears. I use it to scroll back to see what the folks I’ve been following have been up to for the past few hours. Sometimes, their tweets include links to interesting articles on the Web. Other times, they give me ideas for articles or stories or just things to think about. And other times, they’re just plain boring. Let’s face it — we can’t all be interesting all of the time.

I tweet throughout the day while I’m working. I also have something set up somewhere (I forgot now) that automatically posts a tweet whenever I post a blog entry. That’s all automated, which is a good thing. On a good day, I can put out 5 or more entries.

I like the reassuring tweet and ping sound when a new tweet comes in on Twitterific. I work alone at my desk with only Alex the Bird (in the next room) and Jack the Dog (under my desk) for company. While Alex does plenty of talking, none of it is very meaningful. Getting tweets from people I follow is like hearing from the outside world. I may be physically alone, but there are people out there doing stuff and thinking about things and they’ve made me part of their world by tweeting. Andy’s doing his computer and hacking stuff all over the U.K. Miraz is raising her dogs while working at a desk in New Zealand, not much different from mine, 20 hours into the future. Leanne is practicing her saxophone, doing gigs, and teaching at a college. Mignon is researching and recording podcasts and getting interviewed. Mike, the good dad, is doing stuff with his kid and making plans for the next addition to his family. It’s digital but it’s live and real and it gives me company throughout the day. And, in more than a few instances, I’ve actually learned things from these people, most of whom are complete strangers to me.

I also tweet when I’m out and about. When I invested in my Treo, I also invested, for the first time ever, in a text messaging plan. I get up to 250 text messages a month. That might not seem like a lot to the folks who text to their friends and family members throughout the day, but to me, it’s a ton. So I post tweets via telephone. (I also use my Treo to post photos to my TumbleLog when I happen to see something interesting or funny.) For example, I tweeted whenever possible during my recent Alaska vacation and maybe — just maybe — I gave a few folks some ideas of what to see or do if they ever head up there.

Enter the Opportunists

If you use Twitter regularly, you’ve likely gotten e-mail messages from Twitter telling you that you have a new friend and offering a link to that “friend’s” tweets on the Twitter Web site.

At first, you might feel flattered — here’s a stranger that wants to keep track of what you’re doing. You might decide to thank him or her (or it — sometimes gender is unknown — by making him/her/it your friend.

But stop! Wait! Do your homework.

I’ve discovered that more than a few Twitter users don’t give a damn about anyone else’s tweets. All they want to do is suck other Twitter users into following their tweets. And their tweets are full of self-promotional bull or plain old advertisements.

Take, for example, PersonX. I won’t use this person’s name because, until recently, I was following her tweets and she may still follow mine. I didn’t realize it at the time, but PersonX had at least 3 Twitter accounts. It should have tipped me off when all three became my friends at the same time. Two of the accounts — I’ll call them AccountY and AccountZ — were for informational “services” posted as tweets. One, for example, provided quotes from literature. I can’t remember what the other one did — I didn’t stick with it long. PersonX’s tweets were all about how popular AccountY and AccountZ were getting. Or, if they weren’t getting popular, they were musings about why they were being ignored. It was pretty obvious that this person’s accounts were solely to promote herself and these useless services.

One particularly popular Twitter member tweets throughout the day with the latest on who he’s interviewing and what cool new product he’s been allowed to play with. Then, later in the day, he releases a bunch of @name responses to the people who have tweeted directly to him all day. Reading a dozen of these in a row — especially when you’re not following the tweets of the person he’s responding to — is a real bore. Thank heaven Twitter only allows 140 characters. I could see a person like this filling the bandwidth with one-sided personal conversations that no one else cares about.

A few other people I’ve followed in the past just tweet links to articles they’ve written or promotional material. Someone who’s curious might follow these links and, thus, waste a bunch of time reading ads. There are quite a few of these people out there. More than there should be.

All this, in my opinion, is Twitter spam.

Do Your Homework

It’s easy to prevent yourself from adding self-promotional opportunists as Twitter friends. Just do your homework in advance.

How? Simple. When you get an e-mail message telling you that PersonY has added you as a friend, click the link in the message that displays the person’s most recent tweets. (This will be something like http://twitter.com/username.) Read them. Decide whether this kind of content is something that interests you. If it’s not, ignore him. If it is, add him as a friend.

Removing a Friend

About Me on TwitterIt sounds cruel, but if someone you’ve added as a friend turns out to be someone who posts a lot of crap that you’re not interested in, it’s easy to remove their Tweets from what you see.

There are a few ways to do this. One way is to go to your Twitter home page (http://twitter.com/yourname/) and click the Friends link in the About box on the right side of the page.

This will list all of your friends:

Image

For each friend, you should see at least two links beneath the Friend’s name:

  • Leave username basically ignores the friend for a while by not displaying his links for you.
  • Remove username removes the friend from your list of friends. I’m ruthless, so this is the one I usually pick.

To my knowledge, the friend does not receive an e-mail message saying that you have left or removed him. So you don’t have to worry about insulting him or him bugging you about it.

Oh, and if a Twitter member is obviously using Twitter solely for spam-like communications, do us all a favor and report him. The Twitter team offers a form for assistance; you can use the same form to report a Twitter member’s unacceptable behavior.

I Still Like Twitter, Despite Any Shortcomings

I still like Twitter. It makes me feel as if I’m part of a community, even while I’m sitting alone all day in my office. I’m just very picky about who I follow — I have only 33 Twitter friends as I write this — and I’m quick to turn off the Tweets of the people too quick to promote themselves or their products.

And I think that’s vital for any serious Twitter user.

Treo Internet Connection Problems Resolved

Posted on by
1

But not very satisfactorily.

palm Treo 700p Smartphone (Verizon Wireless)A few days ago, I reported “The Trouble with Treos.” In short, I’d bought a Treo 700p so I could access the Internet from my off-the-grid camping shed on Howard Mesa. Although I’d been told that the Treo would “tether” with my Macintosh for an Internet connection, I later learned that feature wasn’t supported by Palm (maker of the Treo) and Verizon (my wireless provider).

Motorola Q Phone (Verizon Wireless)Today, while running an errand in the Phoenix area, I stopped by the Verizon Wireless store where I bought the phone (Happy Valley, north of Phoenix) and spoke to the woman who sold it to me. I believe her when she says she thought it would work. But I also don’t know why she didn’t tell me about the Motorola Q phone, which definitely would work. Could it be because it cost $150 less?

Could I Love My Phone?

Now, after spending the past week sending photos to my TumbleLog and text messages to Twitter while on a business/vacation trip to California, I’m rather attached to the darn phone. Just the other afternoon, while Mike was driving from the LA area to Santa Barbara, I was stuck in the back seat of the convertible he’d rented. With no chance of participating in the conversation between Mike and his cousin due to wind noise, I amused myself by exchanging a series of photos with my brother in New Jersey who was lounging by his friend’s pool with his friend’s family, his wife, and his dog. I sent him photos I’d taken earlier in the day, as well as a few scenes from the Mustang’s cramped back seat as we made our way up the coast.

That’s something I couldn’t do with my old phone.

I know that other people have been doing stuff like that for years, but I was never into the cell phone thing. Now it’s almost an addiction. And I just don’t want to give up my new phone, even though it doesn’t do everything I want.

But I’m a logical, reasoning person — at least at times — and it makes no sense to be emotionally attracted to a smart phone that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. So what was I to do?

Make it do what I needed it to.

Doing the “Impossible” — Poorly

So I got on the Web and I tracked down a software package called USB Modem. Available in Mac OS, Windows, and Linux flavors, this package includes software for the Treo as well as drivers for my Mac. I installed a few things, configured a few things, plugged in my tether, and connected to the Internet. In other words, I was able to do what Verizon had belatedly told me I couldn’t do: connect to the Internet using the USB tether cable.

But the connection seemed painfully slow. I fired up the Speakeasy Speed Test and tested it out. Sure enough, I had download speeds of only 120Kbps and upload speeds of only 20Kbps. Sheesh! This is broadband?

To be fair, I ran the same test on the Bluetooth DUN connection. I got 135 down and 85 up. Not much better.

Then I ran it on my house connection just for comparison. 524 down and 516 up.

(All these tests were done with the same computer.)

At Least I Have a Reason to Keep the Phone

The only good that comes out of this is that now I have a reason to keep the phone. True, it’ll cost me another $25 to buy the software to do the tethered connection — I was using a demo version to make sure it would work before I coughed up any more hard earned money — but at least it does work.

It just doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Or as well as the salesperson at the Verizon Wireless store said it would. Very disappointing.

I still have three weeks to decide.

Anyone out there use a Q phone with a Mac? Please do use the Comments link or form to share your experiences, good and bad.

Clean Up Patrol

Posted on by
5

I clear out my old office.

I”ve owned a condo in Wickenburg for the past eight or so years. It was the first non-stock investment I made when I started making decent money. I figured that real estate is always a good investment, and it would be nice to have a property that someone else paid for. So I bought the condo — which had been previously occupied by a single renter for 11 years — and put it up for rent.

The condo isn’t anything special. It’s two bedrooms, one bath, with a kitchen that’s separated from the living room by a breakfast bar. Total square feet is about 900. The big living room window faces out to the parking lot, a park where there are ball fields and the town pool, and the mountains. The bedroom windows face out on another parking lot and route 93, which is the main thoroughfare between Phoenix and Las Vegas for cars and trucks. The condo property includes a well-maintained swimming pool, a not-so-well-maintained spa, and mailboxes. (A big deal in a town that’s only had mail delivery for about 15 years. The place is a short walk to a supermarket and other shopping and is well within walking distance to two schools.

I put it up for rent within a month of closing on it and had a tenant within a month. Thus began my long career as a landlord.

Being a Landlord Sucks

Being a landlord is not a job for the faint of heart. Although most tenants show at least some level of responsibility, there are always a few in the crowd who will treat your property like it belongs to their worse enemy. Some tenants go out of their way to find things to complain about — one family complained so many times about how the shower door didn’t roll properly that Mike and I went to the apartment, removed the shower door, and replaced it with a curtain. (Let’s see you have problems with that.) And did I mention that the average tenant isn’t interested in living in the same place for 11 years? I witnessed a parade of four tenants in less than five years, with lots of cleaning and painting and empty unit time between them. Anyone who thinks being a landlord manager is an easy way to make a living is fooling himself. It’s a pain in the ass.

To make matters worse, I had another good year and bought another property. That one was a 3-lot parcel with a 4-unit studio apartment building and two bedroom, two bath house on it. What the hell was I thinking? I multiplied my single unit landlord headaches by five. Now there was always an empty unit somewhere, a unit to clean, a tenant complaint to deal with, an apartment to advertise and show.

I won’t go into the gory details. I’ll just say that after trying a rental agent (who took a fully-occupied property and had it down to just one tenant in four months) and letting Mike manage the place for a short while, I got smart and sold the larger of the two properties, leaving me with the condo.

In the meantime, the condo’s last tenants, a young married couple with a baby, terminated their lease early and disappeared. But not before they completely trashed the carpet, doing what would turn out to be $1,600 in damage.

I’d had enough. I was sick of being a landlord. I decided to take the apartment off the market and move my office into it.

An Office in Town

Having an office outside my home for the first time in about 12 years was a treat. My work wasn’t in my face all the time. I didn’t drift from the kitchen to my office and get caught up reading e-mail or working through edits. I went to work in the morning, worked until I felt done for the day, and went home to a life. Mike, who was working from home at the time, did the same. I took the condo’s living room, so I could look out over the mountains, and Mike took the larger of the two bedrooms. The place had everything we needed to be comfortable — full kitchen with dishwasher, bathroom, and access to high-speed Internet. (For about a year, MIke had wireless access that we think he picked up from the local Radio Shack. Ah, the days of unsecured wireless networks.)

The really good part about all this is that we reclaimed both of the bedrooms we’d been using as offices at home. Mike’s old office became the full-time guest room, with all the furniture you’d expect to find in a bedroom. My old office became the “library,” with all of our non-work related books, a desk, framed maps, and a futon for overflow guests. We usually kept the guest room closed off in the summer and winter so we didn’t have to air condition or heat it.

Of course, there were some drawbacks to the office situation. First of all, my office was about 6 miles away, which meant that if I needed something there, I was taking a drive. I had everything there except my 12″ PowerBook, so I dealt with all work-related matters there. For a while, we didn’t even have Internet access at home, since we didn’t “need” it. (It didn’t take long for that to change.)

But the worst part of the situation was when I got calls in the middle of the day for a helicopter flight. The airport is on the opposite end of town. So if I got a call for a flight that day, I’d have to pretty much drop everything I was doing, lock up the office, hop in my vehicle, drive home to put on some more appropriate clothing, and drive to the airport to preflight the helicopter and pull it out. That took a minimum of an hour. When the flight was over, I’d do the same thing in reverse. By the time I got back to my office, my concentration was gone and I wasn’t usually able to get back to writing. Sometimes, the whole day would be shot to hell for a 25-minute tour around Wickenburg that put just $195 in the bank — that’s gross, not net.

When space opened up at the airport for an office, I tried to get it. The Town of Wickenburg’s Airport Manager jerked me around to no end. (If you think coming to Wickenburg to start a business is easy, think again. It seems that the town management isn’t happy unless they present at least a dozen hoops for a new business owner to jump through. The smart ones take their plans elsewhere. I’ve spoken to three different people who were interested in bringing medium sized businesses to Wickenburg, and all three said they’d built their businesses elsewhere after dealing with the town.) It took over a year, intervention from the FAA, an RFP process, and the threat of a discrimination case to get a contract. Now I’m wondering whether I want the Town of Wickenburg for a landlord. Like the smart folks who give up when they see the hoops, I don’t think I do.

So I moved my office back home.

There’s No Place Like Home

The move wasn’t easy, but we were smart enough to do it in the winter months, when it was comfortably cool during the day. We gave away a lot of furniture so we could fit my desk and the things I needed back in the library. All the books went back upstairs, into some built-in shelves, so my work books — including the ones I’ve written — could go in my office. Mike, who now has much less need for space, took the library’s desk upstairs and set that up by one of the big windows with the good views. We put his old desk in my hangar, so I had more space there to do my FAA-required paperwork. (My old desk there had gone up to Howard Mesa months before.)

So now I live with my work again and, frankly, I don’t mind one bit.

I had a book to write, so I got right down to work before everything in the condo had been moved. It I was more ambitious about it, I would have cleared the place out right away, had it thoroughly cleaned, and put it back up for rent. But I dreaded the thought of dealing with all the accumulated paper — including boxes I’d packed in our first Wickenburg home (an apartment on Palm Drive) and ones I’d packed back in New Jersey ten years ago. So I just moved everything aside to give the carpet folks room to lay the new carpet, turned the heat pump off, and locked the place up.

Now I’m Cleaning Up

Months passed. And I finally did something radical to get me to clean up: I hired a professional cleaner. And I told her to come next Wednesday, when I’ll be away in California.

Of course, I don’t expect her to go through all my crap and box it up for my office or storage. That’s something only I can do.

I put it off as long as I could. Yesterday, I had a dawn photo flight here in Wickenburg and a lunch meeting with one of the companies I advertise with. A good day to work on my old office, I reasoned. Lunch would make a good mid-day break. I’d put in 6 hours or so and be done.

Wrong! Although lunch was a good break, I didn’t come close to finishing. I worked in the condo from about 8:30 AM to 11 AM, did some errands, went for lunch, and got back to work at 1 PM. Then I spent the next 3-1/2 hours going at it.

I threw away 7 tall kitchen bags — you know, the 13-gallon size? — full of junk, including stuff I’d saved for more than 15 years. I got rid of all the Apple promotional and developer disks I’d accumulated from 1992 through 2001. I got rid of old software and manuals. I got rid of magazines — about 40 issues of MacAddict that were still in their original wrappers. I got rid of loose receipts, bills, and bank statements. I was ruthless. My hands got filthy — I washed them at least once an hour. My feet got sore from walking barefoot on the cheap carpet I’d had installed in the place.

I filled six file boxes with stuff I wanted to keep. I made piles of stuff to give away — some stuff for the cleaner, miscellaneous paper items for my neighbor’s kids to do crafts, photo and negative holders for a photographer friend, empty CD-cases for the local print shop guy (who also uses Macs).

Later, at 4:15 PM, when Mike rolled up to help me take some of the boxes out, I was exhausted. We loaded most of the boxes into my Jeep and his car, dropped some of them off in storage, and brought the rest home.

But I’m not done.

I’m mostly done. I don’t think I’ll need more than another 4 or so hours. And frankly, I might take the lazy way out and just box up the stuff and stick it in storage without sorting through it. It’s a terrible, nasty job, but there’s only me to blame for it. I just keep too much crap.

So today, after getting a haircut at 8:30 AM, I’ll go back to work in the condo. I’ll get all the loose stuff gathered together, throw away some more junk, and stack up the boxes to go into storage.

Hell, at least I can turn on the air conditioner.

Four Steps to Get the Most Out of Twitter

Posted on by
8

Some tips for taking the “yuk” out.

I first heard about Twitter a few months ago on either the MacBreak Weekly or TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast. (Both highly recommended, by the way.) I immediately checked it out. At first, I thought it was kind of cool, but then I realized that it was nothing more than a gigantic, worldwide chat room. Everyone talking, few people talking to a specific other person, some people even talking in languages other than English (imagine that!), few people saying anything of interest.

Twitter is a micro blogging tool. If you looked at 100 random blog posts from all over the blogoshere, how many of them do you think you’d like? This is the same. Look at 100 random tweets and you’re likely to find very few that are even worth the time it took to read them.

And they’re only up to 140 character long.

First Impressions

Miraz summed it up in a comment on yesterday’s “Reach Out and Meet Someone” post here:

I’m really interested by your previous post and comments here about Twitter. I’d noticed Twitter and found my first, and strong, reaction was Yuk!

The next time I looked was the other day when I thought I should include it in a book I’m writing for community groups. This time I looked and just felt old.

I see it as a monumental waste of time and a triviality, so I find your comments about feeling more connected to people particularly useful.

I felt exactly the same way. Yet people were talking about it and raving, in many cases. So I figured I was probably missing something and decided to give it a closer look.

You Need to Scrape Away the Bull

The main complaint about Twitter is: who really cares about what all these people are doing? What you had for breakfast isn’t very interesting. What you’re watching on TV isn’t interesting either. And why all the cryptic statements? Are you trying to be cool?

But if you could scrape away all the bull and concentrate on the content that may be of real interest to you, Twitter does have some value. I’ve gotten a glimpse of it. Not enough to convince me that it’s good, but enough to make me think that it might be.

Here’s what I did to reach this point. I recommend these steps to anyone who wants to give Twitter a real try.

Step 1: Create a Twitter Account

I’m not going to explain how to do this. You can go to Twitter and follow the instructions online to do it yourself.

I definitely recommend that you choose an appropriate image for your identity there. Something that gives people an idea of what you’re all about. For a while, mine was the same image I currently use for my Gravatar: my helicopter’s back end with hot air balloons in the background. Pretty but not very real. I’ve since switched it to my standard head shot, which I hope to get redone one of these days. Most Twitter users either use a photo or a cartoon for their images. My advice: don’t use established cartoon characters; one of these days, someone’s going to start suing.

While you’re in your account settings, be sure to create a one-line (they really mean about six-word) bio of yourself. It appears when someone goes to your Twitter page. Set your time zone, enter the full URL for your Web site or blog, and just provide the needed info. If you don’t want to be on the public timeline, there’s a box you can check. I wouldn’t check it unless you’re worried about stalkers or some other crazy thing. After all, there is a slight chance that you might impress someone reading the public timeline (whoever that might be) enough to make a new friend.

Step 2: Download and Install a Tweeting Tool

I cannot over emphasize the importance of this step. Sure, you can keep your Twitter home page open and refresh it once in a while to see what’s new. But there are better ways to get involved with Twitter.

For a while, I used a Dashboard widget to compose and send my tweets. This was convenient; press F12, fill in a form, press Return, and press F12 again to get back to work. This added my tweets to Twitter, but did not display the tweets of my friends.

TwitterificThen I discovered Twitterific. Frankly, I can’t imagine using Twitter without this little application. (Now calm down, folks. You can use the Comments link or form at the bottom of this post to tell me why your favorite Twitter tool is better.) It features a resizable window that captures and displays not only your tweets, but the tweets of all the Twitter users that you follow. There are a variety of notification options with and without sound. And, best of all, there’s a tiny form at the bottom of the window that you can use to enter your own tweets.

Twitterific has just one problem — and it doesn’t affect me at all: it requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Yes, it’s a Mac-only application. (I’m relying on the PC folks reading this to use the Comments link or form to tell us what they’re using. Let’s hope they don’t let us down.)

Twitter also works with instant messaging and I’m pretty sure you can use your IM client (iChat, MSN, AOL, etc.) to interact with Twitter. But since this article’s intention isn’t to explain all the different ways you can use Twitter, I’ll let you explore that option on your own.

And Twitter does work with text messaging on a cell phone. But if you enable and regularly use that feature, you really need to get a life.

Step 3: Find People to Follow

You don’t want to monitor the public timeline. Trust me: it’s a waste of time. You want to follow the tweets of a select group of people. People that you select.

There are a few ways you can find people to follow:

  • Ask your friends, family members, and work associates if they have Twitter accounts. If they don’t, use the Invite form on your Twitter account to invite them. Be sure to use the extra note field to explain what this is all about. You might want to point them to an article about Twitter (like this one?) or a favorable review. The people you invite should be people that spend a lot of time in front of a computer connected to the Internet, so tweeting will be easy and convenient for them.
  • Track down the Twitter accounts of famous people you want to follow. Believe it or not, Barack Obama has a Twitter account. (I don’t follow him.) So does Stephen Colbert. (I do follow him.) Now, obviously, these people have better things to do with their time than send tweets out into the blogosphere, so their tweets are likely composed by their staff and have some kind of marketing value. Obama’s is strictly campaign stuff. Colbert’s is a bunch of typical Colbert-style one-liners. These are just examples. I’m sure plenty of celebs have Twitter accounts, if you’re into the celeb thing.
  • Check the blogs you follow. Quite a few bloggers have Twitter accounts. If you like the blogger’s blog, then you might like his tweets. I found a number of interesting people to follow this way.

Make these people your “Friends” — that’s Twitter’s term for the people you follow. Doing that is easy; just go to their Twitter timeline and click an Add link under Actions.

If someone makes you a friend, he’ll be listed under your followers. It’s always nice to add them as friends, too. It might give you insight as to why they added you. And you can always “Leave” them if you decide you don’t like their tweets.

Which brings up the next point. Once in a while, you’ll discover that you really don’t like the tweets of one of your “friends.” (I really feel a need to put that in quotes since the people you follow might not be real friends.) Just go to your Twitter page, view your list of friends. and click a Leave link under his name/icon. I did this just the other day when I decided that one of my “friends” was getting a bit too political for my taste. (No, I don’t want to sign your online petition, thank you.) Click of a link and I don’t have to hear from him anymore.

Step 4: Post Tweets

Even if you have no followers, you should make it a habit to post tweets on a somewhat regular basis. I’m not saying you need to do it daily or hourly or weekly or every ten minutes. I’m saying you should do it at least occasionally, when you have something to say.

I tend to tweet when I sit down to start a project or finish one up. This morning, I tweeted about going down to feed my horses and about a new article posted on my site. When this article is finished and posted, I’ll tweet about it and provide a link.

Be particular about the content of your tweets. Try to limit yourself to tweets that people might actually be interested in. Okay, you had eggs for breakfast. But don’t tweet about it unless you fetched those eggs out of a henhouse and the rooster tried to kill you or you cooked them in a microwave, causing them to explode all over the inside and start a fire. Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. But you know what I mean. Something interesting.

You can make all your tweets self-promotional, but I assure you that you’ll have very few followers — unless, of course, you’re famous and people want to read about your latest book, movie, radio show, interview, podcast, etc. I admit that my tweeting about articles as they are released has an element of self-promotion to it, but I’d like to think that some people might want to check out some of what I’m writing about. After all, if you were using Twitter, wouldn’t you be slightly interested in an article about it?

Remember, Twitter limits you to 140 characters per tweet. Don’t feel as if you have to fill them. It automatically converts long URLs to short ones (using tinyurl), so don’t worry about URLs taking up all your characters. Just keep it short and sweet.

As for writing style, Grammar Girl wrote an excellent style guide for tweets, “Grammar Girl’s Strunk & Twite: An Unofficial Twitter Style Guide.” Read it and use it. Please.

The Twitter Virus

I first read the phrase Twitter virus yesterday. At first, I thought it was some kind of real computer virus. But apparently, it refers to a person’s active involvement in Twitter — in other words, tweeting the moments of your day all day every day.

A certain amount of Twitter virus is vital to using Twitter and attracting and keeping followers. But if you’ve got it too bad — like a certain person I follow who tweeted from his cell phone about being stuck in traffic waiting at a railroad crossing this morning — you probably want to take a step back and think hard about your involvement.

While a tool like Twitterific makes participating in Twitter extremely easy, don’t get carried away. The people who follow you don’t need (or probably want) every detail of your life.

Try It

Twitter is also a social networking tool. I participate because I find it interesting to see what other people do and think throughout their day. I leave the Twitterific window open — I have a 20″ monitor, so there’s enough real estate for it — and peek at it once in a while. And then I tweet when I have something to say. It’s pretty effortless and it certainly doesn’t take much out of my day.

Now you know what I do with Twitter and how you can make it a worthwhile experiment. Don’t be shy. Try it. It’s all free and, if you don’t catch the virus, you can quit it at any time.