The Eric Wroolie Blog

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything here.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time running and playing with Twitter.

Twitter has grown so fast it’s incredible.  It seems like every day more and more celebrities and politicos are joining.  Of course, the celebrities immediately have loads and loads of followers almost immediately.  Other people follow loads of other people in hopes that they will reciprocate and give them a high number.

The avalanche of Twitter use really hit me when Kevin Pollack posted a few days ago “After 19 days of Twittering . . . “ but it seemed like he was one of the early adopters and was one of the top 10 Twitterers (with the most followers) when I subscribed to his feed.  I’ve been following Newt Gingrich, Jonathan Ross, and Scott Hanselman among other people.  They post several times throughout the day.  But having only done it for a few weeks, I think it’s something that will lose it’s novelty soon enough.  A year from now, we’ll be saying “Remember when we were all into Twitter?” and laugh and laugh at how silly we were to latch on to that fad. 

I’ve been Tweeting once or twice a day. Usually to say how far I’ve run or what I had for lunch.  Nothing major.  If I have an idea about something, I can keep it to myself or write it.  It makes no difference, really—it’s easy enough to do both.  If anyone is interested in what I’m doing, they can follow it—but if it evaporates into the ether without anyone noticing but me, I see no problem with that.

I still don’t talk about Tweeting when with my friends or colleagues—they are too cynical and it exposes more of my nerd-dom.  They may latch on in a few months or a year (like they did with Facebook).  There are still people I don’t tell about the blog, because they see it as superfluous anyway.

The other activity that has been taking a lot of time recently is running.  In two weeks, I’m running the Reading Half Marathon.  The last half marathon I ran was the Kole Kole Pass Half Marathon in Hawaii back in 1993.  I was 21.  I’ve run ever since then, but never with the regularity to run 13 miles.  My practice runs take place in the very early mornings—the longest so far is 10 miles.  It’s odd to run 10 miles before 6am.  The run is long forgotten by lunch time.  At that time, it’s dark and quiet and cold.  Strangely, morning running suits me as it rarely has another activity (like a meeting at work or a situation at home) to delay it. 

The Half Marathon is on the 29th.  Baseball season starts a week later.  Perfect timing.  My early morning runs will be replaced with watching Padres night games in the early morning hours here.

Oh, and I recently bought Guitar Hero for the Wii.   Fantastic game.  I have a habit of buying video games thinking I immerse myself into them, but never do.  This game is different.  The big plastic guitar is fun to use and it’s an easy game to pick up, play for twenty minutes, and then move on to other things.

That’s it.  That’s what I’ve been up to.

Twitter is all the rage now and it seems to be all that anyone ever talks about these days in the blogosphere.  So, why should I be any different?

I set up a Twitter account before Christmas and haven’t used it much.  I’ll check it out every few days as a curiosity.  One or two tweets in a few weeks.  But, that’s not really in the spirit of trying something new.

For the past few days, I’ve tried to fully adopt it.  I have two followers.  I don’t know who they are or why they are following me, but maybe that’s just the way it works.  In the first few days of setting up the twitter account, I had several people subscribe to start following me.  I think these people troll for new accounts and subscribe, probably so I would reciprocate and follow them.  So that put me off a bit–the thought of oportunists praying on me. 

But I never gave Twitter much of a chance.

At this early stage, I’m not sure what to expect.  I would think that my followers would only be people I know.  Like family in the states or people I’ve had passing acquaintances with.  Or maybe readers of this blog. 

I have to admit, the whole 140 character thing makes me wonder how useful it is.  I can’t ramble on (a good thing perhaps) but I’m also limited to things like “Went to lunch.  Ate chicken”.  But, occasionally I’ll want to write something a little more spur of the moment like “Subqueries are almost always a symptom of bad database design” or “The guy sitting next to me doing Sudoku looks exactly like the guy three seats down doing Sudoku”.  Still, not really riveting, but better than hearing about my menu.

I’m only just getting used to Facebook.  When I log on, I see the status updates with something like a friend who “is making cookies.  Yumm.” This not only bores me to death, but makes me wonder if the social media is going too far.  I wonder if Twitter would be the same type of thing.

But, I’ll admit that I started blogging just to see what all the fuss was about and really enjoy it.  That was five years ago.  I like the idea that I can write whatever I feel like, whether it be a story about my past, an embarassing incident at work, or a bit of code I’ve been working on.  I don’t have many regular readers, but most people find the posts via a google search for something or other.  It was a fad I latched onto and now really enjoy.  Perhaps Twitter will be the same.  So many of my favourite bloggers are raving about it.  I’ll give it a go.

So far, it feels like sending text messages to no-one in particular.

There are still people who, when finding out I have a blog, say “Oh, Eric!  Why on Earth do you need a blog!”  I don’t need one, actually.  But I don’t need a lot of things.  I want one.  I enjoy it.  What I have to say may only be of interest to the occasional googler, but that doesn’t mean I can’t lend a voice here and there.  Besides, I’m the only American living in London– who speaks Mandarin, codes C#, works with offshore developers, is learning Hindi and who grew up in San Diego– that I know.  Everyone has a unique perspective on something.  No one needs permission to write it.

By the way, on Twitter I’m following the Diggnation guys, Stephen Fry, Scott Hanselman, and Scoble. 

My Twitter account is ericwroolie.  Feel free to follow and I’ll try to keep it interesting.  I’ve got a Twitter section in the sidebar of this blog which lists the last few posts.  You can set up your own account so I can follow you.  You might enjoy it, too.

See you in the Tweets.