the ronster - is quietly judging you
The Ronster Lowdown

I'm a married atheist who all too often finds himself with far too much time on his hands, thus making stuff like this possible.

A citizen of the internet, if you can't contact me via the email/twitter/facebook, then I've probably died.

www.theronster.com

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me and twitter, 2009

It's been a funny old year. This isn't going to be a long, prosey post, more just a series of thoughts.

For the first time in about 6 years, I've taken to watching TV while it's being aired in the evenings. Why? Because British telly is much more enjoyable when you invite all your Twitter followers into your living room to chat about it with.

Hence it's the first year I've watched X-Factor, and enjoyed slagging it off. Also watching movies and TV series like Doctor Who become strangely interactive, with a certain section of Twitterers always seeming to be on hand to chat about the positive and negative merits of whatever's on.

Also: I rarely feel like I'm on my own in the house when I'm, well, on my own any more. Any time I need a chat or to vent some nonsense I just fire off a tweet - I'm usually guaranteed a conversation within minutes.

Messages of support and condolence came my way when I told my followers about the deaths of my Grandfather and Grandmother this year. Even though many of them came from people I have never met, they still meant something, and that's worth pointing out.

Twitter has been a great place to get feedback for the music I make with my band. It's always encouraging when complete strangers tell you they enjoy your creative efforts - even more so when they go on to actually pay for them...

I started a comics podcast with two fellow users, @pauljholden and @scott_evil. THAT wouldn't have happened without Twitter as a facilitator.

All in all, Twitter is entertainment on the go - it's a daily window into people's lives that is oddly reassuring - just knowing that at any moment I can fire up Tweetie on my iPhone and find out what everyone is up to. It's not nosiness, really. I see it as being the 21st Century version of chatting with the neighbours over the back fence.

Right enough of that. Here's some other nonsense.

Funniest User: @noberts. She cracks me up, although I don't interact with her that much. Her blog is outrageously hysterical when she can be arsed updating it.

Joy of Youth: @doorofkukondo - I enjoy seeing what he's up to, whether it be young love or organising @cupcakecampbelfast. I think he'll be a young man to watch.

Photographers: @carriedavenport and @icedcoffee are both great at what they do - both have blogs that make me wish I had talent in that field.

Bands: Both @ASIWYFA_band and @aplasticrose have made good use of the service to promote themselves - next year, more interaction lads!

Friendship: There are quite a few who are there everyday. I'll forget some, no doubt, but here's to @dressjunkie, @cimota, @rudedoodle, @3naturalsixes, @stuartgibson (all in Bangor, oddly) @leelowe, @marramgrass, @lisam75, @tinpot, @theeadversary, @tinpotray - all good people, all worth following. If I've forgotten you, I'm really sorry. This isn't the most organised blog post I've ever done, and I'm sort of winging it.

Oh, and I should probably mention my wife @karenquinn - she makes me laugh all the time, and her Twitter usage is no different. 

Anyway, I'm done for now. Here's to another year of mindlessly sending messages out into the ether and expecting something worthwhile back!

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Filed under  //  internetz  
Comment (1)
Posted 2 months ago

someday all this will be soooo simple

I've been trying to work out what the simplest solution is to manage all the myriad social networks out there. I have a Facebook profile, a Twitter account and this blog. I don't really need any more than that. I've long since deleted BEBO and MySpace from my life (except the band MySpace - apparently it's THE LAW that you have to have one of those...)

However, I also have the same again for both my band and my comics podcast. It kinds of gets complicated when you want to have the same update sent to all three in order to effectively message disparate audiences.

Posterous is really handy, because any blog posts I send to it can be automatically forwarded to Facebook and Twitter. But the whole Twitter/Facebook updating thing is a bit of a minefield.

I use Twitter a lot. Way more than Facebook. I used to have all my Tweets sent to Facebook as status updates, but my heavy usage seemed to annoy people (who quite frankly would be better off using Twitter, since they seem to be using Facebook in that fashion). So I removed that service, but this means that I always forget now to forward tweets (using the #fb app instead) that I would like in both places.

So I'm trying Ping.FM now, coupled with an iPhone app called Social Personas. SP is, quite frankly, one ugly mother of an app, but it does the job quite well. Ping.FM on the other hand is a really great service that is basically a catchall for all the various micro-bloggind/status-based websites out there.

However, I've just added Posterous as one of my services in it, and I can't figure out how this is useful. In fact, I'm typing this very post into a box on the Ping.FM dashboard, and it's kind of difficult to understand why anyone would find this more convenient than the standard method of posting to that system, i.e. email.

Still. Just thought that it was worth a wee note about. I am going to have to log into Posterous now though to add links and format text via their web-editor, so this kinds of highlights just how useless Ping.FM is for actual blogging. Later perverts.

via Ping.fm

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Filed under  //  internetz   whinge  
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Posted 3 months ago

how not to live your life

I read a lot of blogs, but far and away the one that makes me laugh the most is that of my friend Niki.

She's a full on nutcase, but she makes every single tragic thing in her life seem guffaw-out-loud hilarious when she publishes it on there. 

I only wish she'd write more often.

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Posted 7 months ago

wow. that was exhausting!

So tonight was the night that the first Sunnyside Comics Podcast went up. 

You'll all be able to tell your grandchildren were you were when you first saw the embedded player on the blog. Although I've suspected for a while now that when my grandkids ask me my whereabouts for every major current event of our times, my answer will invariably be:

"Well kids, I was lying on my back with my laptop on my stomach when I read the news". 

It's true though. Just about everything that happens in the world today I find out via one of 3 screens; the 13" one on my MacBook, the 20" one on my iMac or the 3.5" one on my iPhone. Nothing else. 

I've all but stopped listening to the radio, I never buy a newspaper anymore and I can't remember the last time I turned on the TV to see the news. No, wait, I can. It was to find out more about Michael Jackson's death, but by that stage my iPhone, and Twitter specifically, had already fed me all the details that were pertinent. Who gives a damn if they were accurate?!

And so it has become a new ritual, replacing the old one of flipping on BBC News 24 in the morning while I ate my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. The first thing I do, when I wake up, is to reach for my iPhone, tap in my 4-digit passcode, check my email and then hit the button for the Byline app, an excellent Google Reader interface. If you have an iPhone, and are prepared to do the prep required to amass a useful collection of RSS feeds, I can't recommend it highly enough. 

I have headings for News, Comics, Blogs, Comedy, Apple, Tech and probably a couple of others I've forgotten. Just about my only request would be a 'Mark All As Read' button at the top of each category, and a universal button that does the same thing for ALL articles. 

So if you couple this with a using Google Reader on your desktop or laptop, or better yet using it in a SSB (site-specific-browser) created using Fluid or something similar, you have a pretty nice synchronised news-reading solution.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to tell you all this tonight though. I'm ridiculously tired at this stage, having been staring at Garageband for hours, and cursing at it for it's (read 'my') stupidity. Still, I'm pleased with the results, and honestly believe it can only get better over time.

Or I may just be deluded by tiredness.

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Filed under  //  comics   internetz   iphone   news   podcast  
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Posted 7 months ago

john hughes

It's not even midday, and already I'm sick to the back-teeth hearing about John Hughes. Was there this much fuss when Akira Kurosawa died? Or should he have made some inconsequential films about how crap being a teenager is, but it's worse when you grow up because your soul dies? Twaddle, I say. Like everyone else, I thought my life had been changed when I watched The Breakfast Club for the first time. I thought I'd finally discovered cinema.

Fortunately, the same day I bought The Breakfast Club in Our Price's buy 2 get 1 free sale, I also bought Taxi Driver. I watched it right after TBC.

Endy fucking story. Seriously, what do you think was going to have more affect on a 15 year old? This:

Or this?

Still, I like She's Having A Baby, and the Home Alone flicks (which he only wrote, to be fair) and a handful of others. Although according to Wikipedia, he only actually directed about 8 movies, so he was hardly prolific. In fact, I'm going to be the first to come out and call him lazy. The man never directed another movie after Curly Sue, and that was in 1991. To be fair, he was probably stopped.

Still, at least back then people like Hughes bothered to write movies that didn't necessarily talk down to kids, even if they did pander a bit to the narcissistic side of being a teenager.

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Filed under  //  internetz   movies   whinge  
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Posted 7 months ago

what's up my sleeve though?

Just did this on Photofunia. Lots of really good wee photo-effects there. Complete waste of time, but then you're reading this blog aren't you? So you can't be that  adverse to wasting time.

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Posted 7 months ago

is twitter down?

I wonder if at times like this, the guy who made this site makes a killing?

Is Twitter Down?

If you click on his answer there, it takes you to Amazon via his affiliate link. Clever dude.

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Comments (3)
Posted 7 months ago