This End Down

Twitter has helped me learn conciseness. Earlier today, I had a thought that I wanted to write down. It started as just a one-sentence thought, but then quickly spiraled (in my head) to become paragraph after paragraph of elaboration. I caught myself, thinking, “I only have 140 characters (the length limit for Twitter messages) to get across this message. Fix the sentence to make it communicate what you want; don’t just elaborate forever.”

Obviously, the fullness of each of my thoughts can’t be explored in 140 characters. But no matter how long I make this post (before I edited it, it was almost four times longer), its summary will always be simply the post’s first sentence (which is far less than 140 characters): “Twitter has helped me learn conciseness.”

Edit: I chose to change to the word conciseness. I prefer concision, personally, but conciseness is a better communicator–there’s much less of a pause between reading the word and understanding it, as conciseness has only one meaning and concision has multiple.

Tereva got a new bike the other day, and after I cleaned her (the bike, not Tereva) up a little, she took her for her first ride. She decided to name her Tinkerbell, and I decided to take some photos, which are now up online for your enjoyment here: Tinkerbell and my fiancée.

A charge for $.11 showed up on my bank statement from “EST COMPANY.” I found page after page of complaints, only to finally learn that they were one of 20ish front companies for a “small credit scam”:

Ebook Web site on DSL Reports.com

Complaintwire.com folks reported on it here and here.

From what I can tell, the only thing to do is report it to my bank and have them do a “charge-back”–which apparently puts a negative tick on the scammers’ merchant account, which will hopefully eventually be shut down with enough charge-backs. Maybe. I think that’s what I read.

Most people say to cancel the account, but I really don’t want to deal with that.. we’ll see.

Despite the appearances that may have been created by that link a few posts ago, I wasn’t just putting that list out there. To tell you the truth, I haven’t even done a good job of keeping up with it (since I learned about this crazy idea… “gifts are for getting people things they want but would never buy themselves.” It’s one of two theories about gift giving, the other of which is “gifts are for getting people things they need.” I think I like the first one, but my updating of the list often reflects the second…)

Essentially, I’m really excited about my birthday for the first time in a while–mainly because a few of my friends, most specifically Tereva, have been really talking it up and I’m getting all caught up in the excitement. She already gave me a gift–mini A&W root beers. But as to that list–its purpose, gift-wise, is to help people who want to give a gift and don’t know what to give. What do I really want? To see you, or hang out with you, or talk to you, or whatever. If you give gifts, then give what you want. If you make cards, do that. I’ve never been one to tell people “just give money to ______”, because I think gift-giving is a wonderful interaction between people, and by telling someone what to give me, I’m making it more about me and less about us.

I was out of town this weekend. Three-day-long area team meeting in Daytona Beach, half-day-long friends’ conference in Ybor, one-day-long Sonburst Practice in Ybor, and one-day-long hanging out with grandparents in Seminole. It was great.

My mom is visiting Florida in two weeks, and I’ll be out of town. This is killing me. I need to get this worked out. She may come to Sonburst for a day. That could be awesome, actually. Hm. Interesting.

It’s been forever, I know.

There’s a new (short) post up at Stauffer on Staff.

My birthday is coming up soon, so I spent some time updating the wish list that I programmed for myself… only to stumble across Giftag the next day. I don’t know if I can completely give up on my program, but Giftag just looks so much better… This may be the end. I’ll need to compare Giftag with Amazon’s Universal Wish List, but I think between the two they’ll knock my weak little dude out of the water. Edit: Apparently Giftag is made by Best Buy, and they’re mailing all of the information to Best Buy marketing every time you choose something. Yuck. Maybe I’ll stick with my program or Amazon, then…

In other news, Berto’s moved into his new shop. Picture here and here from yesterday.

I’m testing out a cool service called drop.io that allows you to add media to a page very easily–through text, email, voicemail, fax, normal upload, web site widget, etc.–and not have to manage the page hardly at all. There’s just one administrative password and no login, so it’s very … I guess nebulous is not the word, but it’s definitely not like “My drop.io” or anything–I set up a drop and I’m the only one who knows the password, and I set it so only I can add stuff to it… but I could tell other people the password, or I could allow others to add content to it.

Anyway, here’s the deal: Matt’s Fixerupper