Posts Tagged Twitter

It looks like we’re going to be shorthanded at work this week, as this little office really needs two people to keep it running smoothly, and one-half of that equation is out sick with the flu.

I suppose I’m the lucky one. No flu, but I get to try to do the job of two people, so I’m scurrying around at work, and worn out and brain-fried when I get home.  I’ll try to get some content up, but most of it will probably be links and Neat Things I Found When I Got a Breather.

For that first neat thing, in the bitty bits of space I’ve gotten between phone calls and craziness, I’ve been participating in BBC Audio’s little twitter experiment, writing a crowd-sourced audiobook begun by Neil Gaiman, and finished by his loyal tweeps.  Scene One and Two are finished so far, and I actually got one of my tweets in on Scene One (I’m @meadhbh).  It’s a really fun experiment, and I’ve been having fun trying to keep up with what’s going on in the story, when I’ve been able to check it.  When the story is finished, it’ll be put into an audiobook format read by Neil Gaiman himself!

Yes, so I know it’s silly to be so excited that one sentence I wrote (and not even a particularly good sentence) is going to be read by Neil Gaiman…but…WHEEEE!

There. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system….(*wheeeeeeee*)…ahem… I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep to my usual posting schedule this week (I’ve already slipped off of it somewhat, since this is gong out Tuesday instead of Monday).  I’ll be trying to keep from getting the flu, writing tweet-novels with Neil Gaiman, and trying to come up with a price list for my baked goods. So I can bake things. And, you know, sell them.

Also, it’s a bit late, but I hope everyone had an excellent Coming Out Day yesterday, and I’d still like to encourage everyone to get the word out and send out your letters regarding the injustice done to poor Jonathan Escobar.

Related Articles:

• With Twitter, You Can Write A Book with Neil Gaiman (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)
• Ready, Set, Tweet a story with Neil Gaiman (definitiveink.typepad.com)
• Neil Gaiman and Twittersphere to Collaborate on Audiobook (mediabistro.com)

When the usual sites I check every morning were down the first time I checked them Thursday morning, I shrugged, thinking that the storm the night before had somehow messed up the DSL connection at the office, as bad storms occasionally did.

Then I noticed that those same sites weren’t pulling up on my blackberry and that other sites were operating just fine, though, with a few exceptions, the sites affected seemed entirely unrelated.

Turns out there was a pretty wide-spread DDoS attack (that is, Denial-of-Service Attack) that seemed to be specifically targetting social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and successfully took down Facebook for a short while during the morning and Twitter for most of the day. Unfortunately, the general overloading of networks was enough to cause difficulties on some completely unrelated sites.

That’s fine, I can do without Twitter for a day, and I don’t bother with Facebook, but it is worrying.  If an attack is able to do this to big-name but relatively unimportant sites like Facebook and Twitter, what’s to keep them from targeting financial websites and banking institutions? The network infrastructure of the US was, for the most part, built to withstand traffic that is less than a tenth of what it now is forced to support, and while banks and high security networks are built to withstand hacking attempts and attacks intended to steal information, most are not equipped to deal with the pure server overload that is the typical DDoS attack.

If someone can shut down Facebook and Twitter so successfully and for so long just by over-loading their servers with traffic, how long will it be before they can shut down something much more important?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter hit by DDoS Attack
• Twitter Down Due to Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) (mashable.com)
• Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal Down at the Same Time! (Update) (readwriteweb.com)

There’s just something about fire that is utterly fascinating.

That said, when a boy decides to play with firecrackers on a windy New Years Day and sets the back yard on fire…less with the fascination and more with the panic. Said boy would be my little cousin. He was appropriately horrified and embarrassed, and fortunately we were able to at least slow the progression of the flames that it didn’t reach the tree-line before the fire department arrived.

My throat’s raw and I’m congested from helping to fight the fire, but other than a huge patch of black, burnt grass, there was no real damage done.

On another note, I’ve trying out Twitter. In general, I despise the world of netspeak that was encouraged by such things as limited-character cell phone text messaging and Twitter. However, as my beloved Strunk and White preach concise writing, and because I’ve found several writing Twitterers who post links to interesting information via Twitter, I thought I’d try it out myself.

My initial uses of it were entirely for advertising my blog updates, but lately I’ve embraced the “microblogging” aspects of it, and you will see my latest Tweets on this page. It seems to be a good way to quickly jot down new ideas in a place that is easily accessible.