We know your iPhone is the greatest machine ever invented.  Thank you so much for posting about it in fifteen consecutive Twitter messages.  How do you say “unfollow”?

Seriously, Ladybug and I just had a conversation this week where we decided to buy iPhones when our Sprint contract is up in October.  They are nice machines.  But I swear to God, if I become one of those people whose every breath is spent in praise of Apple, I want you to shoot me in the face.

I’ve had the horrible feeling this evening that my domain name is about to expire, at which point I’m reasonably sure it would snapped up by pornographers. Then there would be lascivious pictures and videos of a man purporting to be Ross White, but who would, in fact, not be named Ross White. It would all be a clever trick by the makers of the pornography.

If you consider this a far-fetched, futuristic fiction, consider the case of HeidiWhite.com, a domain I have tried to buy for my beautiful wife several times only to be foiled.

In 2001, it was operated by a blonde actress who looked like she had been turned into a clone of Brigitte Nielsen, circa 1992. And, be still my heart, this Heidi White wrote poems. link

In 2002, the clone was replaced by a normal-looking girl who, unable to come up with a new logo or back-story, used the clone’s back-story as her own. Her poems, however, became much shorter, though no less trite. link

On August 8, 2003, the clone captured the normal-looking Heidi White and resumed control of the web page. link

Presumably drugged with clone-altering substances, the clone let the domain, and perhaps her own body, fall in the hands of pornographers. Follow this link to the Wayback Machine, and click on any of the 2004 links. You’ll be presented with a “you must be 18 to enter” page, following which you will see one of any number of porn sites. Presumably, if you were to pay these archived sites using some of your own archived funding, you could see shockingly graphic representations of the clone engaged in lewd acts. You might also find the normal-looking girl in some sort of bondage, since presumably the clone, having kidnapped her to resume control of the domain, and the pornographers who subsequently took control of both the clone and the site, would not have released her for fear that the site would once again change hands and the poetry featured therein would become even more trite.

In 2005, GoDaddy assumed control of the site, and neither the clone or the nice-looking girl were anywhere to be found. This was, I believe, the same year GoDaddy bought Super Bowl airtime and filled it with boobies. So we’ll assume they were in cahoots with the pornographers. link

It appears that clip art took over the site in 2006. link

Finally, in 2007, GoDaddy once again took control of the site, and the clip art was vanquished to 1992, where presumably, it will send a clone of Brigitte Nielsen forward into the future to purchase the most important domain in the history of mankind: HeidiWhite.com. link

Jeez, by the time I’d finished mapping out that horrific sequence of events, I finally found my login for my registrar, and discovered that BullCityPress.com was set to expire in 20 days. Thankfully, I caught it in time, so you won’t find surprising bull-porn at your favorite press web site for the next 5 years.

Tomfoolery and sheer idiocy, in bullet format:

• The list of people I’m following on Twitter has swelled from 15 to 34 in the last couple weeks.  Twitter is infinitely more satisfying now.  If you’re reading this, and you’re on Twitter, and I ain’t following you, let me know.  Perhaps you interest me.
• This is kind of amazing.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for the guy.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for anyone who’s going to have to return the stuff they hauled away.  You cannot help but wonder how anyone came up with it.
• Spent most of yesterday moving furniture. We now have the corner cabinets that Ladybug’s grandfather made.  And some other crap.
• I’m headed back to the classroom!  Well, for a day.  I’m subbing for a colleague’s poetry workshop next week.  I have missed being around poetry students.  Badly.  I realized it once more when I was writing a recommendation for a student and I read over his creative sample.
• I’m currently badgering Tom McHenry to make me into a cyborg.

I got back and forth on Twitter– sometimes I think there’s a ton of value to it, sometimes I think it’s a complete and total waste.  It is, of course, only as good as the people you’re following, or the content you’re adding.  I’ve felt like a less-than-adequate content producer of late, so that part of the equation isn’t up to snuff.  And I don’t follow a huge number of people– a poet friend-of-a-friend that I respect a great deal, my boss and a handful of co-workers, Smalls and Ayse, a couple improv peeps, and the biggest twit on Twitter, my great friend Lee Creighton.

Some days, my sidebar is full of tweets from just one or two people, and I feel like there’s not much to it– some political linky-linky (important, yes, but not what I use Twitter for), a bunch of @soandso tweets that say good morning or discuss coffee, a little bit of technical discussion (I follow a kickass coder).  None of it makes my life richer.  But you do get things like:

• This morning a friend posted that there was a new traffic pattern at one of the best places to hang out in Carrboro.  This isn’t earth-shattering news, and I am quite sure I would have noticed when I tried to turn in the out lane.  But still, it’s cool to know those things as they happen.
• Found out that an author I have a great deal of respect for is speaking in the Triangle soon, and since I don’t regularly read the Independent, I would not have known that otherwise.  (Alas, I’m spoken for that evening.)
• @arsepoetica tweets about the music she’s listening to, and when she talks about a band I don’t know, I make a point to check them out, because we like a lot of the same stuff.
• A couple of times, I have looked at a recent tweet by Lee and thought, “OK, he’s available for hijinks.”  And then we hijink.

I’ve thought frequently that I would be more interested in following poets; fiction writers would be good too, but poets would be my top targets.  The compact nature of tweets could/should produce some interesting results among a group of like-minded, twittering poets, one that I would be very keen to watch even if I wasn’t an active participant.  But I cannot find that group, if they exist; I can’t find more than one working poet twittering right now (and she tweets about her day job).

So how to make Twitter more useful, if the people I most want to follow aren’t on it?  As it turns out, it may be following more people.  I have been very selective thusfar about who I would follow because I was trying to keep up with everything that people close to me post.  But that actually might not be what serves me– I might do better to follow a bunch of people, and if I miss tweets, I miss tweets.  If I miss tweets aimed at me, so be it.  Because if someone wants/needs to talk to me directly, they know how to find me via more reliable means that Twitter.

Following more people seems like it would create a sort of conversation slipstream– the real world happens, and the conversation on Twitter is the backwash.  So one could reasonably step in and out of that at will; it would be the nerd equivalent of the evil movie character who goes to his room with 100 TVs on 100 different channels and simply sits and absorbs all the information.

Now I just have to find interesting people to follow.  I suppose the problem is still the same… but where, in the past, I would only follow someone I knew in real life (or, at least, had some level of private communication with), I’m going to follow some people who just strike me as interesting.  I added one earlier today, who saw my tweet about wanting to follow more poets and writers, and direct messaged me about it– we have a similar desire to see it happen.  (She’s also a proponent of 140-character microfic, or, as I’m calling it now, “tweetfic.”)

Perhaps I’ll be more interesting as a result.

One of the joys of carpal tunnel syndrome is that you get to use voice recognition software, which leads to some strange misunderstandings. Almost invariably, you end up making some sort of slurring your speech, because not everyone can talk like a newscaster (which the software recommends for excellent dictation). This isn’t so much a problem when you’re writing an e-mail, because you can prove the e-mail before you send it. But when you’re talking to a friend on Google talk, and you want to keep up the pace of conversation, you’ll almost always say something embarrassing in print that was perfectly innocuous when you spoke aloud.

The proof of one’s manliness is his willingness to make these mistakes in his blog entries, and leave them uncorrected.

Well, damn. About ten minutes after I Twittered that no one else should start a new Scrabulous game with me because I have nine going, Scrabulous is no longer available on Facebook. I broke the Intarwebs.

Update: It came back. False alarm.

Should you find yourself looking to sample fine music before purchasing it from the industry that treats you like a criminal, BeeMP3 is a terrific search engine for mp3s. I’m currently listening to Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain,” which is much cooler in my memory than it is in real life.

Check this class description for an upcoming class at WWC:

The repetition of phrases and sounds is a technique many of us use to give our poems rhetorical as well as emotional emphasis. Too often, though, our poems are overwhelmed by this gesture and devolve into so much noise. In this class we will look to Whitman and Hopkins’ highly charged poems of ravaged landscapes to consider how one might “repeat” (or return) as a means of making the poem and its argument /more/ muscular and fluid at the same time. We will look to issues of craft to guide us. As such, students will be expected to participate fully in lively discussion.

Friends have already e-mailed to ask if I’m drooling with delight. I’m drooling.

The following bullet points consist of links you should follow and the context for following them.

• A parody of “The Office,” created to make you miss the striking writers even more. My friend Charlie directs, my friend Anthony stars.
• My little magazine gets a mention in the News & Observer’s holiday gift guide.
• I called American Gangster “fair.” Creighton liked it a lot better. Metacritic says 76. (Creighton, notice that Michael Collins got the higher ranking.)
• Pinksy gives some love to Van Jordan’s terrific Quantum Lyrics.
• My 14-year-old brother is now allowing me to stalk him via Twitter.
• I felt the need to end this short list with a lolcat.

via LoFro: The Death of E-mail

I may not be ready for e-mail to die. But I think I’ll be ok if it does.

Continuing my push towards the perfect inbox, I have gone ahead and arranged GTD folders for my personal e-mail account. And my Gmail account now has IMAP, so I’m finally bringing that into Thunderbird. Will the wonders never cease?

(Answer: no.)