The Omnigeek

Today as I was archiving old email I got an idea to figure out just how much information I created or processed for the year.

I’m an e-mail pack rat. I keep most every message sent to me. I do not keep spam, most mailing list messages, etc. So messages where Twitter tells me I have a new follower and similar are not included.

For Twitter, I have to way to count the number I read, nor do I have a way to count Plurk stats or text messages and IM’s sent or received.

I have two separate Flickr accounts, one is for bulk uploads and represents all but around 180 photos which I uploaded to the main Flickr account.

And while photos taken isn’t a social stat, its an interesting number.

Here are the numbers:

Count	Channel
16,207	Emails Received
2,338	Emails Sent
3074	Tweets Sent
1,883	Photos uploaded to Flickr
106	Blog Posts
13,962	Photos Taken

Twitter. Tweets. Tweeple twittering. Its all over the place like the yellow pollen covering every inch of your car and house. You can’t escape from it. Twitter (wikipedia) hit the mainstream and is no longer just some silly geek toy with a silly name.

In the past couple of months, Twitter has gone from geek-stream to main-stream in a big way. It literally has exploded into its own mass-media.

Get used to it folks. Twitter is here. And you need to join in!

WTF are you talking about? What is this “Twitter” you speak of?

Have you been under a rock? Okay, perhaps you have so here is a little background. Back in the day when you had to walk to school in the snow uphill in both directions, if you wanted to be heard on the Internet you had to play on mailing-lists or forums. You used sites that other people owned and managed.

Then the blogs came.

You now had the ability to have your own site and deliver your own content rather easily and others were permitted to comment on your content telling you how much they love your work or how stupid you really are. The later part, called “Trolling” has been around since there was anonymous Internet communication.

But blogs were still a bit of to setup and maintain and they didn’t handle the mobile world very well. So we needed something new. So in 2006 the world was gifted the wonder’s of Twitter. But it was obscure and people used it to connect friends together and let them share what they were doing using messages that worked with cell phone text messages, which means they are limited to 140 characters (plus overhead to make it into a 160 character SMS message).

Now you could blog, albeit short posts, in a very simple to setup and manage service. So now anyone can share their thoughts and read everyone elses going ons.

Well 140 characters doesn’t let you say much and its early utility was for friends to keep up with what they were doing:

Bill: I’m at the Coffee Shop, come on down!
John: I’ll be there around 10am!
Jill: I wish I could make it

Well it served a niche, but it was of limited utility. But people started using it to share real information and eventually breaking news:

jkrums: There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. http://twitpic.com/135xa

And its utility to report breaking news came to fruition. So now every one is using it to get news, tell news, share information and with the addition of good search features, its now a strong research tool.

Thats a Nice History, but why do I want to be involved?

Frankly, if you’re not into using the Internet for socializing, you probably won’t get the maximum benfit from it, but if you have found MySpace or FaceBook, then Twitter is an obvious expansion of your resources.

Twitter is very similar to Facebook Status updates and in fact many people use utilities to post their twitter posts to FaceBook. But the utility of Twitter over FaceBook is that FaceBook updates are limited to your friends. Twitter status updates go into the public where anyone can see and search for them.

FaceBook is driven about finding people you know personally, friends, workmates, your high school crush, etc. Twitter of course lets you network with friends and such, but Twitter makes it eash to network with strangers who share common interests.

I’m not into social networking

Well don’t run away yet! Twitter can be useful in other ways. You don’t even have to participate either. Its more fun if you do, but twitter as become a great resource for finding things. You can go to http://search.twitter.com and put in something you’re looking for like say “coupon“. You will get a list everyone who has twittered about coupons lately. Many will have links to coupon sites or great deals. Just as we would use Google to find things, Twitter becomes another resource.

Now if your into a hobby like couponing, you can then use this search to find people who are posting things you like and then you “follow” those people. You don’t have to contribute (its better if you do). You can just be a consumer.

Twitter is a great resource for news too. Your local newspaper or TV stations likely has an account that they publish breaking news to, so you can follow your newspaper and keep up with that’s going on. Maybe you are not interested in news so much, but you want to keep up with your favorite sports team? You can find people who post news stories and commentary about your team or the enemy team!

Some sites even create specific twitter accounts for special events, such as Myrtle Beach’s Bike Rallies

And a natural extention from this is the Celeberty traffic. What to know what’s going on with Coldplay? Brittany Spears? You can follow them and read about their day to day musings, concert information, etc. Even Oprah is now twittering.

So there is plenty of content being produced on Twitter waiting to be consumed.

Still twitter wouldn’t be as powerful as it is with out its members creating content.

Okay, I need to check this out. Where do I start?

Thats easy. Go to Twitter’s Web site and click on the green “Get Started – Join!” button. You will need to enter just a little bit of information: Your real name, a “Twitter” username, a password and an e-mail address and you’re all set.

Next, you can explore around Twitter’s “Find People” option to find friends who might already be on twitter, find the popular celeberty and information accounts, etc. Then to find people who post things your interested in, go to http://search.twitter.com and find people saying things your interested in and follow them.

You follow people by going to their twitter page, by clicking on their photo associate with each tweet, then read about them in their profile, and click on the “Follow” button to add them to the list of people who you are interested in.

Then you visit Twitter’s Web site, login (or stay logged in) to visit your profile page. There you will see a list of messages your followers have produced and you can read to your heart’s content.

Getting Involved

At 140 characters, some messages will be a little terse and maybe your have a question or want to get more details. Maybe someone says something you know to be wrong or that you have better information on. Its very easy for you to contribute. You can reply to someone easily. When you move your mouse over a tweet you will see a small curved arrow. Click on that and your status bar the top will have the person’s name with an @ sign in front of it. This is called a “Reply”. Type what you want to say to them and click the “Reply” button.

Twitter replies are public. They are searchable and anyone can see them. Think of it as standing around the water cooler at work and replying to something somemone said.

Twitter allows you to send private messages directly to someone. You do that by typing the letter “d” and their name at the beginning of the status, then your reply, and click reply:

d MiracleMan Thanks for this blog post, its really helpful

would send that message to me and me alone. My twitter is also setup so that direct messages also come to my Cell Phone as text messages.

Eventually, you may want to say something of your own and you use the status block to post your own message.

The power of Re-tweets

Lets say you follow me and I return follow you. You will have a group of followers and I will have a group of followers, but they are likely to be very different and not have a lot of overlap. Lets say for instance that I have 200 followers and you have 100 followers. You post something I think is of value to my followers, I can “Re-Tweet” it and now my 200 followers will see your message as well, so its now going to be seen by 300 people. Then if one of my followers passes it on to their 500 followers, in two actions, you’ve communicated your thoughts to 800 people.

To Re-Tweet, you type RT in the status bar and cut and paste the message into the status form and click reply.

RT @MiracleMan Thanks for this blog post, its really helpful

The RT doesn’t do anything magical, its just a short “code” for people to recognize it. You always want to give the original poster credit for their tweet.

Stepping it up

When you first create your twitter account, it is very basic. You provide a name and nickname that’s publicly visible. They provide you with a colorful twitter blue bird themed background and you have an “Avatar” or small icon/picture that you can use to represent yourself. At a minimum you should upload your avatar photo. The default brown block with light blue circles is a signal to people who would follow you that your a “n00b” (newbie or new user) and can be a turn off. It doesn’t have to be a photo of you, though many people do use pics of themselves.

Secondly, you can visit your “Settings” and fill out the rest of your profile. There is a place to put in a web site address. This could be your FaceBook page, your personal blog or any other online presence that you have. If you don’t have one, you can leave it blank. There is also a “One line Bio” where you have 160 characters to let the world know who you are. It could be something as simple as “Coupon Queen” if your into couponing. Or you could put “Father of 2, Hockey Addict” or whatever describes you to those who would want to follow you.

Enjoy!

Twitter is a fun, educational and informational environment that you can take advantage of regardless of technical ability or experience in social networking. Go try it and ave fun!

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/MiracleMan.

It was a foggy Sunday morning in Charleston, South Carolina. Four white 15 passenger vans rolled into a nearly empty parking lot of an unassuming shopping center. Tucked into one end of the strip mall is a pair of ice rinks and on this particular Sunday morning, two hockey games would be played. This is the story of one of the games and one of the teams.

But lets back up 48 hours earlier. Two of the vans pulled into the parking lot of the Chilled Ponds Ice Facility in Chesapeake, Virginia to load a hockey team for a trip to Charleston to play in the South East Junior Hockey League’s end of season tournament. The Hampton Roads Junior Whalers Green team had a seven hour drive in front of them.

Their bother team, The Hampton Roads Junior Whalers Blue team had to leave the night before as they had a 5pm game Friday night. The Green team got a morning skate in before they packed up and left a couple of hours later.

Their destination was the Carolina Ice Palace. The top two teams from the tournament would join regular season champions, the Atlanta Knights in Marlborough, Massachusetts in two weeks to participate in the USA Hockey Tier III National Championships. “Three Wins and your In” was the motto of the Green team as they headed down I-95.

At the same time parents, family and friends were packing up their cars to make their journey to watch this end of season tournament. It would be one of the best parental showings of the year for these men between 14 and 21 years of age. Some traveled from as far away as Louisville, Kentucky and West Palm Beach, Florida to cheer their players on.

Text messages from the parents already at the rink were sent to the players on the road to keep the players updated on the progress of the Blue Team’s game. The two teams had not officially played each other during the regular season, but their league records were nearly identical and their scrimmages were split. Either of these two teams could come out of this with a bid to nationals and there was a chance they both could.

After the Green team checked into the hotel and got dinner, most of them migrated to the rink to watch the last game of the day. The Tampa Bay Bolts were playing the Space Coast Hurricanes, both teams had come up from central Florida. At the end of regulation, it was tied. After a 5 minute overtime, it was still tied. The Green team had an early 9am game on Saturday and the lateness of this game was becoming a concern. Surely the ensuing shoot out would be over quickly and they could get back to the hotel. A long shootout took place, going 15 shooters per team deep. Finally a team had an advantage giving the underdog Tampa team the win, effectively eliminating the Hurricanes. The Green team headed to their hotel to get some sleep before their 6:30am wake-up call the next morning.

“Three Wins”

The Whalers would need to win their two round-robin games and win their semi-final game to qualify for nationals. They would not need to win the championship game. Just three wins.

First up was the Tampa Bay Bolts. The Whalers Green team quickly dispatched them 10-2.

With many thanks to the Davies family, the boys were treated to a cookout for a post game lunch. The Davies were staying at a Residence Inn next to the rink, which had a large gas grill in the pool area and some 40 hamburgers, 40 hot dogs and 2 boxes of chicken later, the boys were fed and playing pickup basketball on the adjacent court.

But for one player, Billy Varley, basketball wasn’t his post meal entertainment. It was Billy’s birthday. His mother surprised him with a belly dancer who performed for him. It was pretty clear the boys were having a good time.

A post meal nap was scheduled before the boys had to be back for their 8pm match-up against Space Coast. Two junior hockey games in a given day is taxing to the body. Space Coast had nearly 20 hours to rest between games, the Whalers less than 8.

Everyone was nervous going into this game. Though the Green team was 2 and 0 against Space Coast for the year, the games were reasonably close and in their last meeting a major brawl broke out after the game. Would there be any bad blood?

“Two Wins”

The game started out hard hitting. It was clear these teams did not like each other and that Space Coast was here to extend their season. The teams went to the locker room with the Whalers up 1-0 at the end of the first period. The second period started up with more hitting. But starting 5 minutes into the period and over a period of the next 7 minutes, it was “Good Night Sally, See ya” as the Whalers effectively ended the game. The Whalers found the net 3 more times to end the game 8-0 putting the Green Team into top seed in their bracket going into Sunday.

Earlier the Blue team gave the East Coast Eagles Majors a tight game, but the Eagles prevailed to take the number one seed in their bracket. This setup a match-up between the Whalers Green and the Whalers Blue team in their first official meeting of the year.

With the top two teams getting bids to the nationals, the winner of the Blue-Green game would get a bid, the other’s season would be over. The other semi-match-up pitted Tampa Bay against the Eagles Majors which the Eagles would easily win. The championship game only mattered for seeding in the nationals.

“One Game”

The season was on the line. This had the billing to be a very good hockey game.

Five minutes in, Nate Atangan put the green team ahead. Ten minutes later, Chris Armand, for the Blue team tied the game. It was a hard hitting fast paced game. The Blue team climbed to a 3-1 lead on goals from Barron Sluder and Michael DePatto in back to back goals within 35 seconds half way through the 2nd period. The Green team would not go easily. Atangan picked up a short handed goal to narrow the deficit to one at the 7:32 mark. Four minutes later, Brandon Rumble scored an unassisted goal to knot the game at 3-3. Just before the period expired, Alex Byrne scored to give the Green team a 1 goal lead going into the 3rd period.

Two minutes into the 3rd Period Brandon Rumble gave the Green team the most dangerous lead in hockey . . . a 2 goal lead. The game moved back and forth until a 5 minute major penalty put the Green team on a power play that would consume most of the remaining 3rd period. The Blue team killed it off and with about 2:00 left, the Green team took a penalty that gave the Blue team some life. With the goalie pulled giving the blue team a 6-4 man advantage brought the game to a 5-4 score just after the penalty expired with 11 seconds left on the clock. The Green team killed the last 11 seconds. Joy was on one end of the rink, sorrow and sadness on the other.

In a great show of sportsmanship, instead of shaking hands, the players were all hugging each other. This was extra special since the referees were not allowing post game handshakes in many of the games. To see these guys being so emotional to each other after such a hard fought game was amazing.

The sun was out. The fog has been burned away. It was a glorious day for the Green team.

From the beginning of the year, the Green team was focused on making it to the Nationals. Instead of “We’re going to Disney World” the chant was “We’re going to Natties”.

The team headed to Hooters to celebrate achieving their season goal. More birthday embarrassment for Varley and the captains were forced into doing the hula-hoop.

There was another game to be played and congratulations to the East Coast Eagles Majors on their bid. It was an amazing weekend for the boys. They happily piled into their van’s for their seven hour drive home knowing their season was extended as they were:

Going to Nationals!

I don’t like reality shows for the most part.  I enjoy American Idol once the final 12 start performing because you hear *some* entertaining music.  But I don’t have time in my life to get involved in them.

Needless to say, “The Bachelor” is probably near the bottom of the rung when it comes to Reality TV for dudes.  Mushy “Rose Ceremonies” in exotic locations that mortals can’t reach are great for women’s dreams.  Its a romance novel on TV.  And you know what, I’m cool with that.  Its something they like.  They are allowed to have their fantasies as long as they don’t complain about my por…, er fantasies…..

So its Monday night, the Mrs. is clipping her coupons and she makes sure to watch “The Bachelor” when its on.  I’m sitting 6′ 4″ away in the other chair with my laptop surfing the net doing my social networking thing and I convert the show to white noise while I’m twittering away about photography to someone.  Its a fairly normal Monday.

But not this Monday.   “Honey, tonight is the last night and you won’t have to put up with ‘The Bachelor’ for a while.”  I replied “Yea, like 4 weeks”.  It was the “After the Final Rose Ceremony” night.  Three straight hours of mega mush, crying, frolicking in New Zealand and some really nerdy emcee saying “the most emotional rose ceremony every”.  Gag me with a pitch fork.  Three hours?  You have to be kidding me.

I manage to kill the 1st two hours by spamming my Twitter fans as I experimented with a Twitter chat of budding and experienced photographers for a blog site (Thats http://iheartfaces.blogspot.com/ btw).  The show is to a point where the dude, Jason has dumped the woman who is probably really in love with him, Molly in favor the other woman, Melissa for whatever reason possessed him.

The third hour was dedicated to how things are going between the couple after six weeks.

My wife, and I love her dearly, was nice and realized how much torture this show was handed me the remote and went upstairs to watch the last hour from the bedroom.  This is where it gets embarrassing.

I didn’t change the channel.

I had the remote.  I had the power.  I even shut the computer down.  I watched the last hour on purpose.

Perhaps it wasn’t as much as on purpose as much as the show running as background noise had gelled my brains so the aliens can scoop them out easier with a melon baller.

I had 52″ of wide screen high def Jason with the nerdy emcee blasting me.

Six weeks had elapsed since the final rose ceremony where Jason proposed to Melissa after telling Molly to bugger off because she was 2nd place and well 2nd place as we all know is the 1st looser.

Now of course, this is all taped and the exec’s at ABC along with the nerdy emcee had time to write their promo scripts taunting you with “This show is so emotional out of respect to the participants we chose to film it without a studio audience” so it was obvious something was up.  Of course ABC has to keep mixing things up or the show will become boring (oh what, it is boring.)

Well Jason tells nerdy emcee in the couples six weeks of one-on-one time “Dude, something changed.  I messed up and picked the wrong one.  Its not working out with me and Melissa.  I want to press CTRL-ALT-DELETE and get a do-over.”  Nerdy emcee is eating this up realizing that their ratings are popping through the roof.  (BTW:  The hashtag for our twitter chat was trending higher than the hashtag for the Bachelor for the night!  Take that Nielsen ratings!!!!).

They bring Melissa out and Jason drops the bomb.  “I don’t like you I like the other one and you can go take a joy ride in the limo”.  Supposedly the couple had discussed this over the past six weeks and she should realize things are not working.  Well Melissa seems to have forgotten that and this is all news to her.  She rips Jason a new one and goes for her joy ride.

WTF?

So this is where I have to start getting “involved” with this.  Men have a bad enough reputation with women over commitment.  They know men have trouble committing and here on their grandest stage, Jason didn’t let them down.  He made us ALL look like chumps.   I was shocked.  I shouldn’t have been, we didn’t earn that bad rap without reason, but for ABC to parade that was just wrong.

Then they (predictably) brought Molly out where she sat on the couch listening to the story.  This dude breaks up with his bride to be on national television and a matter of minutes later, he’s telling the women he told to bugger off that he just dumped his choice and wants his do-over with her.  Molly of course has a skeptical “WTF” look on her face.  She looks like she’s about to slap the cooties out of him realizing his level of scumbagness for this move.

Jason then says he wants to hook up with Molly and she pretty much jumps him on set.

WTF?

So now Molly has done to women what Jason just did to all the men.  If guy dumps you for another woman then he comes back crawling and in a half-assed “I’m sorry” she’s all forgiving.  Molly, he dumped you six weeks ago.  You haven’t talked to him or seen him other than watching the TV episodes and in less that 10 minutes you’ve forgiven him and acting like nothing ever happened.  What if he changes his mind and wants to go back to Looser #2 or #3 or some other woman who passes through his life?

This show has to be the worst for male-female relationships.

Oh, the real last hour of the season is on now.  Its another six weeks later.  Who knows were we will be after tonight?

And he needs to turn in his man card for crying on national television!!!  (Thanks to Sherz for that one!)

You know the routine, you open your email in the morning and there is a message that “BillyJean is now following you on Twitter!“. You open up the message and click on the link and a Twitter profile page pops up in your browser followed by that inevitable questions “Should I follow them back?”

I know I ask myself that question several times a day as seemingly random people want to now stalk me and do I really want to stalk them back.

It seems that people who want to follow you fall into several categories:

1. Your real friends (or at least people who think they are your friend)
2. People who find you based on things you’ve posted.
3. Businesses or News sources that your interested in.
4. People who are trying to inflate their follow count.
5. People who are trying to spam you

Obviously you should be excited when your real friends find you and in most cases you will probably follow them back. More on that later. You should be able to recognize your friends and this is really the core of what Twitter is about.

The next group of people are those who watch the public feed or use search.twitter.com or hashtags.org to find tweets that are important to them. For instance during the Daytona 500 a couple of weeks ago, I posted several NASCAR tweets and used the #NASCAR hashtag and within a few hours, I had several new followers. I chose to follow them back.

There are some very good businesses who are taking advantage of Twitter to reach their customers. I once complained about a problem I was having with FireFox and shortly, I got a reply from someone at Mozilla.org with a suggestion on how to solve my problem. Generally, these people may reach out to follow you first in hopes your interested in their information. For example, the pro photo lab that I use is on Twitter, mpix.com. They are good about responding to customer issues and announcing new products, upgraded software, or in a recent case, their 50% off 8×10 prints promotion.

In addition to those hawking a product, there are other useful information sources. I follow several news organizations who post breaking news and others that just want to share information. During the NFL football season I followed @nflscore which posts scores to Twitter as they happen so you can stay up on your favorite team. You can expect that these people probably won’t follow you back or at least they are not reading your tweets.

Then there are people I just don’t get. Its all about getting more followers. Its a popularity game and they will follow just about anyone and hope you follow them back so when they reach 2,000 followers they have reached some level of importance. I personally don’t get these people. Following 3,000 or 4,000 people means you get so many tweets there is no way you can possibly be reading them all, unless that’s all you do, so these people are producing content and not absorbing it, much like the businesses, but their content is generally of low value, other than to say, “I need 10 more follower’s to break a thousand”.

The final class are spammers. These people are clearly there to sell you something and have very little to offer you as far as information or value other than their product.

Now for me, I’m at around 260 followers and I’m following around 260 people and there is a difference of about 40 each way. So I’m following around 40 people who are not following me. Sadly, I found that a bulk of them are co-workers and friends who I thought would reciprocate. A few were not a surprise. I was initially bummed, but given my interests its only logical that they may not be interested in the same thing. Then the other direction, there are about 40 people following me that I don’t follow back and those are mostly people trying to inflate their follow counts or businesses that I may not be interested in, but it doesn’t bother me that they follow me.

So how do you decide who to follow?

Well real friends, you probably should follow. People of shared interest can be worth following and you probably should give them a chance. Of course, the business clients that interest you should follow.

Next, I look to see how frequent someone posts. If I see someone with 3,000 posts, they are probably generating way too much noise.

Next, I look for a huge difference in the number of followers to friends. If someone is following a lot of people and very few are following them, its a good indicator of a spammer. If they don’t have an avatar or if their avatar is bikini-clad and their screen name doesn’t match their URL, you can bet that its a spam account. Not only do I not follow these back, but I block them from seeing my posts as well. Generally Twitter’s spam detectors will pick up on these accounts and cancel them.

If I see a large number of followers and friends, I will look at their posts and see if they are of interest before I decide to follow back. Post frequency is really the determining factor if I’m going to follow back.

Finally, I recently went through my followers and friends to determine who was not reciprocating. I made a decision to unfollow any one who I didn’t know personally who I was following. This helped cut down the noise in my twitter stream.

Thoughts? What decisions to you make when deciding who to follow?

There are various 16 things, 25 things, 40 things lists going about.  In general, someone produces a list then “tags” X number of friends through social networks and posts their list.  The tagged people are supposed to do their 16 things and tag other people including tagging back the person who tagged you.  I’ve been reluctant to play since someone has to break the chain, but I caved.  Here’s mine.  EDITED to bring the total to 25.

1.  I have two personalities that I work hard to blend in to one.  One is  my conscience and cowardice and one is my devious side, brash, dark and confidant.

2.  My last name isn’t really pronounced “miracle” but “Markle” or “Myracal”.  It traces back to 17th century Germany and is derived from “Merkle”.  But it was too hard in college to explain how to spell “markle” when its written “miracle”.  So starting with me and my kids, we are now officially the dreams of saint wannabe’s.

3.  I’m generally disorganized and lazy.

4.  I was born 16 years after my baby sister.  I have a nephew thats a mere 5 months younger than me.

5.  I’m a walking GPS.  Maxing the navigation score on the Air Force Officer Qualification Test should have told me something.  Who needs a Tom-Tom Go when you have a Rob-Rob Go?

6.  I love science.

7.  I don’t smoke.

8.  I pretty much love all sports, but I don’t get people’s fascination watching golf on TV.

9.  I have a passion to share what I know, which is why my job is about training and why I love coaching.

10.  I love puns.  I love to use puns.  This is probably why Monty Python and movies like Airplane are so high on my favorites list.

11.  I’m an admitted geek, but I try hard to not be nerdy.

12.  Related to #6, I’m also a Sci-Fi/Fantasy fan.  No, I don’t play dress up and I don’t go nuts collecting Star Wars toys, but I do love the genre.

13.  Related to #11 and #12, I still play Dungeons & Dragons.  Would you like to play a game?

14.  I lived in Key West, FL for 6 years developing online games.

15.  I’m a Kentucky farm boy.

16.  My favorite meal is pinto beans, cornbread and macaroni all mixed up.

And now for the 9 bonus entries to make the 25 things people happy….

17.  I’ve made my living as a photographer and I want to again.

18.  Related to #5, I went 38 years never being lost then I moved to Raleigh and that record went out the door.  Raleigh is a confusing place.

19.  I’m horrible with video.  I can’t shoot it, I can’t edit it.

20.  I was “Robbie” until about half way through college when I didn’t like my photo byline “Photo by Robbie Miracle” and shortened it to Rob.  Only my family and school buds still call me Robbie (and please don’t start).

21.  I’ve worked on just about every major variant of Unix through the years.

22.  I met my wife via a computer match for a college Halloween Dance.  We were not matched up, she was matched with a friend who couldn’t go, my match was a no show, we’ve been BFF’s since and that was 26 years ago.

23.  We got married 2 years to the minute after we met.

24.  My insistane to be precise with measurments, in particular time drives my wife crazy.  Example:  My son called and asked when we would be home.  I responded “In 97 seconds”.   She asked “Where did you pull that from?”  I said, thats how long it will take.  97 seconds later the truck came to a stop in our drive way.  I’m not sure what bothered her more, my geeky pull-a-number-out-of-my-ass statement or that I was right.

25.  Yea, I said ass.  I cuss like a sailor, but I also believe in being professional so most people will never hear me.  I would have loved to have gotten one of the NC WTFnnnn license plates before they realized what it meant and stopped them.