The Twitter Diet

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here

Twitter: It’s better than cable

I had avoided watching the Butler basketball game in the second round of the NCAA tournament because I’ve decided I can’t stand to watch sports games when I actually care about the teams. It makes me anxious. (I can’t watch The Amazing Race either because I get worried that the good people will miss their flights and the bad people will win because this is not scripted and evil sometimes wins.) As I confessed last year, I love the Butler Bulldogs, and I still find comfort in the idea that there is a parallel universe somewhere in which Gordon Hayward’s buzzer beater shot from half-court actually landed in the basket, they won the tournament, and someone is producing a movie about it. And I don’t even care about basketball!

So, there I was avoiding the game, which was easy because it was on cable and I do not have cable. My dad was visiting, so we were watching a game between BYU and Gonzaga, which sounds more like a cheese than a university. Alas, CBS had an infographic at the top of the screen that updated with the latest scores and the time left in the other games. So, of course, the Butler game comes up with Butler down a point with one whole minute left in the game. And I was like, “Damn it, Butler! Why must you always do this to me? Why can’t you just demolish your opponent instead of eliminating my need for nail clippers?”

My dad and I watched the timer run down to 8 seconds (actually, I watched through my nail-bitten fingers), and then it held at 8 seconds for awhile, which was driving me crazy because I didn’t care about the cheese college’s game. So, what does a girl without cable do? She gets her Twitter on! People are always clogging up my Twitter stream with stupid talk about basketball, and now I was finally grateful for it! I pulled out my laptop and searched Twitter for the #butler hashtag. Oh, marvel at my ingenuity, me the 21st century girl (without cable).

This was at once both incredibly informative and totally confusing. For instance, in the tweet stream I would see something like this:

@bballFan4Life: YESSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!
@LiveToLayUp: NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

So, something important had obviously just happened, but who was the Butler fan and who was the Pittsburgh fan? Why couldn’t their Twitter names be @ButlerRocks and @Pitts4Evah or something?

Then the clock restarted on the TV and then stopped again at 2 seconds, which is when the Twitterati let me know someone had done something stupid, though I could not determine what. I kept hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, trying to sort out facts from the chatter, and finally figured out that Butler had gotten the upper hand by one point and was good to win the game when—d’oh!—somebody fouled Pittsburgh, which meant they’d get two free throws and might win the game.

This was when I remembered why I DON’T WATCH SPORTS GAMES THAT I CARE ABOUT. I evidently needed to expand that rule to include not searching Twitter for hashtags about sports games I care about.

So, there was more rapid refreshing and I announced to my dad, who was watching over my shoulder, that there would be overtime. Yay, overtime! I hate it at work, but in this basketball game it was a Godsend. Go Bulldogs, you’re the—Oh, wait, what’s this? We’re not in overtime? There was a foul. Huh, what? Do they mean the earlier foul? Someone else couldn’t have possibly fouled with less than 2 seconds left. Did we foul again? Were we doubly stupid? When did this become “we,” anyway? Oh, right, many, many moons ago when I worked a contract job at Butler for two months. Here’s the picture of the cup I stole from IT to prove it:

Finally after several tweets about overtime, fouls, and the bowel movements of the tweeters in question, I finally figured out that Pittsburgh had fouled Butler (God only knows how), so now Butler had two free throws to break the tie and win the game they really should have won several seconds ago.

Tension!

I kept clicking the refresh button and again there was the “YESSSSSSSS!!!!” and the “NOOOOOOO!!!!” and I was like, “Yes! No! Yes! No! What the hell happened?!?!?” Finally, FINALLY, enough tweets came through for me to learn that my boys had come through and Butler had finally won, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat that they had just snatched from the jaws of victory, like some sort of metaphorical turducken, all stuffed within each other.

It was a rather odd way to follow a basketball game, as thrilling as it was confusing. I had to wait 20-30 minutes before CBS finally showed the highlights, so I was glad I hadn’t been stuck in a clueless vacuum with only a cold infographic to keep me company. Later I poked around the NCAA site and learned you can watch live streaming video of games, which would have been good to know earlier, but probably would have been choppy and unreliable because of buffering and datastream speeds and all that nonsense. Watching a game in ASCII takes much less bandwidth.

Here’s a more linear, less confusing wrap-up of the game if all the Twitter recapping left you puzzled. (I hear ya’!)

Go #butler!

"Smart, unflinchingly honest, and laugh-out-loud funny."– Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice

PastaQueen.com is a fascist regime ruled with a benevolent fist by PastaQueen and the macaroni military. Lively discussion is encouraged, but any comment may be deleted or edited according to the whims of your monarch. Please read the official rules of commenting etiquette for more details. Spammers are publicly beheaded and their blood is mixed into our spaghetti sauce. Comments are occasionally disabled some time after an entry has been posted to keep the blog on a spam-free diet.

View the original article here

Marketplace Money appearance and Twitter chat

On the radio
If you listen to public radio, you might have heard me this weekend as a call-in guest on Marketplace Money. Unlike any of my other media appearances in the past few years, this one had nothing to do with my books, my blog, weight loss, headaches, or anything relevant to my online presence. Instead, I had a question about a $2600 request for overpayment on a 401K rollover from my last employer who made a vesting error on the employer’s matching contributions and oh my God do you want to stab your eyes with a rusty paperclip yet? Because I do. Anyway, I wanted some help sorting out this financial mess that was not my fault but is now my problem, so Tess Vigeland and Kathy Kristof came to the rescue. You can listen to it by clicking the “Listen to the Show” or “Listen to this Story” buttons on this page and scrolling to the 21:35 mark. I even slipped in a plug for PastaQueen.com! I’m getting much better at this self-promotion stuff.

Tomorrow night #MovePT TweetChat
I have never actually attended a Twitter chat, probably because I am 30 now and far too old to understand you youngin’s and your twittergraphs. But, if you are into that sort of thing, there’s a TweetChat happening tomorrow night, November 3, from 6pm-7pm ET hosted by The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). The chat will be about staying active and living healthy. It’s hosted by AOL’s That’s Fit blog. Talli van Sunder, PT, DPT, a blogger, health expert and APTA Member, will be available to answer questions. To join the Tweetchat, visit http://tweetchat.com/room/MovePT, login to Twitter and follow the hashtag #MovePT.

PastaQueen.com is a fascist regime ruled with a benevolent fist by PastaQueen and the macaroni military. Lively discussion is encouraged, but any comment may be deleted or edited according to the whims of your monarch. Please read the official rules of commenting etiquette for more details. Spammers are publicly beheaded and their blood is mixed into our spaghetti sauce. Comments are occasionally disabled some time after an entry has been posted to keep the blog on a spam-free diet.

View the original article here

Marketplace Money appearance and Twitter chat

On the radio
If you listen to public radio, you might have heard me this weekend as a call-in guest on Marketplace Money. Unlike any of my other media appearances in the past few years, this one had nothing to do with my books, my blog, weight loss, headaches, or anything relevant to my online presence. Instead, I had a question about a $2600 request for overpayment on a 401K rollover from my last employer who made a vesting error on the employer’s matching contributions and oh my God do you want to stab your eyes with a rusty paperclip yet? Because I do. Anyway, I wanted some help sorting out this financial mess that was not my fault but is now my problem, so Tess Vigeland and Kathy Kristof came to the rescue. You can listen to it by clicking the “Listen to the Show” or “Listen to this Story” buttons on this page and scrolling to the 21:35 mark. I even slipped in a plug for PastaQueen.com! I’m getting much better at this self-promotion stuff.

Tomorrow night #MovePT TweetChat
I have never actually attended a Twitter chat, probably because I am 30 now and far too old to understand you youngin’s and your twittergraphs. But, if you are into that sort of thing, there’s a TweetChat happening tomorrow night, November 3, from 6pm-7pm ET hosted by The American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). The chat will be about staying active and living healthy. It’s hosted by AOL’s That’s Fit blog. Talli van Sunder, PT, DPT, a blogger, health expert and APTA Member, will be available to answer questions. To join the Tweetchat, visit http://tweetchat.com/room/MovePT, login to Twitter and follow the hashtag #MovePT.

PastaQueen.com is a fascist regime ruled with a benevolent fist by PastaQueen and the macaroni military. Lively discussion is encouraged, but any comment may be deleted or edited according to the whims of your monarch. Please read the official rules of commenting etiquette for more details. Spammers are publicly beheaded and their blood is mixed into our spaghetti sauce. Comments are occasionally disabled some time after an entry has been posted to keep the blog on a spam-free diet.

View the original article here