One Hot Day

It was a stinking hot day - one that came out of the blue.

23 deg already. Suns got bite!
— Richard Phelps (@richardphelps) October 4, 2012

I had to lug a heavy laptop up a hilly street for the days first client visit. In addition, I had 600 postcards to drop off.

Reluctant to put on my work clothes, coz I'll be walking to some meetings today. Lugging a laptop. In blazing sun. #deodorant
— Richard Phelps (@richardphelps) October 4, 2012

The load got lighter, but by the time I had walked down the hill, caught my breath on a train and found my way to work, it was 10:30am and already 32 desgrees!

I couldn't wait to go to the office. Air-conditioning like Dubai? Nope, not even like Sydney. It was broken, and our office was a stinker. The atrium area was looking good about now. I was a bit dehydrated so taking my own advice, I headed down to the Coke vending machine. It was probably just as dehydrated as it took my $1.50 with nothing to show for it. Luckily I had some spare change, and rustled another $1.50, only to see that get swallowed as well.

This could have been the last straw!

I called Coca Cola Amatil. The guy at the other end seemed surprised at how well I handled it. What? People lose their hit over a broken vending machine?! He took the details of the vending machine, and my details to issue a refund.

So, today a lovely letter arrived, with my refund.

Twitter Tools

Today I was looking for a tweet i'd, erm, tweeted about at least six months ago.

Unfortunately for me, Twitter itself is (currently) shit at two things. Search, and history.

I was looking for a website that would show my tweets without any formatting, going back as far as the Twitter API would allow, which is around 3200 tweets.

So many companies use this to data mine, enabling them to have some kind of targeted product, whether it's an app, a plugin or a website. So after a bit of scouring, I found it.

It was included in this article, and after a bit of thought, bringing the original links onto this blog post will help these services. One more blogger link eh?

Definitely check out the rest of the article at the aforementioned link, by all means. There's plenty of other great tools there.

This was the service I was after:

AllMyTweets.net

It's great, as you enter your twitter handle, and using a bit of lazy loading, you get to see around the last 3200 tweets, without any embedded media - just the text. Thank you again, Air Tight Interactive.

At the time of this post, i'm over the 8,000 mark, and All My Tweets gets me back almost a year!!

Best tip - use your OS search tool to search a keyword. This is CTRL+F on Windows. It is super quick and will always be faster then Google (let alone Twitter itself).

You sneaky bitch

Google, you sneaky bitch!

What have you done to Blogger? What's with this super clean back-end interface? Did you fire the person who came up with #FFFFFF as the primary way to keep what could be a turd of a site, clean and simple?

Looking around I have options to label this post, which I will - one will be WTF - I can schedule this to publish tomorrow, or whenever, like 12:12pm on 12 Dec 2012 (but I won't). Scheduling was there before but clunky and hidden at the bottom. Unsure If I want to tag my location though - going on my recent escapade with Foursquare.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that in my absence of 6 months at Blogger, you've done some serious renovating. It's good.

I just need to come back more often.