It’s been an interesting evening. A couple of hours ago I got a call from a guy who hired one of my direct competitors (in the haunted house industry) to do his site. There’s been a problem along the way; I was called, near as I can tell, because the assumption was I’d know what to do.

That’s flattering. Obviously it begs the question of why he didn’t just hire me in the first place, but hey, now he knows.

Then a little while ago a web design company that focuses on a different industry hired me to redesign their logo and website, which is a first for me. I’ve never designed another designer’s brand/website. That’s also flattering.

So I’m flattered. And maybe a little perplexed. But mostly flattered.

God grant me the serenity to accept the domains I cannot register,
Courage to register domains through ICANN,
and wisdom to know the difference between .COM, .NET and .ORG.

All this carrying on about Twitter.com – I don’t understand what the big deal is. It’s an abbreviated way to share thoughts and ideas with people whose thoughts and ideas you like. So why all the fuss? Why do you care how I blog?

Twitter is just like any other blog/community – it’s a tool that can be rendered obnoxious by the people using it. That’s why I maintain the position that those who hate Twitter aren’t using it right.

I run multiple accounts at Twitter, each serving a different purpose, and all of which feed information to related sites. Most of them are news oriented and make a quick and simple way to post updates that aren’t worth a full “story”, but bear mentioning.

The exception is my personal account, which I use as the short version of my blog – random thoughts, musings, annoyances and ideas.

By and large, there are two kinds of people I follow on Twitter: Ones who post news about stuff I’m interested in, and ones who are just really funny. I don’t follow actual friends – I have LiveJournal, Facebook, MySpace, etc. for that. Frankly, most of my friends post stuff I don’t particularly care about, which is one of the reasons I stopped reading LiveJournal – I just don’t have time to spend reading about what Bob had for breakfast or how many miles Jane rode her bike this morning.

When I check my Twitter feed, I can count on (a) finding out about at least one thing that genuinely interests me and (b) laughing. A lot. This is entirely due to the fact that I’m selective about who I follow, many of whom are professional writers.

Given that Twitter restricts a post to 140 characters or less, it can be quite a challenge to express a complex thought in such abbreviated form, so when it’s done right, it’s like Haiku – elegant, concise, often hilarious and occasionally thought provoking. I’ll close this post with some fave’d examples:

hotdogsladies I’m speechless whenever salespeople ask me why I won’t buy something. It’s like being asked to defend why I’m not a fern or a ceiling fan.

indiana_state My computer beat me at chess last night but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Hear that Skynet?!

grendelsden XP Service Pack 3 is A-OK thus far, as I expected. Though the tentacles and smell of sulfur is a bit much.

Johnny_C Know someone who has been denied a personality for the fact that the world rewards them for their looks? Hammer to face changes everything.

JhonenV Short Horror Theater: Girl orders boba tea, realizes she’s not chewing tapioca but EYEBALLS. Girl sues owner who turns out to be a dracula.

AinsleyofAttack If you’re an adult with blue hair and a ferret on a leash I know that your parents didn’t tape your macaroni art to the fridge often enough.

hotdogsladies Lot of people say “Not a problem” when they mean “You’re welcome.” Which is why I switched from “Thank you” to “Is this a fucking problem?”

In the late 1990′s I began a long-distance/online relationship with a woman in London. It lasted for a few months. At some point she challenged me to come visit her to prove I was sincere, which I did. Things got hot and heavy in the weeks leading up to my visit and the L Word got used. Then I got there, and it became apparent that something was amiss. She was weird and distant, claiming nothing was wrong but certainly not exhibiting the feelings for me that she’d claimed she’d had.

So the weekend was frustrating and bewildering, to say the least. It remains one of the more painful memories of my adult life.

I flew home, hurt, confused and rejected. Once I was safely an ocean away, I guess she decided it was safe to tell me The Truth. Turns out that she had started seeing somebody else well before I arrived, and decided somehow that it would be better to just not tell me. Mind you, she told everybody else (the backdrop for this was Whitby Gothic Weekend), just not me.

So on top of everything else, I got to add humiliation to the mix. I spent the weekend with her in Whitby, thinking that maybe there was still a chance, while everybody around us knew there wasn’t. Ha ha. What a chump.

Why am I writing about this now, 10 years later, when I haven’t thought about it in years?

Because she just sent me a friend request on Facebook, suggesting that we “bury the hatchet.”

I politely declined.

I don’t know why it’s bugging me. I guess it’s just the hubris involved, and her cavalier attitude – I’ve never been treated quite as cruelly as this woman treated me, so either she’s unaware of the consequences of her own actions, or she just isn’t concerned with them. Or figures that the Statute of Limitations on such things has expired and it’s OK to talk to me now.

I guess not. I’m surprised to find this memory is still quite painful, as such things go. I’m generally a pretty forgiving person; I don’t like to bear grudges. But I seem to be keeping this one.

Maybe it’s because there were so many things she might’ve done to mitigate the hurt she caused. Looking back at it and realizing how many times and ways she could have just come clean, or at the very least given me ANY indication, about anything, instead of just remaining distant and inscrutable until I was a thousand miles away.

I suppose I should thank her in a lot of ways for cementing some lessons that the divorce I’d gone through the year before all this happened had started teaching me. I certainly came out of those couple of years a much harder, more cynical person, but I also was much more clear on what I wanted out of a relationship, and what I was willing to put up with to get it. More to the point, I was ready to be alone if that’s what it boiled down to, because it would be better to be alone than to go through something like that again.

As it happens, I lucked out. A woman I’d met almost a decade earlier looked me up online and we started talking – again, online, long distance. The difference being that I didn’t fool myself into thinking that IMs and phone calls were a relationship, and this time she came to visit me. That one ended better – we’ve been married for almost 10 years.

The point? I don’t know, honestly. I guess I felt like venting and, hey, it’s my blog, so where better. Nobody has to read it unless they want to seek it out.

So the second weekend of 2009, I lost my desktop computer and my web hosting server within 24 hours.

Suck.

I lost all the posts from this blog and a great deal of content on my other sites.

Double suck.

I have to thank Twitter, Digsby, Gmail, Archive.org and my external backup hard drive. Friends on Twitter/Digsby offered great advice & support; Gmail archives all email on its server; Archive.org lets you access content from websites from years ago and the backup drive saved all my critical data.

This last week has been a blur, and somewhat exhausting. Add to the mad scramble to recover files, data and get close to 200 websites back up and running the fact that it’s snowed almost every night since the 9th, making it dangerous and stupid to try to go anywhere that’s not necessary. So there’s the cabin fever. I haven’t left the house in 9 days. We haven’t received mail (that includes much-needed paychecks) since Wednesday because of the snow, and tomorrow is MLK Day, so no mail ’til Tuesday. Unless it snows some more, I guess.

Bleah. Can we get a 2009 do-over?

ADDENDUM: I also need to thank Rock Star Energy Drink, Lifehacker.com and Pumpkin the Puppy. Rock Star for… well, that’s obvious; Lifehacker is an indispensable info source and Pumpkin is always ready with puppy lovin’ when I get stressed out. Never underestimate puppy lovin’.