Blog Updated, And I Need Your Help!

I recently upgraded this blog to the latest Wordpress version.  I had such a pain with it as I tracked down some issues I was having.  I’ll write more about that later.  But, for now, I’ll just say that, with that upgrade and troubleshooting, I had to change some things around.  Many plugins were reinstalled from scratch. So, to ensure that all is working right, I’m calling on all of you!

If you could, take a look through my blog and test things out.  If you find something broken, let me know!

Thank you!

Why Do You Tweet?

I’ve been on Twitter for almost four months.  It seems like longer, but it really hasn’t been.  Time just has flown by way too fast lately!

When I first signed up with Twitter, I saw it as something that people used from their phones.  Honestly, I have no need to update people from my phone about everything I’m doing.  I enjoy my privacy!

That said, I have found Twitter to be a useful tool.  For one, it lets me follow certain people and organizations and get 140 characters (or less) of information from them.  For example, I’ve been following @Nasa and, if not for their tweets, I wouldn’t have known about the ability to watch the Atlantis shuttle launch live recently (via NasaTV).  Or I can get notification quickly of new Stargate news from @GateWorld.

With Twitter expanding as rapidly as it seems to be, there are so many useful apps and widgets that seem to keep popping up.  I can post a blog, like this one, which TwitterFeed will send to my Twitter account.  That, then, is fed to my Facebook profile.  There are enough apps out there to have Twitter do so many things.  I’m not even sure I want to guess at what will be coming in the future!

I also have found that Twitter can be a relatively useful marketing tool, with various degrees of ’success’.  I’ve not tried to use it too much on that level yet, but it definitely has potential.  I, personally, still need to look into that, as I know I’ll be using it to try and market a few sites I work with.

So, for me, personally, when it comes to what I say with my personal account, my replies, or anything that I put up, why do I tweet?  I like how easy it is to get updates from those that I follow, how easily I can update ones that need to be updated on something, and how simply it is all done.  It can let me get information from a target group and project information to a target audience.

Why do you tweet?

WolframAlpha: Oh, Where Were You…?

Friday, something new was unveiled.  I don’t think it’ll be competition for the major search engines, but it definitely is cool.  It’s called Wolfram|Alpha.

It’s not really a search engine.  There are definitely quite a few neat things that you can do with it, though.  I did a few quick examples.  First, I did a search of a date.  I chose September 11th, 2001, as it is a date known by almost everyone worldwide.  Now, I’m shown data about how long ago that was, notable events, sunrise and sunset times, and how long there was daylight on that day.

Let’s try a different search.  One of the examples shown was to do a search for the International Space Station.  You can get sky position and orbital data about the ISS.  So far, this is looking really cool!

It seems that Wolfram|Alpha is great when it comes to data that has statistics, numbers, or other kinds of numeric measurements.  But this isn’t what I’ve been playing with the most.

One thing that I had to try was some mathematical computation.  I initially tried it with a simple quadratic equation.  I then moved on to something a bit more complex.  Being the geek that I am, I thought back to my Calculus days and had to try a little integration and differentiation, too.  Oh, and limits.  You can’t forget limits.

I must say… I am impressed.  I just wish I had had this to play with when I was still in my various Calculus courses.  Actually, I would’ve enjoyed using this with my engineering courses, as well.  There is so much to play with!

If you would like to try Wolfram|Alpha, why not check their list of examples?  There will definitely be something there that you can play with.

Have fun!