On Monday January 15, 2007, ten thousand chickens were incinerated by Japanese ities in fear of Bird Flu. The trial of six men accused of the July 21, 2005 London bombings began. Babel and Dreamgirls won Golden Globes. Colombian police arrested "Don Hugo" suspected leader of the Norte del Valle syndicate, the "most powerful and violent drug-trafficking organization in Colombia" was arrested. And I joined Twitter.

My first tweet wasn't for few months, I think. I tend to do that kind of thing; sign up for a new site that I hear the alpha nerds talking about to ensure that I get the username I want, veganstraightedge. Then later, if that site turns to be super duper, I try it out further. I can't tell you what my first toot actually was, because (at the time of this writing) Twitter's pagination only goes back 160 pages. I should have 250 pages of archived toots. Shame on you, Twitter.

Like most people, I didn't get the value of Twitter at first. I probably said things like "Trying out Twtter, don't quite get it" and "I just ate lunch. Yum!" or some version of the requisite first toots. Eli was the first of my IRL friends to join up too. That's typical, though. He's definitely the nerdiest of my friends. With one friend on there, it started to make more sense. I was experiencing Metcalfe's Law first hand.

At the time, Twitter was still the realm of web nerds. I followed maybe 30 people, got all of their updates as txts and occasionally even looked at the public feed which was still kind of interesting then. I followed people like John Gruber, Jason Kottke and Ariel Waldman Dan Benjamin and other nerds whose blogs I read.

Suffice to say, I was a lurker. I consumed others' toots, but didn't post any of my own. I didn't get it yet. I hadn't found my killer app. Then I decided to go meet some friends in New Zealand when they got out of Antarctica. I thought Twitter would be the perfect solution to the problem of (I don't ever keep up with my written journal when traveling) + (I want to document what I do) + (I don't want to travel with my laptop when 'backpacking') * (if only I could publish to the web from my phone). It did indeed.

I rented a crappy Nokia brick from Vodaphone at the Christchurch airport for a month. It was great. That trip was my lightest packing ever. When I returned to the states at LAX I weighed by bag. I had refactored down to 11 pounds (4.99 kilograms). This was largely made possible by a minimal gadget set: Ricoh GRD, iPhone (first gen) and Nokia. I think Eli nailed it while he was on a passenger train traveling thru rural Thailand, he was able to publish to the internet... from his phone... from a txt message. Game. Changer.

After that trip of twittering, I was hooked.

Since signing up, I've twittered about traveling to New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. About going to Chile for a month. About getting arrested for taking a picture of an open ATM at a Seattle REI store. It's got me job leads and an offer to do a TV show. I've made a couple dozen accounts for different projects that I've been a part of: Rubinius, Seattle.rb, Less Than Three, The Vegan Straightedge blog, Vegan and/or Straightedge AV Club. I made one for my dog Civ too. In the summer of 2009 I lived in my van and traveled around the country for a few months twittering about all details along the way. I've reconnected with old friends keeping up with their lives better than before. I've made new friends and accomplices with countless schemes (and lisps) yet to unfold.

The Twitterwebs even played a crucial role in Stacey becoming my girlfriend. That's a story for another post though.

What I'm trying to say is, I know you don't care what I had for breakfast (tofu scramble, fakin bacon and french toast) or what music I'm listening to (Sand Castle by Beta Minus Mechanic) or that I think some website has pretty pictures and that's OK with me. Or maybe you do care. I don't know. You choose your own level of involvement in Project Playhem. Twitter is part of my everyday life now. Just like Flickr, Twitter acts as my kind of journal that I share publicly (nod) and my life is better for it.

Thank you, Twitter. See you at ten thousand incinerated chickens, I mean tweets.

I take my shoes off at work.

I still wear my socks (I'm not that guy). I keep my shoes under my desk. If I need to leave the building or go to the bathroom, I put them back on. But I don't put them on to go to the kitchen or H.R. or when I talk to the designers. Or when I ask my boss to go Have a Talk in his office about something important. Not even then.

I did this on Friday, the two week mark at the new job at the big company. Charlie's my boss. Well, he's a couple levels of boss above me, but he's leading the project I'm on. So he's my boss directly, too. He's a pretty hip dude. His hair's a little messy. He wears a sports coat over a tshirt. Very casual kind of uniform. Granted, he's got days when he's got to meet with his boss and his boss's bosses. Those days he's a little less casual. Understandable.

All of this is just the setup for this story.

I was telling my girlfriend Stacey about this talk I had with Charlie and how it went as well as I could've hoped. Or at least I was trying to tell her that story. Instead she just couldn't get past the part where I don't wear shoes at work and how that just does not fly at her work. She was especially flabbergasted at the idea of asking my boss to go talk about something kind of important in private while wearing socks with no shoes with my feet propped up on his desk. To be fair, his feet were also propped up on his desk (with shoes on).

I tried to explain to her that it wasn't a big deal, that in the software / web development / design world dress code is very relaxed at most places. It's not unheard of or that crazy for people to have wacky hair / hair color, zero fashion sense, socks and sandals (yes, it actually happens) or to not wear shoes. She couldn't believe me.

Perfectly timed, her friend Nicole showed up at our house. Nicole is a designer at the corporate office of a large retail chain store. Her role is similar enough to mine that Stacey and I decided it'd be a fair litmus test for how others in this area of work perceive the shoelessness.

Turns out, Nicole doesn't wear shoes at the office either. Bang Pow.

Still, Stacey couldn't believe it. She's works for the same company as Nicole, but as a store manager at one of their locations. When she goes to work she dress pretty profesh. Not pant suits and lawyery, but like a hip alpha female who runs a store. She told me about one time she had one employee who tried to go shoeless. Apparently, all the other employees were thrown aback by it too. This wasn't even during open for business customers in the store hours. It was during an employee only even. Either way, it did not fly.

Eventually, I came to a kind of clarity about it all. She's in the business of selling stuff. I'm in the business of building stuff. Although, it's disingenuous to frame this way, as diametric like that. What's missing is the detail that she's not just selling stuff. She does do that, too. But primarily she's a store manager which is part baby sitter, part camp counselor, part therapist, part herder of cats, part salesperson, part diplomat, part arbiter.

She builds relationships.

That's the difference between her kind of job and mine. Developing relationships are a part of my job, but they're not the end product. Code is. Or pixels. Or whatever. Some thing is what I'm paid to produce. She's paid to develop relationships as the product itself. Of course, this all leads to the bigger goal of selling stuff for the company, but that's the goal of the whole company; sell stuff, make money. The company I work for is no different; sell stuff, make money. Different stuff, much larger company, same idea. It's not exactly her primary objective. Just like it's not mine.

So when your job is to make a thing while not being seen by the customers or the up and up bosses (or heaven forbid, the board), you can dress however you want. Shoes optional even. If your job is to build relationships with other humans (with all the hang ups and preconceived expectations about dress and appearance), then you maybe can't dress however you want. Shoes are probably not optional.

If you work from home, pants are optional!

LA Ruby Conf is coming real soon. A while back (at RubyConf 10 in San Francisco Burlingame) I talked with Coby Randquist about submitting a design that would be considered for the conference tshirts. I whipped on up with these ideas in my: 1) no red / ruby / gem imagery, 2) no nerd conf shirt look. I mean, I know we're all nerds and we're not ashamed of it. But I get tired of the same old shirts at everyone of these things. So with that in mind, I decided on grey with no images, one column of justified variable weight Helvetica (duh) run most of the length on the front of a shirt. Light grey text on dark grey shirt.

I think it would've be nice, but oh well. If anyone else wants to use this general design for another conference (or whatever), feel free to. I'll even send you my Illustrator file or I could modify it to fit your needs. If your event is something that I especially like, all I ask is for a printed shirt in return.

Today I:

• built a mud flap on our rear car gate so the little dog, Beta can't get out
• unstuck two french doors
• clean some random crap out the yard
• moved the compost bin
• did some diplomacy with the landlord
• listened to some podcasts: Planet Money and The Pipeline
• made and ate a great lunch out on the poolside in the sunshine
• read a little bit of The Elements of Typographic Style
• played with the doggies
• walked around the yard, slowly

I'm currently waiting for my lovely girlfriend Stacey to get home from work to spend a little Quality Time together. All in all, a pretty great day. Life is finally starting to work out.

The Problem

This is Beta, Stacey's dog. She's cute, clever and a little rascal. She's small, fast and a runner.

This is the rear car gate and driveway in our back yard. Take note of the gap between the gate and the ground. That is a recipe for escape.

The Solution

Mud flaps or something like that.

There happened to be a couple pieces of carpet in the driveway. I think they're there to deal with muddy days. Or whatever. I got out some tools, cut one piece of carpet into a few strips and punched some holes into them.

I used some rubber coated steel wire cut into ~18" lengths to tie the strips of carpet to the fence.

In the end, it's a little bit low rent and not the prettiest thing in the world. But you know what? It kept Beta from going under the gate (which is the first place she checked when I let her out of the house after I was done) which meant that she and Civ (and the landlord's dogs Ezra and Madison) could run wild and free all day in two yards and the tennis court. It also meant That I could have all seven doors open all day enjoying the beautiful weather and sunshine. A win for all of us. Additionally, both Civ and Beta are tuckered the hell out from running around all day. And that is why we picked this house as our new home.

PS. The gate can even still open. It just needs to be lifted upward a little bit more than usual. A small price to pay in my mind.