Hello Dave AKA Dennis Markuze,

First of all, thank you for waking me up this morning with your tweets. What a wonderful way to spend your sabbath! You bothered to open no less than 8 new twitter accounts just to call me and my friends to your hate-infested posts! Nice work.

Let me just say, I’ve seen it all before and it really isn’t going to change my mind. All that hate just proves my point about Christians and cements my position in Atheism. Why would anyone want to believe as you do? Such a sad and hateful little world you live in.

Now, calling out my friends is just stupid. You have no idea if or what religion they might be. Yes, I have religious friends, although my religious friends don’t feel it necessary to attack other people with their hate-filled rants.

I honestly don’t understand the point of your constant tweeting to people and linking to that same post. Is it working? Do you have a list of Atheists who suddenly change their point of view to yours? Or do you get some sadistic joy out of annoying people? Do you realize you’re a laughing stock?

You sir, are an Internet Troll. Your methods will never work in making the change you appear to be working for with the agility of a legless bull elephant. If you really want to change the world, maybe sending links to like-minded people and gathering a following would work better for you. You could run for politics and affect change that way. People who agree with you would vote for you in droves. You know, be normal.

Alas, I fear you will continue in your ham-fisted way to annoy your betters. The thing is, now that I’ve reported you (again) as a spammer I turned my phone off and went back to sleep. I’ve fed the troll and now I’m content. But you sir will always and forever be a boring nutcase. Have a nice day.

It occurred to me just now that when your friends post requests for you to vote for someone they know for some random award or contest it chips away at your integrity to follow through.

Don’t get me wrong, I posted a request just a couple of weeks ago for my friend’s daughter in a radio contest. In my mind I thought if they wanted to people could peruse all of the entrants and could choose H’s video. Or just save time and pick hers to be nice, which is what (as if anyone did) most people would do.

You see it all the time on twitter and facebook. Just now someone put out a request for his friends to vote for his cousin to get Teacher of the Year somewhere. I barely know him, I don’t know her so my vote is bogus, right? Does the fact that he has bunches of loyal friends voting make her, in fact, Teacher of the Year worthy? Maybe she IS the best teacher on the planet, but how do I know?

Sometimes we put out or respond to the requests thinking we’re doing a good thing to help someone, but isn’t it cheating? Does everything have to be a popularity contest dependent on how many friends and friends of friends you have?

Fine, it’s a minor thing (unless you’re the other guy in the contest) but I can feel it’s chipping away at our collective integrity under the guise of social media friendship.

It’s cute how the earworm in the 4-year-old’s head is @Pink’s Raise Your Glass. Except she didn’t have the words just right so I pulled up the video to listen to over and over. It’s the first time I’ve seen it and it’s AWESOME!

I want to ask so many questions! Like what was the most fun part to do, the sumo wrestler or feeding the calf? Who’s idea was the whole women’s breast milk for the calf anyway? I can’t decide what is my favorite part! I love the waking up with different religious icons too.

So Kira and I were dancing around the living room singing to Pink. And although I’m pretty sure a 4-year-old and her 50-year-old grandmother are NOT in her demographic I’m absolutely sure Pink wouldn’t mind.

Oh yeah, I opened a twitter account for Kira. She’s not such a SmallChild anymore so her new online name is @MsEmphasis.

EDIT: Someone pointed out my earwig/earworm mistake. I blame it on the bifocals.

I wish people wouldn’t feel the need to beat you over the head with their opinion:

ME: Hot atheists and agnostics http://bit.ly/b37g57 Aren’t Agnostics just Atheists with a fear of commitment?

(Meant to be humorous)

Other Person: agnostics = there is a god! Athiests = there is no such thing as this god nonsense

To which I stupidly reply:

ME: Agnostics are just-in-case Atheists. You can’t have God without religion. Like believing in Huck Finn without Mark Twain.

Which in turn opens the angry floodgates:

OP: uhhhh… I’m agnostic. Yes, you can have spirituality without religion. You can’t be Christian without Christianity though.

OP: it’s more about abandoning religion than anything. Don’t tell me what I am.

OP: people don’t understand that spirituality and religion are two totally different things.

Oh, I had a reply but I refrained from comment there. I mean it’s twitter! Land of the quick comments not long discussions.

OP: that is like saying people of earthly (pagan) religions are athiests because they don’t believe in the Christian God.

My eyes are glazing over here…

OP: or that I am an athiest because I believe in and thank the universe for what I am blessed with. I am not Christian…

Fine, whatever you say dear. Go eat a cookie and calm down.

ag·nos·tic: (wishy-washy)

• One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.
• One who is skeptical about the existence of God but does not profess true atheism.
• One who is doubtful or noncommittal about something.

The Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm concert was MARVELOUS Thursday night. Absolutely and totally worth the bullshit we went through before it actually started. MadCrap MadCap Theaters is THE most horrible venue I’ve ever ever been to. It’s a testament to how much I love JC and the boys, that I’d EVER go back there again.  Why would anyone want to go there? They don’t give a shit about the customers, they have extremely lousy organizational and communication skills, and I’m guessing they spend hours wanking each other off rather than cleaning up the theaters. The whole experience is practically abuse and we’re paying them to do it.

Friday night was the usual #evfn, except E and Sheila weren’t there and neither was the guy they had organizing it in their absence. So of course I take up the slack and try to make sure everyone is taken care of and the newbies are introduced around. I don’t think I did a very good job as certain people walked out. Oh well, there’s always next week.

Kira and I hung out Saturday night and this morning we wandered over to a new (for us) McDonald’s, shopped at WalMart and took the light rail to downtown Tempe (yes, I live here but I’d promised Kira we’d take the train one day) to check out #comiccreate.

And tonight I get a following notification on FourSquare (a social geolocation application) for Earl Newton! Now I’ve met the man at D*C a couple of times, and maybe he would friend me on twitter where you’re getting occasional light-hearted updates/comments from people. And maybe on Facebook which is pretty much the same thing. Likely because of my connection to Evo and less on my own merit I think. Twitter/Myspace/Facebook are places you “friend” anyone you’ve ever met and then some. But wouldn’t you only follow people on a location-based application that you might, maybe, kind of EVER thought you’d actually want to know where they are? Earl Motherfucking Newton wants to know where I am? That’s soooo fucking cool. I feel like somebody now.

And Earl? If you’re a googling fool and come across this post, please don’t explain or get freaked out or delete me or anything. This is me after a couple of drinks – FREAKING THE FUCK OUT because someone of your caliber clicked on me as a connection somewhere, that’s all. Let me have this. Carry on and I’ll never bother you again.

Oh yeah, I got paid for work I did! Actual money instead of possibilities.

What a great weekend.

Do you prefer Brightkite, Gowalla or FourSquare?

What am I talking about? There are applications to keep track of where your friends are and to let them know where you are. Hey, sometimes you’re  hanging out somewhere and you think, “maybe a friend would drop by and hang out with me if they only knew where I was!” Voila! Or if you’re meeting up with a group they can see who is already there.

I use FourSquare because it let’s you sort of compete with your friends and earn points and mayorship of places, stuff like that. But if a place isn’t already in their database you have to manually enter it, which is a pain in the ass on your phone. Asking a business what their complete address is so you enter it right, and then making sure you spell and get the name perfect? Nope.

So then I turn to Brightkite because it pulls it’s information from google. You can almost always find where you are with few clicks. But there’s no extra incentive.

I’ve noticed people using Gowalla, which seems like a combination of both. A searchable database of locations so you don’t have to enter the information yourself AND points and great icons and it says you get perks from the places you visit. I dunno.

And all these link with your twitter/facebook so you can get the information out instantly. I think they all have regular text access too so you don’t need a fancy phone for them.

So before I sign up for Gowalla I thought I’d check with you. Which do you prefer?

So yesterday twitter went nuts with the Tiger Woods serious accident!!!!!OMGELEventY!!! I didn’t bother to click on anything, cuz there are more important things in my life than the OMG about some golf dude. After the bullshit over the balloon boy, I stopped jumping on anything trendy.

Someone posted a link last night to an article praising twitter for having the headline/story out HOURS before CNN! OMG CNN dropped the ball! We’re all smart and superior for knowing half a story before actual reporters you know, report!

I love that regular twitter users get the first heads up about important events like plane crashes and earthquakes, but I think the gossip factor about other “news stories” is out of control. It’s almost as bad as junior high girls trashing each other.

Don’t believe it just because everyone is talking about it on twitter.

This morning the story is a little more fleshed out. Apparently Tiger was fucking around on his wife which may/may not have anything to do with his accident. He somehow crashed into a fire hydrant in front of his house and his wife busted the SUV’s back window open with a golf club and dragged his sorry ass out. I’d have let him sit there for a while. That is, if I gave a shit at all about his private life. Why do you?

My point is SHUT UP TWITTER. Calm the fuck down. Don’t haphazardly retweet headlines of unproven gossip. Let’s try to be better than TMZ or FOX News.

Friday was Phoenix WordCamp. It’s where everybody roasts Blogger buttons around a campfire and chants WordPress, WordPress, WordPress. Nah, not really. I don’t even know why these things are called camps!  There are no tents, fires, or s’mores. Wait, WordCamp was held in a tent! One of those humongous commercial semi-permanent tents with A/C. And we had sack (picnic?) lunches.

Anyway, it was a day filled with WordPress information. It started off with some woman I’ve never heard of calling her self the Diva of WordPress and yet preaching “we don’t care if you have bad spelling or grammar, we just want to hear what you have to say!” Cue immediate disrespectful twittering from many people. Then another all-about-me presenter and more cranky twittering. Then some kid who looked 12 but seemed to know a lot. The morning was filled with more motivational type speakers – all about content. The afternoon leaned more to the technical side, the guy who created WordPress in the first place, and local WordPress magicians Chuck Reynolds and Josh Strebel had a Q&A panel. Another guy got all geeky with step-by-step widget coding that was way over my head. Merlin Mann was highly entertaining, and Brent Spore was great. All-in-all a nice motivational day, but not what I expected.  Props to my friend Chuck for organizing the 500 seat sold-out WordCamp.

Saturday and Sunday were this year’s PodCampAZ, the one I’m involved in planning. I spent most of Saturday working registration with Rachel so I got to meet lots of new people. I helped Evo with his panel (I clicked the slide advance button) and helped set-up and take down. Yesterday I set up registration, but spent more time in actual panels. Brent’s panel on social media almost immediately got intense when the packed room divided between the let’s-keep-it-to-ourselves side and the we-need-to-bring-in-new-people-side.  He wanted to get people talking and it certainly did. Another friend Katie had a panel on social media but it was more what you should and should not put out there. The best panel I went to was a WordPress panel, where Josh skimmed over the best settings and must-have widgets and plugins – which was the information I’d been looking for from WordCamp.

So expect some changes to this site as soon as I’m rested up. I’m still tired as hell and I have a lot of notes to expand on while the information is fresh. We all learned that GeekWeek is toooooo much at one time. Information overload + planning anxiety + RL stress = exhaustion. There were other conferences earlier in the week that some people attended too. Thursday was the Entrepreneurship Conference, there was a design camp somewhere and I think one other thing and some people hit them all. Each event was successful but running them all within a week is too much which is likely why the PodCampAZ ending wasn’t attended by as many people as we expected. Our numbers were much lower than registered though there were a lot of walk-ins.

I was surprised at how many of our speakers failed to show up! When I checked with our speaker coordinator Lawrence, only about half of the n0-shows bothered to contact him with an explanation beforehand. It’s fucking rude as HELL to have a roomful of people waiting for you and not show up.

It freaks me out.

Twitter just started this listing thing. You can assign the people you follow to various lists. I got about halfway through and gave up.

Certain people are older Internet friends from the McCaffrey boards and BPOI. Some of those I’ve met in real life and a few are actual real friends now.

Certain people I’ve met through podcasting. Some of those I’ve met and are real friends, some are just fans (which is freaky in and of itself) and some I’ll never meet and really have no connection to, but follow because.  A handful are writers I’ve met through podcasting who have become both semi-celebrities and semi-friends.

And then there’s the real life family, friends, kid’s friends, etc.

It’s weird enough when, because of some interesting banter or retweet, person A from list B starts following person R from list D.

Right?

This completely freaked me out today:

Katie Berry is one of my daughter’s friends we’ve known since Kindergarten. Seth Harwood is a published author and podcaster and cute as hell. They cannot know each other! Coincidence has made my mind explode.

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Kira’s vocabulary has exploded too. In the last few days she’s started say things like, “Just listen to me, LISTEN to me! Be very careful out there so the monsters don’t get you.” She’s so insistent. And today in the car when I asked her if she was going to behave in the store she answered with the most nonchalant “of course” I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Casey’s friend Charlie tells me Kira got up at the crack of dawn the other morning and proceeded to (attempt to) wash her dishes.

At this very moment she’s dancing to Funky Town in Shrek 2. I wish my camera had batteries. Crap.

PodCamp AZ is coming to the University of Advancing Technology November 14th and 15th! PodCampAZ is a FREE networking media “unconference”, dedicated to blogging, video blogging, podcasting, social networking, and all other relevant media.  At the heart of the unconference is the opportunity to have a conversation at large with those innovators which have created a successful blend of relevant media and put it to work for them. Speakers will address emerging trends and best practices on everything from print and radio to mobile, interactive web, and in real life information exchange. During PodCamp sessions, attendees are free to drop in, listen and learn about what is relevant to their needs, and if they choose to, move on to other sessions. You can also become an interactive part of the experience by sharing your knowledge as a speaker or stimulating ideas and asking questions as an active attendee.

If you are an established or aspiring blogger, podcaster, video blogger, or social media advocate and want to meet hundreds of people with the same interests, head over to podcampaz.org to get more information about this exciting event. And above all else, register to attend PodCamp AZ!

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Okay, I blogged the quasi-official blurb. On a more personal level, y’all need to come. It’s fun and informative and FREE! I’m one of the planning committee members and I’m planning big things. If you want to speak, register and say so. If you want to sponsor, register and say so. If you think you might want to attend, REGISTER and pencil in the dates on your calendar, November 14-15. PodCampAZ is the final event in Geek Week (actually more than a week) so keep watching for details on other AZ events in that time frame.

If this all looks too good to miss and you’re not in the PHX area, we will soon have hotel deals and some of us are willing to put people up just so they can come.

Seriously, you NEED to come. Conferences, parties, tweet-ups, and more conferences.