Request to the Twitter Team

I recently asked the wife why she preferred a third party Twitter app of the official app for Android. She replied with a simple and short answer, "It does not remember where I was in the timeline". Fair enough, but I like the Twitter app better than the one she is using, and know that she would too if it did what she needed. So like any good awesome epic, husband, I told her I would see what I could do.
What follows is the message I sent to Twitter to see about the issue. Time will tell on it's resolution.

Subject: Android App, Timelines, My Demanding Wife
Greetings from my laptop.
I have been a Twitter user for sometime now and am very pleased with your service in general. I also am a very avid Android user, and was incredibly pleased when you released your official app for Android. Unfortunately, my wife (@tracitenkely) flat out refuses to share the same enthusiasm as I do regrading the official app. Her initial frustration arose regrading the app's need for Android version 2.1, but that was easily remedied thanks to a custom flavor of 2.1 from Cyanogenmod (my wife is still rocking a G1, like a champ. This is something I am working to remedy but so far have been unsuccessful). Anyway, I thought sweet, problem solved. Oh no, this woman is incorrigible! Despite it running very smoothly, she insists that the app not being able to remember where she left off in her timeline is a deal breaker! Crazy, right?! I guess she really likes to read every, single, bloody, tweet that comes across her stream. Me, I don't really mind either way, but I am pretty sure that my desire for her to utilize the official app for things like contact sync and her refusal to do so because of the timeline issue could very well drive a deep wedge between us. The kind of wedge that over time slowly and painfully drives both parties to the brink of insanity. Where evil plans are quietly hatched to ensure the other sees the correct point of view. Where we both end up in dark, dank, secret, laboratories developing Twitter zombies to flood the other person's stream with talking points and irrelevant #braaaaains hash tags... Where inevitably all the Twitter zombies break free of their confinement tanks only to flood the twitterverse with illegible tweets full of groans and the occasional haikus and slowly exterminate the entire population of Earth with @replies. Honestly, I am worried, but that's why I am coming to you. Perhaps there is a way that you can add an option in the settings to allow for her to remember the position in the timeline. Perhaps this could could prevent the development of the aforementioned wedge, the devising of plans, the construction of secret labs, creation of mutant Twitter zombies, and eventual destruction of Earth. Perhaps there will never be any need to send Terminators back in time from the future to save John Connor!
Please get back to me when you can. I have not seen my wife much in the past few days so I can only imagine her lab construction might be underway. I think it's obvious that I must begin my construction as well now. I will be available via email, or via Twitter, and anxiously await your response.

Baskets, Burritos, n' Bowels oh my!

Image via Wikipedia
For starters, that's a catchy damn title...

Anyway, the wifey found out about this thing called Bountiful Baskets around a year ago, but she never did anything with it. She citied my 'inferred apathy' when she mentioned doing it as the cause... whatever. Well, she finally got around to actually ordering from them and I must give credit where it's due, this baskets thing is pretty sweet. I don't want to go into the specifics of how it works, mostly because I don't care (apathy), but also because that's not why we're here. Basically you pay money and a co-op of farmers or lettuce pickers (what's the pc term for farmers?) puts a bunch of food stuff in a basket, then you go home. Where this gets AMAZING is that they had some kind of 'Mexican pack' that comes packed full of... wait for it....Mexican food! Yowza! We scored a ton of tortillas, like 7 dozen or something crazy, and some peppers n' stuff. So long story short, the wifey made me enough burritos and enchiladas to last about 3 weeks. We kept the first week out and froze the other two so they can be heated when it's time for them to merge with me and become one being though digestion. I'm like the Highlander of burritos.

Image via my effing Nexus One

Why am I telling you all of this? I am going to eat nothing but burritos for 3 weeks. It's kinda of like that stupid Soda Challenge I did but this time it's awesome. At the point of writing this I am officially one week in and so far it is amazing. I have seen no negative side effects in my health, my weight has remained level, and my spanglish is improving! I do need a colonoscopy, but the cause of that cannot be traced to a strictly burrito diet, yet. 

Wish me luck in the comments as I head into weeks two and three of the most excellent burrito diet ever!

The Facebook Hokey Pokey

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I quit Facebook. I quit in the sense that I deactivated my account and have not logged into it since. When I made my exodus I cited my reasons for leaving as privacy, lack of use, distrust of the service, etc. All these reasons remain true ...but... I went ahead and quietly logged back into Facebook the other day (gasp). Why did I get pulled back in, was it my need to share earth shattering news with my friends, maybe it was an unyielding and unholy need to play FarmVille? No, sadly it was neither. I've never really found Facebook that engaging. I'm sure some people actually read some of the informative crap that I pipe onto it, but it's hard to tell when they remain uncommented on. Lately I find Google Buzz far more engaging than Facebook and noticed I spend loads more time there than anywhere else (Buzz FTW). As far as 'social gaming' is concerned, those games can go pound sand. I play real games and I am well endowed in the game department, thank you very much (Oh, hey FarmVille, you are really good and all, and I'm gonna let you finish, but Animal Crossing had one of the best gardening games of all time). 
No, while I have been away from Facebook I have been enlightened to a new 'discovery', if you will, relating to a little product called the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector (MSC). Anyway MSC lets you connect some various social networks into Outlook, giving you little snippets of social juice from people who you email with. After setting this up in Outlook 2010 at work I noticed something amazing! It was for sure showing me updates from people who are not connected to me on Facebook but are also not protecting their updates. Hah, yes with out 'friending' I now have access to my supervisors updates, many external partners, and lots of employees. My concerns about privacy are now being exploited for my benefit and/or amusement. The only downside to this entire thing is that my Facebook account has to be active... so I guess I will keep it active for at least until people wise up about their privacy settings.

New Commenting System

(Update: Obviously the commenting system has changed since this post because we're fickle. If you are looking for help setting up a comment system or have questions about the posts here, drop us a line through the contact page)


Despite what anyone says, we listen to your feedback. Recently we received a comment stating that commenting on the site was ridiculously hard. It required loading multiple pages to leave a comment and people were loosing interest while waiting on link clicks and page loads. Well fret no more guy who complains on the internet, we just made a major change to the commenting system @ www.dolphinfree.net.

We will now solely be using Google Friend Connect to power the community. GFC will let you join and comment using the account of your choice, whether it be Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Netlog, or Open ID. Once you join you can leave comments, participate in polls, make friends on the site, send messages to other members, and be a bad ass.

We took a vote and decided that we will require members to join/sign in in order to comment on individual posts, but the "Wall" and the comments section of the Social Bar (blue bar on the bottom) will allow for anonymous posting. That way people can still complain about the site anonymously and we can see more faces in the post comments! 

The benefits of this change are far to technical for you to even attempt to comprehend so I will not even bother to waste anyone's time attempting to. Just know that it is awesome. 

Head over to the site now, read our latest post and leave a comment in the new system to check it out!!

Thanks-