so, it's come to this...

by Michael

Nov 11, 2012

ACR and Twitter

This is one of those "grouchy old man" posts in which I complain that the noobs are ruining the game. It should be read with a healthy skepticism and sympathy for the senile.

Summary:

Noobs and marketing suits are ruining hashtag timelines for following conference news because the timeline looks more like my spam folder than the Atlantic. Create lists of the best Tweeters to keep your timelines clean and informative.

Quotes

Social media is the democratization of publication but also of subscription.

tl;dr:

Where I brag how cool I am and try to establish my credentials

I'm an early adopter, well beyond the cutting edge and more at the bleeding edge were it's not that you have to be careful because you might get cut, but rather are constantly bandaging all the wounds you're sustaining daily.

I've been tweeting at the ACR since before the ACR had a Twitter account. In Philly in 2009, I was tagging my posts with #ACR09. In the years since, Twitter has become more mainstream mostly for the better and because of this **I've met some great Rheumatologists and learned a lot. No question: the benefit has vastly outweighed the risks. **

Time to whine like a baby

But with the change has come problems. Many of the new Twitter users are not aware of basic internet and Twitter customs. They #tag #every #single #word #with #hashtags. They RT @ retweet so that instead of one tweet with a +100 retweet marker on it, you get 100 individual tweets in the timeline you have to scroll through.

Retweet Horror

They tag every single post with the meeting's hashtag, even when it has nothing to do with the meeting.1

They're new. They'll learn. But in the meantime, someone needs to be pantsed.

Success has also brought the vultures: the Brands, the "SEO gurus", the numerous "advocate groups", and everyone else vying for attention. You want to hear about the choice bits of scientific knowledge but in their mind their bit of spin is the important bits of scientific knowledge you must hear.

Patient's with RA have less fatigue on steroids?!?!?! Who knew?!?!?!? So awesome you did a double blind placebo controlled trial comparing steroids to nothing in RA. That's never been done before! /sarcasm

And then you even have the attention-seeking, self-appointed experts like myself going around whining in the official timeline2 that everyone is doing it wrong.

Yes, the noobs, vultures, and jerks are ruining it. It is tempting to decide that the space is dead and flee to the suburbs, and in some ways I have. I've moved a lot of my social media activity over to App.net, a paid, gentrified social media site mostly for tech nerds. And yet, within the original structure of Twitter and social media is the very answer to the problem. Social media is the democratization of publication but also of subscription. I choose who I follow and what I see. 3 So while the official (and ridiculously chosen) hashtag #ACR2012 timeline looks worse than my spam folder, my cultivated ACR12 list is a clean bounty of useful information. I accomplished this by a slightly more difficult but far more rewarding technique of finding top-self Tweeters and putting them into a list. Instead of following a hashtag, I follow a list timeline of the best Tweeters.

In which I pretend to have an original solution

Lists are a great functionality of Twitter. Admittedly, I didn't originally understand their use and that was in large part probably due to the fact that I only followed a few people and the rarely used hashtags of the technocrati. Once my playground opened to the masses, the noise to signal ratio dropped radically.

Lists are useful when you want to see all the tweets from a select group of people in single timeline, especially when you may not want to be a regular follower of all of the people the rest of the time. Since I pick who I follow, I select for those with the humor, intelligence, and Twitter etiquette I like. No brands or SEO gurus can force themselves into my view.

This is still the original model of your main Twitter timeline. I feel silly that I missed this fact which is the very reason it was so successful to begin with. Getting back to the roots, if you will.

In which I abuse the Cheers metaphor

I view social media as a bar.4 I have no interest in listening to every drunk at the table tell me about their Area 51 conspiracy theories, or brushing off passes from over the hill barflies, or getting into and endless debates about politics. I certainly don't want some guy to pretend to be here for a friendly conversation and then well me about this great insurance product he "doesn't want me to miss out on."

I want to drink my yuppie local microbrew in peace, chat with old friends, and maybe, just maybe meet some new people. As long as the bar is mostly regulars who behave within the social norms, it's my kind of place. When they install a mirror ball and a karaoke machine, I'm out. As far as how to meet the new folks, I'll let the other regulars in the bar pre-screen them. After I see a few retweets that valuable, I'll add them to the list.

Provisionally.

  1. All 50,000 attendees don't need to know you're going shopping at Nordstrom's after the plenary session. ↩

  2. On review, I've not actually complained in the official timeline, but close enough. I'm a jerk. And many others have. ↩

  3. With the important exception of advertisements, which is one of the reasons the tech nerds are so wary of recent policy changes at Twitter. ↩

  4. Others prefer the water cooler analogy, but that seems even more sad. ↩

Nov 6, 2012

Damning with faint praise

The Brief:

Huawei Probably Not Spying, Just Crappy Programmers

A person familiar with the White House’s review said they found equipment that was “riddled” with vulnerabilities caused by poor programming, and other experts familiar with their equipment told Reuters that it’s “five times easier” to find a vulnerability in a Huawei router than it is in a Cisco one.

Never attribute to malice that which is more likely due to incompetence.

Oct 31, 2012

Medicine in Ireland

Irish Times

In the most commonly repeated complaint by patients, it is related how a person languished for months on a public waiting list for an appointment or procedure, but was seen within a week as a private patient. It is also common in the public system for scores of patients to be called for appointments at the same time, leading to long wait times, whereas in private medicine, individually timed appointments are the norm.

Sounds familiar.

Oct 27, 2012

Alternative Surfaces

Marco has an interesting review of his trip to the Microsoft store to see the Surface.

People who dislike Apple’s approach or whose requirements are incompatible with it will always exist in great numbers, and the Surface is for them.

via Marco.org

Oct 13, 2012

Saving sequential webpages as PDFs with Keyboard Maestro

I needed to save as PDF a series of 80 webpages on a slow server on a password protected website. I could have sat there for an hour doing it manually, but since I wanted to get dressed and have a cup of coffee, I made a Keyboard Macro shortcut instead.

In order to use this macro, you need to set up a very useful shortcut for saving files to PDF. In the stock OS, you hit ⌘-P (Command-P) to bring up the print dialogue box and then in the bottom left hand corner of the pop up menu click the down arrow by PDF and choose save as PDF. A much faster way to do this, is to create a system shortcut that allows you to hit ⌘-P twice to initiate the save as PDF action. I learned this from MacSparky and still go to his page every time to remember how to set it up.

The first two steps are to set up some incrementing variables to allow the files to be named with sequential numbers. If the webpages you're saving have unique names, this won't be necessary, but for my case it was.1

The rest of the code is in a repeat loop. Since I knew it was going to be exactly 80 repeats, it was easier to do it this way than a while, or if loop.

The first part of the real code is to initiate the save as command with ⌘-P twice.

Then the file name is entered with the last digit being placed by a variable that will increment by +1 with every new name. Since the saving dialog seemed to take awhile, I added a pause into the mix. Then ⌘-down arrow moves the whole webpage to the very bottom where the "next page" button is. Keyboard Maestro has a powerful function to find images on a webpage and then use that image. In this case, when it sees the image of the next button, it left clicks the mouse in the center of the button.

The pages are slow to load, so I have a pause in there until the screen contains the image of a circular arrow. This is the refresh button in Safari and only shows up once a page is loaded. It's an easy hack to make sure the next page is loaded.

And then this cycle repeats itself until all the pages were saved. It worked perfectly.

I didn't even have time to do my hair and finish my coffee.

  1. Setting the constant 1 to the variable i was probably unnecessary, but I was trying to get this done quickly, not elegantly. ↩

Oct 12, 2012

IPad Mini event

Jim, is there going to be an iPad Mini event on October 23rd?

Yep.

Oct 11, 2012

Employed vs. Self-employed work hours

From the International Journal of the Obvious:

[H]ospital-employed physicians work fewer hours and see fewer patients than do independent doctors, the foundation’s survey showed.

Really? You needed a study to figure that out?

Oct 11, 2012

Sprint Japan

Update 10/142012:

iClarified:

Softbank, a Japanese cellphone carrier, has acquired a 70% stake in Sprint Nextel for $20 billion, reports BusinessInsider.

iClarified:

Japanese carrier Softbank is in advanced talks to acquire Sprint Nextel in a deal worth over $13 billion, reports the WSJ.

If this goes through, I wonder if I'll get a better deal when traveling to Japan.

Oct 10, 2012

Welcome

I really wish it hadn't taken brain cancer to get treelemon to start blogging.

Sep 20, 2012

Google Maps Fail

Bashing Apple's maps is the thing to do these days, but I just want to share my own Google Maps story.

When I was looking to move to Nashville two years ago I started looking for jobs by looking at hospitals I found on Google maps. There was one hospital on the map that I could never find contact information for. I never thought much about it until I moved there and happened to live right next door. It was strange because there was no hospital there.

For the next year and a half I tried everything I could to get that location unlisted as a hospital. I reported the problem multiple times as a user, I joined their map group and submitted the change manually, and I emailed the Google maps peoples repeatedly. Attempt after attempt was rejected. To this day the location is listed as a hospital with a pink background and a giant H.

THERE IS NO HOSPITAL THERE.

You can see the same problem on the non-mobile version. Update 1.15.2013: This has been fixed.

Even more amusing, if you look at the location in Google Maps and enable photos, you'll see a photo I took of the building's sign. It's clearly an office building and not a hospital.

Apple Maps does not list a hospital at this location.