As I slouch from middle age to full-on geezerdom I appreciate more and more the implied license one has to be a curmudgeon.  It comes in especially handy if you aren’t by nature an “early adopter”.  It took me until well into 2000 to finally buy a cell phone, for instance.  Audio CDs didn’t make it into our apartment until they were kind of unavoidable.  Ditto DVDs.   In fact, one of my more tech savvy brothers sent me a DVD player as a gift to get me the hell started.

It hasn’t always been this way; in 1984 I was one of the very first people I knew to purchase a Macintosh.  It was the smaller model with 128K of RAM.  Sometimes when the revolution comes, it’s just obvious.

The communications phenomenon known as “Twitter” has been less obvious for me.  People “tweeting” snippets of text about their banal doings, comings, goings, and twitches just didn’t sound all that interesting.  However, I recently discovered that some friends of mine who ought to be smart enough to be above such things were on Twitter, so I decided to sign up and see what all the fuss is about.

For those of you who do not know about Twitter, you send little messages (“tweets”) of no more than 140 characters to anyone who is “following” you, which means they have subscribed to be sent your message every time you post something.  Your post can include web links, which adds to Twitter’s usefulness.  Most people use hand-held devices such as phones or Blackberrys to twitter, but I use a little client on my laptop since my cell phone was manufactured back in the Middle Bronze Age and has an abominable interface for texting.

So now that I’ve signed up and done this for a few days, I can say that I am pleasantly surprised.  Of course, I’ve signed up to follow some interesting people that I know, and one or two well-known people who don’t know me from Adam.

Allow me a digression at this point.  As the election has wound down and we proceed into the New Age that we all hope will follow the festering, maggoty, septic, swollen Carbuncle on the Behind of  Humanity that is the current administration, I find that I’m kind of worn out on electoral politics.  I need a break.  While it’s still important to me, I realized that I need to get back into other things.  In other words, I need to reconfigure my personal information stream.  Twitter is a good way to do this–IF you are able to find people who have a knack for finding cool stuff and posting links to them.  I have already found a couple of wonderful resources on the web, some fascinating articles, and other items that will hopefully provide some grist for this blog.

As for feeding stuff to the Twittersphere, I am not yet adept at identifying things in my own world that are twitter-worthy, but I expect that will change.  I have also not quite grokked some of the other aspects of Twitter that allow something akin to dialogues to take place, but that’s for another time.

If you truly have nothing better to do, you may feed my halting sense of self-importance by following me.  My user name is sheldongreaves.

Tweet.