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@Mentions and Native Retweets – disjointed and rageworthy

Rtmention

Time for a rant.

I don’t know if it was #NewTwitter, or if it was before that, but this fucking disparity between @Mentions [old school “RT”] and Native Retweets is annoying as hell.

Here’s the crux of it:

1. I tweet something

2. Person X old school RTs it

3. Ten other people Native Retweet the old school RT by Person X

I will see the old school RT come up in @Mentions on the web interface, or, in Tweetdeck—my preferred Twitter consumption application—under Me / Mentions. I will have NO visibility over the 10 Native Retweets, as they will only show up in the ‘Your Tweets, retweeted’ column of Person X, or, on occasion, in Person X’s Mentions / Me column.

Do most people care? Probably not. But, as I’ve said many a time, I’m a narcissist [maybe I should add that to my Twitter bio [how meta]], so yes, I’d at least like to see it show up SOMEWHERE.

The Solution

It’s simple enough. If you have TweetDeck [I assume you can do something similar on most of these apps e.g. HootSuite, Seesmic], remove your Mentions column, and just add a column with your Twitter handle e.g. ‘@c0up’.

What does this do? It should show you old school RTs, Native Retweets, and account for the case above, showing old school RTs that have been natively retweeted.

Why does this work? Because Twitter’s search function turns Native Retweets into old school style RTs… It feels like they didn’t quite think this through.

I know that TweetDeck tries be as faithful as possible to the Twitter API, but I wish they’d just bundle Native Retweets and old school ones together.

UPDATE:

*sigh* it’s just never that easy, is it? Turns out this doesn’t in fact solve everything, because with a “search” column being added, any mentions from users who have protected their tweets don’t show up /FACEPALM

UPDATE #2:

I wrote this post just last week, and now, for whatever reason, native retweets don’t show up in search results anymore, so we’re basically back to square one…

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Trunk.ly and a few things I’d like to see

I love Twitter. I love spamming Twitter. Sometimes though, it all just moves too fast, and it is an absolute nightmare trying to search through my tweets trying to find links. I certainly ain’t going to make the effort to delicious each and every single one [or save them manually through some other tool], and thankfully for the lazy like me, trunk.ly exists.

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2010: The year in movies

It’s that time of the year again. The post I look forward to and dread in equal parts.

Bear in mind that this is a list of movies I’ve seen at the cinemas in Australia [with the exception of two that I saw in The States] this year, so quite a few that are ’09 releases to some of you, are in fact 2010 releases in this lagging country of ours. I can already see the same thing happening next year, with True Grit, Black Swan and The Fighter getting releases mid-January here.

Once again, this has taken 3+ hours to do. With the notable exception of Inception being best of the year by a clear margin for me, I think in future years, I’m going to have to create this list in some other way [maybe grouped by star ratings], because frankly, this is excruciatingly difficult, and probably not a completely fair way to rank movies either.

Anyway, here they are, ranked best to worst.

EDIT:

I’d omitted Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Knight and Day, so I’ve updated the list to include those two, and got to 100 in the process!

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Photos from my U.S. trip

Yes, it’s about five months late, but better late than never I tell you.

I took a lot more photos, and they looked a lot better at the time on that tiny viewfinder, but scrolling through them this morning and seeing the monstrosities I’d captured, this is sadly the small, somewhat acceptable subset I’m left with. Lesson learned; stop taking photos!

Click the set name to view them on flickr.

Oh, and they’d probably be better in the context of all the blogging I did for the trip, but I can’t be bothered contextualising ’em.

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So I had a Starcraft related dream last night…

I’m playing the game, it was a 2v2, and I could hear Chris’ voice saying “There’s nothing at the base! Nydus Worm!”

For the uninitiated [me being very newly educated on it], a Nydus Worm is this thing you can create at an opponent’s base that acts as an exit to a door, the entrance to which is at your base; you can pretty much throw a bunch of units and it’ll appear at their base and if they haven’t realised it’s there, they’ll be all “OMGWTFNOWAI”.

Anyway, I’d apparently built the structure at the opponent’s base, and I started moving all my army through the network from my end. I started moving them through, and then, suddenly, the game went from the top down view into first person perspective, and I became a part of the battle, and I was zooming through the Nydus Network along with the Zerg army.

I appear at the other base, AND EVERYTHING IS FUCKING GIGANTIC. Now, this was related to a discussion I was having with mates earlier this week about Terran marines actually being 9 ft, and zerglings being kinda gigantic too. I’m not quite sure where my imagination went after that, because there were GIANT COCKROACHES AND ZERGLINGS AND DISGUSTING SQUISHY THINGS EVERYWHERE, and I was standing on them.

Nothing would attack, and Chris was screaming “SELECT THEM! YOU HAVE TO SELECT THEM!”, so then I had to, umm, DOUBLE TAP one of the giant, squishy, disgusting cockroaches to select the whole lot of ’em, and yes, I was freaking out and disgusted.

I believe that is all, or maybe I’ve forgotten the rest. Needless to say, I’ve been a little obsessed with Starcraft II lately, and this is, the gigantic cherry cake on top of the already enormous cheesecake.

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Grooveshark, six months on. Mobile stability, community, scrobbling and search modifiers

I raved about Grooveshark six months or so ago when I first became a VIP, and well, I am not regretting that decision for a moment. In fact, there have been a few new welcome additions that I thought I might as well talk about in this long weekend that has seen me confined to my house for no other reason than laziness.

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I’m Still Here

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Or the above image, if you’re looking for another way to sum up I’m Still Here. It was two years of magnificent trolling in the public eye. I tip my hat to you, Casey Affleck, and especially, Joaquin “J P” Phoenix! The performance of a career, indeed.

Then again, I can’t imagine how I would have reacted if I hadn’t walked into this movie knowing it was a mockumentary. I’d like to think I would have easily been able to pick it as an obvious joke, with SO much absurdity coursing through the film, but so many didn’t, and I have a feeling that there would have been some level of doubt in my mind.

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Ganesha Puja

I’m not the most religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I do my bit every day, and when it comes to the Ganesha Puja, I most definitely make an effort.

I can’t even begin to pretend like I know what’s happening during said ritual, but, it seems to be around bringing Ganesha into your home and providing offerings to him in return for his blessings /shrug You have failed me in proving a simple explanation, Internet.

I remember only a few years ago, when I was woken up on the day of the Ganesha Puja, was grumpy as hell that I couldn’t eat anything before we completed it, and spent the hour sulking, begrudgingly going through with it. Compare that to this year, where I was looking forward to it and managed to understand around 80% of what needed to be done via an audio tape of an Indian Priest speaking in double time.

There was even nervous laughter shared halfway through, when, just as I was marvelling at this antiquated tape that chugs on every year, the tape decided to start dying and started sounding like a slowed down, chopped up R&B song. Luckily, the old pen twirling got things back on track [eh, eh, pun! *nudge*]

All through the hour or so though, there was this sense of dread creeping into my mind, imagining what would happen if I was, say, overseas. I’d like to think I’d make the effort to some level, but seeing the 21 or so different flowers, fruits, vessels, incense sticks and god knows what else that my mum had laid out there, I’m thinking it would be an epic fail; this is one day I’m glad I’m still living at home with my parents. Then again, a Google search returns a gazillion results, with podcasts and YouTube videos of the puja, so who knows!

This post is certainly out of character, but I feel it could provide some good nostalgic value down the line; something a tweet would never suffice for.

Now excuse me while I return to my cold, sentimentality-lacking, pop culture [culture of choice] ways and watch a cat video or two.

Oh, and watch out for that evil moon today.

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Samsung Galaxy S. First impressions.

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I was forced to buy a new phone yesterday, my previous phone being an HTC Magic. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S based purely on the word of 3 different people. I didn’t even know the specs on the thing. I didn’t even know how it looked. Thank god then that the phone is so frakn amazing, because buyer’s remorse is a bitch!

Oh, and this ain’t no detailed Engadget review going through each aspect of the phone. It is purely what I’ve experienced over the last 1.5 days.

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Is microblogging making us a noisy, ignorable bunch?

So, I’m saying this in the context of a few things, and when I say microblogging, I’m pretty much referring to Twitter, but I’m sure it could be extended to some extent to Facebook, Buzz, Foursquare, etc.

Firstly, Leo Laporte’s post late last week, waving goodbye to Google Buzz and lowering his use of Twitter to go back to his blog; the place where people go specifically to read about Leo.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.

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