The Jeff R Project

Premier Gordon Campbell, in proclaiming Feb. 25 Anti-Bullying Day, said “all across British Columbia, parents, teachers and students and community members are taking a stand against bullying and saying that no one should ever be made to feel intimidated, afraid or discriminated against.”

Source: The Province

I have to admit, I didn’t see any pink shirts on my (short) trip to work this morning, but I’m hoping and praying that there are many people out there taking up this cause across BC.

Like many young gay men, I was bullied as a teenager. Not a lot, and certainly not as badly as many kids are bullied. I was never physically injured, nor was I overly emotionally affected by it.

In junior high school, just coming of age and living in a new city, this one kid who lived in my neighborhood decided that I was gay (how he knew) and decided to pick on me. Naming names – Kevin McNabb. I’ll never forget him. He teased me with the usual taunts and verbal jabs, calling me all the usual names and generally making life miserable whenever he saw me.

Obviously I’ve gotten past it. I can’t say it was easy and it didn’t make accepting my homosexuality any easier but in the end I think it made me a bit stronger. I had to stand up for myself and learn that words, while harmful, didn’t mean much coming from small people like Kevin.

Kevin if you’re out there, I hope you’ve grown up in the last 25 years, but I doubt you have. I also hope that you didn’t torture too many others along the way.

How was your weekend? Seriously? Tell me about your weekend, leave me a comment.

Chris and I had a good weekend. Mostly relaxing, some shopping. We bought paint for the bedroom. Turns out Chris doesn’t like the “smurf-murder blue” we picked out for the walls last year.

To be honest, it isn’t what we expected. It was a great color in the tiny little swatch, but not so much on an entire wall of the bedroom. I didn’t mind it, but it certainly wasn’t what we intended.

Today, we bussed over to the Benjamin Moore store on Broadway and Burrard and Chris picked out a bunch of colors for me to choose from. That was the deal since the smurf-murder blue was my choice.

We ended up choosing “Tiramisu” and Chris will spend the next day or so priming and painting over the blue. Hopefully it will all work out.

Chris and Rumble had a rough weekend. For some reason, Rumble plays VERY rough with Christopher. Rumble has “stomped the grapes”, scratched, bit and injured Chris in just about any possible way. Rumble seems to think he’s another puppy to play with and so yesterday Chris had to really put Rumble in his place. That didn’t go over well with Rumble.

Anyway, it seemed to work. Until this morning when Rumble tried to take out Chris’s eye. Thankfully it wasn’t anything to major.

Right now, Chris is watching the Oscars in the bedroom and I’m in the living room (blogging), not watching the Oscars and trying to learn MVC via Zend Framework tutorials that seem to crash my Apache server every time they access the DB. <sigh>

So? What did you do?

This morning, I arrived at work to find my workstation rebooting. I checked with our System Admin to see if he was working on it (I have been having trouble and hoped he was) but he wasn’t. Appears it was rebooting and failing for a while overnight.

So while the System Admin starting working on it (upgrading drivers to replace bad ones), I devised a strategy to let me get SOME work done. I used my iPod Touch. It’s a great little toy tool. I’ve had it for a year and never truly “used” it.

I had my work email setup in Mail but turned on. I turned that on, downloaded my messages, forwarded and replied to those that needed my attention and left the rest for when my workstation was restored.

Next, I needed an IM client. We use MSN messenger for inter-office communication when possible (cheap) and also with some (tech-savvy) clients so I needed to access that. I chose Fring because it was free and multi-functional. Within 2 minutes I was online and ready to chat with anyone. And my timing was great.

With my Touch, I could use the website to do some stuff, manage email, MSN, even access Word and Excel files if necessary. I was pretty impressed on how much actual WORK I could accomplish on my little tool.

I still miss GPS and real networking when I’m on the go that would be provided by an actual iPhone but in a year, that’s never been a “requirement.”

Oh Crap

Chris and I used to watch CSI: Miami – in it’s early days mostly. But even now we’ll tune in from time to time for the beautiful scenery, the ok stories etc.

But one thing we could always count on was Caruso punctuating his moves and emotions with the addition or removal of his freaking sun glasses! Damn it was annoying.

For a few months now I’ve been hanging out on Twitter. I use my name as a personal account (@jeffrose) and I set one up for West Coast Favors (@westcoastfavors) to help promote that company. So far it’s been “interesting” in the sense that there’s a LOT of noise in the signal.

Using tools like Twhirl, then TweetDeck and Twitterific to manage the flow of information seems to be the key. Depending on how many people you follow (get updates from) it can be overwhelming trying to keep track of the conversations.

What have I learned? Nothing overly earth-shattering YET. There are a few lessons in development still. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

1. There’s a lot of people out there using Twitter to communicate, micro-blog and more importantly (to me) make money.
2. You can communicate a lot of information and detail in 140 characters. You can also make a lot of mistakes in that small space.
3. Twitter is a tool to be used. Whether for good (@livestrong), evil (Someone I’m sure), education (Mars Rover used Twitter) or just fun you can reach a broad responsive audience.
4. Time exists more on Twitter than anywhere else. Twitter is all about the NOW. Although it has a memory (ie: search & history) people mostly care about what’s you’re doing NOW. Which is it’s founding principle.
5. On Twitter, nobody knows if you’re a bot, or delaying, or auto-tweeting. (I am not and don’t, although I am testing delayed Tweets for West Coast Favors).

Twitter themselves don’t seem to have a money-model yet. It’s all free. There are rumors floating about changing that shortly, but in the mean time, everyone can use it, tie to to blogs, cellphones and Facebook for full coverage.

How are companies using it? Tune in another time for that answer.