The Philadelphia Corporation for Aging has an ad in Philly’s subway worth passing on…
The Senior Struggle
A little bit of you can pull them through the winter.
Pay a visit, run an errand, lend a hand. Your support means everything.
Call 215-765-9040 or visit pcaCARES.org for ideas and resources. You can do a lot of good.
On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.
In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.
You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing…
“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.
“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.
She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.
Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.
Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.
Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…
Follow @sol on Twitter
or 
Found a funny little bug with Apple’s dashboard weather widget this week. It comes installed and running by default when you set up a new OS X installation or buy a new Mac. I just got a new MacBook Pro a month ago and have been using the weather widget religiously. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball described, it’s one of the favorite widgets (and he has a good old how-to on how to make it better).
But rather than validating by zip code, the weather widget validates by city name only. It grabs the first city name, alphabetically, and plugs that in as your local weather default.
There are five cities in the USA with the name Philadelphia. In alphabetical order, they are Philadelphia MO (Missouri), Philadelphia MS (Mississippi), Philadelphia NY (New York), Philadelphia PA (Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia TN (Tennessee).
Apple’s widget grabs Philadelphia, MO for Philadelphia, PA (and MS, NY, TN). Until this week the weather patterns for MO vs. PA were the same for precipitation and within a few degrees on temperature. It took a month before the cities were different enough to notice the discrepancy.
For all you’z Philadelphians buying Macs, remember to plug in your 191xx zip codes :) To see this in action if you’re in another city, add a weather widget to the dashboard and search for “Philadelphia”. The same occurs This does not occur on an iPhone’s weather app.
Population data on the Philadelphias:
Twitter Tools, a WordPress plugin by Alex King, blew up my blog last night. For those of you following my RSS or Twitter updates, this meant you got 45 copies of a weekly Twitter update (and you would have gotten 8 more that were in the queue to be published if I hadn’t caught it and shut it off – thanks @evantravers for the RSS heads up).
I like Twitter Tools very much. It’s the first WordPress Twitter integration I used, and it’s still my preferred way to go. It automatically sends a tweet when I write a new blog entry. A good, clean, way to let people know you wrote something you’d like them to check out. I used to use it for a list of my more recent tweets, but I’ve replaced that with a FriendFeed plugin.
In one of Twitter Tools more recent versions the feature of weekly digest posts of one’s tweets was added. I wasn’t hot on the idea of a daily digest since it would be too often and would ultimately just be a daily barf of one’s tweets and wouldn’t involve actual thought. The weekly was worth checking out so I played around with the settings (above pic).
If the setting for “Create a weekly digest…” is Yes, you are given a choice of day and time for your post. During my trial of the settings, I chose 11:59pm on Sunday night.
This was last week. I’d forgotten about it. This morning however, it blew up with the 45 posts. Pretty ugly bug!
UPDATE: I saved the above post for posterity… Something blew up in my blog settings and tons of weekly Twitter blog posts were submitted.