My lot(to) in life

     

     So yeah check my lotto ticket. One digit off,…really? Is this my lot(to),  in life is to always be one digit off from hitting the big one? I am starting to think so, lol; yes I am smiling at the absurdity of it.

To be honest it isn’t the really super big thing, worth many millions, it only paid $230,000 and yes there was one winner. To hit four, even though my fifth number was only one digit off is only $100. I usually think that the only reason intelligent people buy tickets is to dream a bit and talk about what you would do if you won, or maybe just think about it.

It is like the old joke of the nun who always prays to win the lotto and after years of doing this one day the Lord’s voice booms out “sister at least meet me HALFWAY and buy a ticket for God’s sake”!!

I do know a guy at work who knows someone quite closely who won $160 million dollars. He thought maybe they would give him one of those big cardboard Ed McMahon checks. He said “you know just a couple hundred thousand I could pay off my house and that would really help’, yes I know. He is still waiting for his check.

The door knocks?

I just had two Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door. I showed them my ticket and they couldn’t figure it out. Those poor sons-a-bitches don’t get to gamble. They go to church and invest a great deal of time and money on the weird, off chance that maybe, just maybe, there really is life after death, and they will skip down streets of gold and play badminton with baby Jesus. To me, that is more worser than the Lotto itself! Your big payoff comes after you’re dead! REALLY?? Com’on man!

Even the evil-blackhearted-God-forsaken lotto will give you a little sugar here and there before you actually die.

The cute young couple gave me a flyer to come to Passover at Echo Falls Golf Club. Maybe I should go just to expand my horizons. I am not sure if it would be really intense like a time share condo sale or not. I do find it funny/ironic that they are right, the Passover is the only holiday that the Bible specifically tells followers to observe. Most “Christians” don’t know this and I have to wonder about that. You claim to be good Christians but you don’t know what the bible says?

 I tell myself that a hunskey is better than a sharp stick in the face and move on.

Klahanie's 98% rich white people- scares me

Klahanie is a 900 acre ‘master planned community” that I went and experienced yesterday. http://www.klahanie.com/home.asp

This guy had a used pickup for sale and I went there and drove it, meeting him at the QFC.  I immediately thought of an ad I saw on Craigslist.org about a Vietnamese Restaurant for sale in Duvall. It said “Duvall, 98% rich white people, good for fancy restaurant”. I got a good laugh about this. Duvall is quite the mix of semi-employed Hispanic landscape workers, broken down loggers, farmers new and old style, Microsoft workers, retired people, with the usual smattering of retail people and whatnot. There are some people here with money, especially just out of town with the big houses and acreage, and there are many people also just barely making it.

Klahanie on the other hand did appear to be 98% rich white people. Driving around there and parking I distinctly felt that I had the oldest most beat up car there, my 96 Chevy Lumina with peeling paint.  My car is in excellent mechanical condition but it isn’t trendy or pretty and it isn’t new. I also seemed to not dress appropriately because people seemed to stare at me. Now I know what black people feel like when they walk down the street in Duvall!

You know how people always wax rhapsodic for the halcyon days of the 1950’s in the USA? Well that life still seems to exist in Klahanie. All the women of child bearing age of 25-45 seemed to be 25lbs. lighter and blonder, with more make-up and jewelry. Everyone seemed to be jogging. Everyone had expensive German cars, or if they had the terrible misfortune to drive and American car it had all the windows tinted and was brand new. Everything was green, the roads were nice and every street had sidewalks on both sides. The topper was the Chevron gas station had three service bays, all open, with FIVE master mechanics on duty!!  Jesus H!

SO apparently the only thing wrong with our modern life is we all need more money. Where the hell did our 1950’s money go?

This twitter WTF??

A friend of mine has been on twitter in the past and didn't use it much. Recently, he opened a new account and has been thinking of using it more and letting Face book cool on the back burner a bit---

So today he sends me this e-mail

"So today I open my Gmail and I have about 20 new people following me on twitter. I open one and its someone from Malaysia. All their posts are in Malaysian, or whatever they speak. So I click block. Then I go back to my email. ALL of the new followers are from other countries and none of their posts are in English. I blocked them all.  Just opened my email, there are MORE, followers from other countries. WTF"?

Here was my response: 

There is no need to "block" people, if someone wants to follow you, let them, it is like someone reading your blog, there is no urgency to reach less people, unless you are running a secret society. There are tons of people out there who will follow you with the only expectation that you will follow them back. They just want to be able to say "Hey look at me I got 25,000 followers in 3 months'! Uh ..whatever. The giveaway is somebody who say for instance  sells bridal gowns, and that is all they tweet about, suddenly out of the blue they are following you, The odds are they want you to follow them back. There are actually software programs that do this digital phishing. If after a week or so if you don't follow back they disappear. My own pet peeve is people who call themselves "social media experts". They want lots of followers to in fact prove that they are experts at what they claim. Invariably they have a blog and write about things like "Top ten ways to improve web traffic". These people LOVE the words TOP TEN!! I mostly don't follow these people because they seem to be all in a giant pit of silly sameness. Then many businesses will follow, (like restaurants), also wanting a follow back and they are looking for free advertising, and a cheap way to get their message out.

Either it is public or it isn't. There are things you can go on and "categorize" yourself. For instance you can put Aerospace, Photography and Cooking as your interests that you tweet about. Then people searching that might follow you. Also of course they search your Bio, if you have a blog put a link in the bio. There is an expectation if you have 10,000 followers you have more influence in the world than if you have  100. Of course if your 100 followers were heavyweights like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, etc those 100 might be mucho more important than the 10,000 but that is another discussion. There are sites you can go on to actually buy followers and I don't know how that works. Followers are generally considered good unless it is offensive like maybe porn or spam. Don't be stingy many people are out there slack-jawed and hungry for your wisdom. it is all about sharing right?

You have to decide of course why you are on there, on twitter, and what you want to get out of it.

I have a dude I follow in Singapore (never met, don't know well), and we have had discussions about a variety of things. I think it is pretty cool you have people following you from foreign countries. Don't assume because they mainly write in a foreign language they can't read or communicate in yours. My neighbor is on twitter and she mainly writes in Japanese!

I have actually met up with people IRL that I have only known through twitter, which is weird but good. It is literally a digital community of your own building, it is a digital garden and it grows with the TLC you put into it and the way you tend it. You can be stoic and machine like on twitter or very friendly, open, and gregarious. Of course you know me, I am an opinionated, fairly fearless, wide-open warrior of the good argument, the good discourse, and I am not hiding from anyone. People in America talk about the disenfranchised 99%, well maybe they should make themselves heard a little more. I also like to bring interesting stuff to the table, interesting links, and stuff I do myself like this writing or maybe photos which I take. I have been interested in photography since I was a little kid so it leaks through the fabric of what is me. The more I use twitter the more I see the value in it.

So for me I use twitter more now to find out what is going on in the world, like right damn now, what's happening?? I use it like I used to use DIGG and Reddit.It is better though because it is more focused to followers because I pick and choose,  I fine tune my stream regularly-

 I use it for news about specific categories of things like Aerospace= @flightblogger and @runwaygirl get on the planefolk list

I use it for comedy so that= @robdelaney and @uncledynamite for instance get on the funny list

 I use it for local community so I have local #duvall people and #98019 people because the Snoqualmie Valley is it's own bizarre little ecosphere

You can make lists and put all the people and accounts on that list you want. So you can search for 'woodworking" or :"bloodwood" and then check those people out. You can follow them and add them to the list "woodworking wonks". If later on they get flaky you can delete  them to "deleted island". If however someone is truly priceless you might look at the people THEY follow, there might well be some gems in there. You can set up lists that are quite different then just pull up that specific list to see what is happening. You might want a list of "Granite Falls Residents", those people often discuss things you won't read about in the Seattle Times. Use the Find People search window on twitter. Put in Granite Falls just to see how many of your neighbors are on twitter and who they are, and what they are into- I bet it surprises you.

By the by, I think you have an excellent question and I am going to post this response as a blog post. Some people got the original notion that with twitter they were supposed to simply tell people where they were eating lunch, I delete those people. If they do the foursquare thing much and tell me they are "mayor of Woodinville Starbucks", I delete them. Another thing is you can have boring people on a list like "Granite Falls Folks" without Following them and vice-versa, does that help at all??

My number one rule is; don't bore people, their tiny fragile lives are short, and don't tolerate people who bore you either-- tweet on brother!