Mediacom’s Last Chance

Our local cable and Internet provider sent a repair guy over yesterday (for the third time this week) to fix the Internet line coming into the house.  For the last TWO YEARS every month or two we would lose the signal, sometimes for as many as five days while we waited for them to send someone out to fix it.  I called their wonderful India based tech support branch eight days ago complaining about service being down.  Three days later they sent someone out who “adjusted the levels.”  I complained that that was what they always did (three times in the last six months at least).  Sure enough, the guy’s adjustment worked fine, until five hours after he left when suddenly it stopped working again. Read more »

Tweetdeck- Better than Twitter ala carte

Tweetdeck Screenshot

I have been on Twitter for about a year now but never really USED it until recently when I tried out an application called Tweetdeck.  I have tried using others like Twhirl and Firefox based Twitter clients, but none have given me the functionality and easy organization that I have found in Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck allows a user to split their Twitter deluge up into different panes.  One pane is specifically for tweets by people you follow, another shows you the most recent tweets where others have retweeted something that you posted or where you are mentioned by your @username.  A third pane show me all of my direct messages.  Additional panes can be added as well, for example I have one pane that is a search that updates any tweets on Twitter that match a certain set of keywords.  Replying, retweeting, or viewing a user’s profile is quick and easy, just a right mouse click away.  The system also has a built in URL shortening service link and a variety of other useful features.

The only minor annoyance is that Tweetdeck uses the Adobe Air platform to run on.  You have to download and install Adobe Air (free download) before you can then install and run the Tweetdeck application.  The first  time I installed Tweetdeck I also had a little problem where some of the settings got corrupted.  I finally found the answer to the problem on the Tweetdeck forums, but I also must say that the Tweetdeck support community is very fast in responding to suggestions and questions.  Not bad for a free product!

Try it out!  I don’t think I would be using Twitter to the extent I am doing so without its help.  It has made using Twitter much easier and much faster in almost every way.