A few of the more interesting and notable Twitter updates that I have made in the past few weeks:

• Buying shower curtains and duct tape. Concerned someone will think I’m up to evil.
• Today feels like I’m touch-typing with one hand sjifted tp tje rogjt (shifted to the right)
• Watching steamed clams pop open is so fun! It’s like a Venus Flytrap in reverse. I think this is what they watched before TV was invented.
• The inaugural use of the rubber mallet was not for the bathroom floor, but for the buttermilk.
• Just got out of a cosmology lecture. It’s turtles all the way down.
• I get entirely too much entertainment value out of shooting squirrels with water.
• You may say to yourself “that Brian’s wearing the same thing as yesterday” but you’d be wrong. Today, my socks are red.
• My current inventory includes: no tea, no coffee, a friendly device that uses wireless ethernet to access the sum knowledge of the Earth … also: bathrobe
  And then the responses rolled in:
  • substitute: @BrianEnigma drop no tea
  • CoffeeJedi: @BrianEnigma what? no towel?
  • redbanshee: @BrianEnigma and no cheese sandwich??
  • Ariock: @BrianEnigma and no thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is?
  • vpisteve: @BrianEnigma did you check the pockets?
  • 3Ms: @BrianEnigma dont forget your fluff.
• Every table at this sandwich shop has salt, pepper, napkins, and… a bottle of Purell? Are public bottles sanitary enough for some1 w. OCD?

A few interesting Twitter updates from the past month or two…

* Someone needs to invent a Capri-Sun style single-serving wine pouch.
* Just got RickRolled by a restaurant Muzak system.
* I love how marketing departments say “it tastes earthy” when they mean “it tastes like dirt.”
* This town needs an automat.

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<rant>
I’ve ranted and raved in comments before about people who use the automatic daily-Twitter-digest-to-blog-post services, but I am not sure that I made an actual blog post about it yet. So here goes. This is specifically in reference to a post Addlepated made today, but in general applies to anyone and everyone.

People of the blogosphere: if you are blindly posting all of your tweets to your blog, please stop. The same goes for your Delicious links.

While everyone calls Twitter “microblogging,” it really ends up being a bunch of ephemeral messages, announcements, and conversations. It is often used more like instant messaging than blogging, the content of which doesn’t really jive with being an automated digest to cross-post to a blog. I don’t cross-post every tweet for much the same reason I don’t cross-post IM or IRC logs. Or in this context, it would not even be the full log, just my half of the conversation. “@username blah blah blah” really doesn’t make sense without the preceding or following tweets.

Most of the people I follow in the blogoverse I also follow on Twitter (and if I don’t, it’s because I do not know you use it), so digest blog posts end up being a double-helping of information.

I am not suggesting keeping every last bit of Twitter-related goodness off of blog posts. Hand-picked conversations, in moderation, are wonderful! See my Twitter excerpts, above. Posting tweets is especially nice when they’re of general interest with a little bit of commentary or banter, giving context. Similarly, hand-picked snippets of IM or IRC conversation are great, too. It’s just the firehose of automated updates that ends up being annoying.

At the very least, if you continue to insist on including Twitter posts in the blog, please consider doing what Josh did–leaving those particular posts out of the Wordpress RSS feed–or what Feedle did–no specific post/method to point to, but he blogs on LiveJournal and has them behind an lj-cut. I hate to be threatening, but I’ve already dropped some people from my reading list (both RSS and the LiveJournal default friends view) because of this.

So please, please, please, if you are considering cross-posting tweets to your blog, please don’t do so. Let Twitter do what it’s good at and let your blog do what it’s good at. Let them cross over only when it makes sense to do so.
</rant>