So as many of my readership found out (all three of you), I’ve broken down and joined Twitter. I explained my break down to bdotdub thusly:

even curmudgeons need to experience life outside the cave every once in a while. we’ll see how it goes. remember: the sun burns.¹

That’s not the whole story. I realized that I’m losing touch with a lot of my friends, mostly due to my hectic schedule, somewhat due to being selfish, and a little because I don’t have an adequate mechanism to shoot random ideas at people and get some back. While I think the idea of writing a less-than-140-character message expressing a random idea that probably no one will care about is a useless one, the idea of having a friend read my thought and think about that idea, having implicitly just communicated with me, is not a bad one. I get the same in receipt.

That, and it takes little effort to either send or receive, so the addition of it to my day is non-intrusive.

I’m still on the fence on calling them “tweets” though. I do hate that they’ve corrupted the use of ‘#’ to indicate a topic to which to send “tweets”. I hope that ‘#’ will never leave my mind as the IRC chat room symbol.

Alas, if you’d care to, you can now follow me at minusnine on Twitter.