Guest blogging again!
Happy Christmas, everyone. I will be guest posting on the rest of December’s xkcd strips over at the xkcd sucks blog. Today’s post is here.
Archive for blog stuff
Mysterious twitter account suspension
So, about an hour ago, my twitter account was mysteriously suspended. I immediately emailed them to ask WTF was up– I don’t spam, I have very few followed/followers, I never post anything more offensive than strange things made of bacon– so there is really not much, if any reason it should be “suspended for suspicious activity.” The only thing I have been doing different is that yesterday I posted a lot of pictures via twitpic of my Halloween adventures (which I will detail in a later post.) Luckily, my account was soon reactivated, though without any word from Twitter support or any indication why it was axed in the first place.
Normally, I wouldn’t give a crap about a temporary suspension. Twitter has a problem with spammers and other shady types, and they’re doing their best to fight that menace. However, all my followers and people I followed are now completely gone. This means I have to go back through my memory of all the friends I had and manually re-follow them. Oh, and I have to try to do it somewhat slowly, since I don’t want to set off any new red alarms in Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms by mass following a whole lot of people in a short period of time. This wouldn’t bother me as much if I had actually done something wrong, but as I said, Twitter has given me no indication that this was due to anything other than a glitch in their system.
Update (11/01 16:45:) My account is back to being suspended. Maybe I was overzealous in re-adding a handful (maybe 5?) friends? Maybe twitter is borked? Maybe I am the victim of a vengeful person reporting my account? Regardless, I just want my account back.
Balls.
Update (11/01 17:30:) My account is back, with all my followers, followed, and lists back in order. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this is for good. No word from twitter on what happened… which I’d really like just so I know if there is anything I should do/stop doing to prevent this from happening again.
Update (11/02 13:47:) Response from twitter support: “We mistakenly suspended a set of accounts in the evening of 10/31; accounts affected by this mistake were automatically un-suspended by 1:30PM PST on 11/1. Based on the time you filed your ticket, we think it’s possible you were a part of this group.” So I guess I didn’t do anything wrong… good to know, and good on twitter for getting back to me. Case closed.
So late…
…but last week I was guest blogger on the fantastic and infamous xkcdsucks blog. I have posted before about attending the xkcd book release party, and I guest the regulars there liked it enough to ask that I do a full review week.
The reviews are here, here, and here. I know I don’t have the most incredible writing skills in the world, but I think it was pretty decent given the subject matter.
Admin stuffs
I’ll be tinkering with a new blog layout (too lazy to work on it offline,) so if the site looks funky from time to time, you’re witnessing my retardation.
Laptop cozy!
I made this today using the instructions from design*sponge:
I used the webcam on my EeePC so it’s a little blurry– I’ll post a clearer picture when I get back home.
In other news, I have been having some trouble with spam, so I added re-captchas to the comments.
I am a 28 year old from NYC who does a lot of nerdy, silly things. You can call me 'aloria.' I am most easily contacted on