Maybe I'm being melodramatic but I miss my Tweets. I joined Twitter on June 30 2007 and started adding updates, sharing links and chatting with other Twitter people. I just made a comment about posting my 5000th update. Then at some point in the past week my update count dropped to just just over 800. What happened to all my updates, are they lost for good? Had anyone else lost their Twitter updates? Is there an explanation for it?

In January I took over social media for Paragon Software. Some of the profiles were already created by someone in marketing on platforms I was familiar with like Twitter, Facebook and Wordpress. They were never updated and basically collecting dust. I started with Twitter since I seem to live in it. I did some tweaking on the @paragonamerica profile, it had about 6 followers at the time and started feeding in some updates and links to news about the company. Basic stuff but I had to start somewhere.  300 tweets later I am at 325 followers and growing a little every day. Now I would be happier if I had 3000 but I wont complain about some modest growth. There are some contributing factors like the company already maintaining the corporate @paragonsoftware profile. There is a strategy to having multiple profiles for the company, I'll explain that in another post. In the @paragonamerica profile I focus on updates for our corporate line of software and industry news that applies to the storage market. Since it feels like I have 4 other jobs with the company, social media is not a full focus of mine, I am glad to see that the little ...

Earlier in the week I was woken up by the loud sounds of something cracking and a couple loud pops. My first thought was someone was breaking into the house. I started freaking out. I cleared the house like I was in some Iraqi village and didn't see anything. Then I smelled the smoke. It was coming from my office and I started looking for flames. It stunk like plastic so my computers and the power outlets were my concern. I couldn't see what was burning and after several minutes the smell started going away. I was lost, I didn't see anything and after the smell was gone, trying to track down the source was pointless. The next morning as I started work, I realized one of my PCs wasn't working and then the light bulb went off. I pulled the computer from the cabinet and there was the smell. Turns out the power supply on the PC melted. I don,t know how the hell something like this happens but I'm just happy it didn't burn down the house. There wasn't much online that I could find about other power supplies that do this so I guess I'm just lucky. I ...

I had forgotten about this picture. I posted it on Facebook a while ago and realized it was never added to my Flickr or anywhere else. I think the drool just adds to the cuteness.

I've become obsessed with location based applications for my iPhone. The concept is easy to understand, where ever you go no matter where, click a few keys on your mobile phone and let the world know where you are. The little geo-apps can connect with your other popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and can even identify friends from these other services that are using the same location based apps as you. Yelp was my first introduction to using an application to share my whereabouts with my friends. Though I rarely used it because of the buggy interface, I got the idea and moved on to bigger and better things. Foursquare caught my attention a year ago when most of my network that attended SXSW started updating their profiles with their locations all over Austin. It started spreading like a firebug and next thing I knew I was seeing updates from people all over the US sending out digital beacons of their place in the world. For the most part the East Bay was untouched territory, most of the locations available in Foursquare here in and around San Francisco which has a higher concentration of people. Little by little ...

In January I started noticing some problems with my website hosted by MediaTemple. I was getting constant 'Database errors' and nothing I did seemed to work. I was hosting my personal blog and a handful of other sites that I like to call my "hobbies" and the fact that all of my sites were up 10 days out of the month was not making me a happy guy. I started using MediaTemple from a recommendation of a friend and they were an easy service to use and up until these issues, I had no issues at all.It got to the point that I was ready to leave and just start using a new host but I wanted to give MediaTemple some time to see if we could get my sites to a place where they were up most if not all of the time. Good thing their support and Twitter contacts were so helpful because if not, I would have made the switch and this post would not be going down the same path. Server Migration After a lot of back and forth on what was going on with the sites from analysing the overhead of the server to looking at specific ...

Life is good at Paragon Software. We just finished one of our most successful years to date. The momentum rolling into 2010 is looking really good for us. I am still managing the direction of the companies channel sales group and helping out with product management. Being in these two key sections of Paragon Software Group lets me get a very high level view of where the company is and will be moving to in the future. I am excited for what this year is to bring with new products and some additional technology that is needed and different enough to get peoples attention. One of the obstacles many companies face is the ability to get exposure to more people. Traditional marketing only goes so far and emailing news is not the best way to communicate with people and even worse if you want to have your message shared with others. Social Media seemed like a great venue for Paragon to shift into. The company has a corporate marketing team that manages a Twitter profile and a Facebook page but our region (America) wanted to do more. So we started creating accounts on social media sites so we can ...

I'm a huge fan of social media. I joined Twitter on June 30 2007 and after a few bumps in the road, I was addicted and even wrote a set of top twitter tips. I try to follow the trends and news around social media as best I can. Really more of a hobby and fascination to me than anything else. I would have loved to get a job in something social media related but that quest always evaded me. That is until recently. I work for a growing software company and they don't have much of a footprint in the social media world. Like many companies, they didn't know the difference between Twitter and a blog or that Facebook was for more than keeping in touch with their friends and family. Knowing that getting into social media and doing it right was needed, especially for a technology company, someone had to step up to the keyboard. That someone was me. I created the Paragon Software Twitter profile and a Paragon Software Facebook page and started looking for inspiration. I know my way around the popular sites. I've grown a healthy network of friends and followers. What I needed was a ...

Last month I met with a writer for a local Concord Ca. paper called the Concordian. The Concordian has been around a really long time. I should have asked the date they started. I couldn't find it on the website.The paper was mailed to everyone in the city. It was a free monthly newspaper that talked just about our not-so-little city. Not to be confused with the local blogs like Mayor of Concord or Claycord that fill the internets with news. Recently the paper has had to stop the mailings but still prints thousands of copies and places them in Concord, Pleasant Hill and surrounding area. The writer André Gensburger who is also the co-publisher for the paper first entertained the idea of talking with me a few months ago. He said my background would be something interesting that the community may want to read about. The topic of the article was to talk about how I have adjusted post Iraq. I agreed and thought this would be a nice thing to talk about. The last time I was interviewed by the media for Iraq was after coming home and talking to reporters that had read my Last Letter From Iraq. The ...