Fifteen years ago, when there were very few agencies with computers in their cars (and I was a police officer), it would have been much harder and taken much, much longer to sort all that out. That is a common mistake among households with two or more vehicles, and when you have all the facts it's plain as day. The problem then was you had to "wait in line" for one teletype officer to get your information back to you in the order it was received. Then you had to wait to verify the follow-on information, etc. And, God forbid if teletype was down! ;-)

Glad it worked out OK for you, despite the ticket - and that the officer took the time to make sure you understood. Most folks have a hard time processing *anything* when they get pulled over, much less something confusing.

We get closer every day or so, believe me! The housing market here is still awful unfortunately. :(

What a great idea! Not only from the aspect of getting your input but for people to meet peers at the same time. Another incentive to move there...!

Thanks for this tip, Brad - when i post a tweet through my business I almost always use up all the characters. I'll have to figure out how to shorten them up...

I *only* use SMS for Twitter, Brightkite, and Facebook. If I have to login to a web site, I don't sign up for it. This only applies to social sites though.

Chauncey, I would say that Brad is definitely not intimidating - however, make sure you are prepared and don't waste his time (that blog post is very good advice) if you request a one-on-one meeting. If you are meeting him in public I highly recommend introducing yourself to him.

I thought you were pretty good with names - you managed to remember David and me (and associate us properly) after just one meeting - although maybe we got into your memory before the overload. ;-) I've found that if I don't think I'm going to see the person on a regular basis (like spouses of coworkers), I'm much less likely to remember their name - although I don't come into contact with anywhere near the numbers of people that you do.

One thing to consider is this: if I follow you on Twitter (or read your blog) based on reputation alone, and you don't have a good picture, how would I recognise you in a crowd? I met several people at Defrag that way - by walking up to them because I had seen their real faces as their avatar. I would be very hesitant to do that based on something that is drawn or animated. At least one of those people recognised me as well, from across the room. And yes, if it were a planned meeting, I would do research to find out what someone looked like, but in a chance meeting it's great to have the real deal.

Andrei,
Thanks for the info - that's very interesting. I had originally thought it randomly scanned and if it could find a rhyme within a certain amount of time, it would add, otherwise search backwards. I'd assumed a line would be discarded if a rhyme didn't come along.

The fact that you've created an orphan database is very interesting and cool - a lot more planning went into that than I thought! It's spectacular and I often check it to see what kinds of things end up there. The great thing to me is that sometimes a very sad tweet is accompanied by a very happy one - just showing the ebb and flow of people all over the world, all the time.

I have been using Mesh for quite awhile now, mostly to share files across home and work computers. I absolutely LOVE it and would recommend it to anyone. I've pretty much stopped carrying a USB drive because of Mesh. The best part is I that I don't even have to install Mesh proper on my work machine; I can get to the stuff without having to share it on a folder (my workplace has stringent rules about software installations).