Drew and Tina were having a conversation about Twitter–specifically about Jesus Christ’s naughty feed–and Tina decided to start her own Twitter account.

After I got the notification that Tina was following me, I clicked through and saw that she was still getting started on the Twitter thing, and I noticed she was only following two people:

Really, who else do you need?  Mike Lawson, and the Messiah.  We pretty much say all you need to hear.

This happened this morning:

I stole this mayorship back from Fadi.  And for the record, I don’t appreciate all of you perverts salivating over his douchey picture that I posted here.

He is the enemy.  Don’t forget that.

From twitter:

I know that this is getting serious, because this morning on the drive to the gym I started thinking about how I could squeeze in a workout on Sunday so he wouldn’t get an extra check in like he did last week.

God, I need a life.

Are you using Foursquare?  You know, the location service-based social network game.  The gist is that you “check in” when you arrive anywhere and it lets your friends know where you’re at.  Imagine Google Latitude knocking up Twitter.

The fun part, for me anyway, is that you get points for checking in.  The points aren’t really good for anything (yet), but you can gain badges for different check in combinations.  For example I received a “BENDER” badge for going out four nights in a row.

And then there’s the mayorships.  All you have to do is be the person that has checked into a location more than anyone else and you’ll receive the crown of mayor.  So gratifying.

At the time of this writing I’m the mayor of five location:

• Dan’s House
• The North Tempe Multigenerational Center
• My Work
• My Work’s Admin Offices
• My paren’ts house

There are two badges that I’m really dying to get (oh my god I’m a nerd).

I need the Gym Rat badge.  Yes, I said “NEED.”  To get this badge you have to take ten trips to a location that is tagged “GYM” in a thirty day time span.  This is important to me because I’ve made a recent decision to regain control over my health.

I also need the Super Mayor badge.  To get this badge you need to hold down 10 mayorships at the same time.  And it can never be taken away from you!  I kind of suck at mayorships right now…I’ve only got five.  I just need to get better at checking in at the bizarre places I go where people don’t have smart phones.  For example, maybe it’s time to go visit my friends next door in the senior center.

I’ll keep you updated.  I’m not one of those super-annoying Twitter people that broadcast every god damn location they visit.  I only broadcast when I win a mayorship, or when I unlock a new badge.  So if you want to follow me on Twitter, go here.

I’m sorry if this is super-nerdy…I feel as obsessed as a World Of Warcraft gamer nerd – but at least with Foursquare you’re out in the real world.

To quote Neil Sedaka, “Breaking up is hard to do.”

It’s especially tough nowadays when all of our lives are intertwined through our blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts and the super stalkery location-aware apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.

It took a week or so for Dan and I to figure out what the next few months were going to look like.  We’re both pretty smart people, and we thought that we had all of our bases covered and were pretty prepared to deal with this new phase in our lives.

One tiny problem that we didn’t think too much about was how our virtual lives are intertwined.  I know that he reads this blog (hi).  We read one another’s Twitter feed.  We follow each other on Foursquare and Gowalla.  An eighth of my facebook friends I know through Daniel.

It’s complicated.

For example, I changed my Facebook status:

And it was a very calculated thing.  Who is going to see this, I thought.   And who should I tell in person first.  I’m facebook friends with my nephew…so I called my mom before changing my status because she might die if she heard this kind of news secondhand.

And to make these muddy waters murkier, I need to figure out how to blog and tweet without censoring my message for fear of how Dan might read it.  And then I’ll work on not over analyzing the things that Mr. D puts on his blog and twitter feed?

Fucking hell.

In 1962 when Sedakas wrote his famous breakup song, he really had no idea.

This just showed up in my inbox:

Isn’t that the guy that OJ someone stabbed outside of Nicole Brown-Simpson’s house?

Blogging is dead.

Well, “traditional” blogging anyway.  Microblogging has totally stolen everything valuable from traditional blogs (like this one) and made it easier to connect with other people, share parts of your life, and get others to respond.

I’m playing around with Google Buzz right now.  And so far I’m kind of impressed with how integrated it is with my already established web of Internet contacts.  It knows that I want to see the newest photos posted by that friend-of-a-friend, and it knows that I want to know what Daniel’s up to.

The shitty part about microblogging – Twitter, Facebook to a degree and now Google Buzz – is that it kills a lot of the motivation I’ve ever had to blog.  Why do I need to log into WhatSomeWouldCallLies.com and complain about a messy co-worker [posted here on December 2007] when I could just pound out my frustrations in 140 characters or less?

And on a good day, this blog has about 40 visitors.  40.  Lame.

On Twitter I’ve got 353 followers.  And let’s assume that only one quarter of those 350 Twitter followers are actually regularly checking their feed, that’s still more blog visitors that I see daily.

Really, I need to think about what my purpose here is.  If I just want to socialize, share links and post pictures of Olive and Beezus then maybe I should be using social networks instead of this blog.

What do you think?

I tweeted last night that I was drinking a daiquiri made with Crystal Light, and I had a few people ask for the recipe. It’s so easy to make them, so I made this quick video:

This is serious.

I’m toying with changing my Tiwtter avatar, but I want to make sure I’m making the right choice.  Currently, my twitter picture is this:

I like having my face.  Too many people have random cartoons or pictures, and you don’t know who they are.  So I really want to keep my face as part of the picture.  Another important thing to keep in mind is if the picture matches my twitter page.  To be honest, the picture above matches my prior design (which was dark wood and dark blues and browns) but my new design is lighter wood with blues and reds.

What a dilemma.  I can honestly say I know what Terri Schiavo’s family felt like.

So here are the pictures I’m toying with.  Let me know what you think.  I’ll post the photo full sized (2oox200) and then I’ll post a screen shot of what it would look like if it were on twitter.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

So help me decide.  Which works best??  And while you’re at it, follow me on Twitter:

I tweeted this afternoon:

Happy Monday! Look at the to-do list!

I also linked to this picture I took from my telephone:

And @FlitterbyG responded with:

@MrMikeLawson Ever try ‘Remember the Milk’? It’s been keeping my life sane for a few months now. I even have repeating reminders for BGLs.

And the truth is that yes I have tried Remember the Milk or RTM.  In fact I got super excited about RTM and had it all linked up to text me reminders and I integrated it with my gmail.  Then I slowly lost interest.  I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn’t have tons to do on my to-do list.

I’m giving it another go.  And like FlitterbyG, I’m going to even put in a BGL testing reminder.  Looking at a paper to-do list like this one every day will kill me.  What I usually do is once the paper is full, I turn the sheet and add all of the un-done things to page #2…but as you can tell, there are quite a few un-checked items on my list.

So I’m going to give electronic to-dos another try.

Oh, and it is also helpful that my cellphone (the amazing G1 that runs Google’s Android software) has an application that allows me to manage my RTM list.

This email made me say, “wait, really?”  And then it turns out that he just has a really unfortunate name.