DigitalPretzel.com

Yet agian, Twitter has delivered me breaking news before any other source.

When United 1549 went down in the Hudson, my twitter exploded. What started as a few tweets were retweeted and tweeted again until they reached nearly every twitter user on-line at the time. They are the ones who take the first photos of the news from the cell phones and post it for the world to experience first hand.

Another example occurred on December 20th 2007, when Continental Flight 1404 went off the runway. Twitter user @2drinksbehind was the first to tweet of the accident. Followers of that user learned of the incident before any major media outlet.

While we still need our CNN or New York Times to give the full story, Twitter has a hand in alerting the public. Twitter has the potential alert the public to emergencies, disasters, and breaking news. It’s not just another internet fad.

According to my ophthalmologist, I am healing quite nicely from my bout with the shingles. My eye is the main annoyance now, as the rest of my face has since scabbed over and began to heal. I’m done taking antivirals, and my eye drops have been reduced from 4 times a day to three.

One thing I will eventually miss from this whole ordeal was my ability to come up with the most asinine responses to the people who looked at my face and asked “What happened?!”

Some of my favorite responses are as follows:

-”I cage fight on the weekends”

-”I was an understudy for Roy Horn”

-”Duuude.. I totally bailed on that Front side nose grind”

If you follow me on twitter or facebook, you would know by now that for the past week, I’ve been suffering from a case of the shingles, a viral disease initially caused by varicella zoster.

I had chicken pox as a child, and the virus remained dormant.

It all started the day after Christmas when my car was sideswiped by a hit and run driver. The same morning I had been awake since 3 am when Joshua was ill with a stomach bug and vomited all over his bed. Needless to say, I was tired and run down. The added headache of police reports and insurance claims turned me into a complete wreck. It was then that I became ill with the same bug that had joshua, and depleted my immune system enough for the virus to come back and get me.

But it did not appear on a part of my body that could be covered with clothes or bandages. It come out on the left side of my face. My forehead and in my eye. This past week I have endured more pain than I ever have in my life, and somehow managed to endure it with alternating doses of Tylenol and Motrin, and half a tablet nightly of Tylenol 3 a friend had left over from some dental work.

Tomorrow I return to the opthamologist to check on the blister in my eye and to decide if I need to continue the anti-viral medication. My Flickr set has some photos of the progression of the disease.

A lot has happened to me since the last entry on this blog. Moving, becoming single, taking a vacation, being in agony, moving forward, and a lot of opportunities to post decent entries on milestone events in my life that were ignored.

My heart was not into blogging like it once was 7 years ago.

Let’s start again, and see if anyone finds their way back.

twittering recently about comcast coming to my place, only to find that the electrician had not done his job (so comcast dude could not do his either) and only to be without cable for another week…. someone from Comcast was listening.

The twitter user @comcastcares found my post, replied asking for more info via e-mail, and now my new service appointment was bumpped up from a week… to 2 days.

Twitter is where it’s at.