After my 15 minutes…
This space usually isn’t for anything personal but since it deals greatly with a project of mine it still fits. By now most people that know me have seen the New York Times article I was mentioned in (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/fashion/29twitter.html) First I want to say that the article was very well put, not demeaning on the “scolds” to me, and altogether fun.
I have read the comments on the Times website, tweets floating around, etc and have one question. What article were you all reading? I’m going to summarize and these numbers won’t be accurate, but:
- 75% want us to “get a life”
- 15% think we could spend our time on this earth for a higher purpose
- 19% other
- 1% are English majors and love this
I just want to make something clear about how @CapsCop works. It’s all automated and it’s fairly stable. This bot can run while I’m six feet under as long as there’s money in my bank account to pay for my server, I would never care enough to do all of this by hand. Honestly I don’t even care about who uses caps lock or not. This started as a 100 line php script I made in 10 minutes to satisfy my curiosity and has grown in to something that causes me to get death threats on a random phone number.
For those that say I should use my efforts to do something more useful: I have been programming for almost 10 years now and it’s not like this is the first thing I have ever made. Some of my projects are serious and most are not. None of them have taken off like this. None have gained the attention from the media. None generate the kind of response that @CapsCop has. I’m not going to say that my other projects are awesome but your media outlets choose what to cover and promote, not me.