A local restaurant we frequent asked its frequent fliers if they should get involved with Twitter. And I hear this question a lot: Twitter, do I hafta?

Of course, people are getting on Twitter and using it because it's achieved critical mass and it's Simply What You're Supposed To Do rather than understanding what it's good for. Like with Facebook. But unlike Facebook, which is basically good for finding out about your former high school classmates without actually going to the reunion and having that Awkward Moment where you've expended the five minutes of conversation you built up over the last couple of decades and NOW WHAT?, Twitter is quite good for lots of things.

You can promote your blogging on it, like our friend Miss Destructo. You can ponder the ins and outs of magic, like our friend Wolven. Or you can use it for some weird conglom of all of it, like when I was lucky enough the other day to have Graham Linehan, the creator of The IT Crowd, relate both my admiration and a question to author Alan Moore–and get me a response. (It was my admiration for Moore's spoken word albums and when will he be doing another one–Answer: maybe next year.) This via Twitter.

But back to the restaurant, if we assume we're talking about businesses. Do they have to get on Twitter? Yes. They do. Do they have to use Twitter? Well, no.

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So here's a free idea for you: there's money to be made in somebody who can make a full-on search function that works as a no-brainer, quickly addresses any issues or bugs, and doesn't scare the shit out of you with their privacy policy.

Basically, if there is somebody that does this, they need to fire their SEO person, because I sure as hell can't find them through Google.

Here's the deal: in general, everybody's got way too much crap on their hard drives. You can buy a USB stick that's 400 times the size of the first hard drive I ever owned for $10. You can literally have a terabyte of storage on your desktop for relatively nothing. Hell, the new mondo desktop I bought has 750GB of storage on it. And I have a 500GB external drive just for my music and other backup purposes. Bottom line: storage has gotten stupid-silly and we're all now digital packrats.

I don't know about you, but I can't find my bloody car keys. So the prospect of 750GB of potential space in which to lose something is rather terrifying. And let's face it: the stuff is in a sort of quantum lost state–we know it's in there. It's not like it vanished. But we can't possibly tell you where. It might as well be etched on a rock off the coast of Malaysia unless you can lay hands upon it. (And I can't tell you how much I want some smartass with a smartphone to send me a pic of them standing on a rock off the coast of Malaysia.)

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Hi. And welcome back.

So here's the shot: you might have noticed that the website went into a bit of hibernation there. And the reason was simple: I had no idea what to put on here. In an effort to boost content on Needcoffee and boost the audience for that content, most of my stuff has gone there.

However, in recent weeks it's become clear that not everything fits over there, even as free form and chaotic as Needcoffee is. Sure, I can rant and rave over there as long as it's aligned with the core mission of Needcoffee, which is to entertain.

One thing that's not very entertaining, though–or at least hard to make entertaining–is looking for work. And talking about the things that I work on. So while it's fine to talk about, for example, Twitter and how it's amazing in the context of something like Bad Movie Club, it's another thing to talk about Twitter and why you need it for your business. I mean, a lot of people will tell you their reasoning for that, but a lot of it's rehashed and isn't thought about from the standpoint of normal people.

Let's face it: I run websites and can think in HTML and PHP code and, if you gave me the chance, could crank out content all day long. That's not normal.

Normal people don't want to have to think about this crap, nor should they. Normal people have lives. They are busy running businesses in the real world. They, you know, sleep.

This blog is now going to be about all the stuff that I should be getting paid for. All the stuff that I had to learn in order to publish and run a website and even a server. And the stuff I've learned working for somebody else.

So if you have a question–and I do get them from time to time–e-mail me at widgett at one tusk dot com. Or send me a message via Twitter @widgett. And let's see what happens.

I really wish there was a replacement for the Amazon MAB tool. Why is it so goddamn difficult to ping Amazon and collect an ASIN? You would think there would be a Greasemonkey script that would do this, or at least some way of pinging AWS to do it.

I would barter free DVDs with somebody who could write one. Or point me at one. Because I'm finding jack all when Googling for something.

I want to take him on tour with me.

Sitting at the gate awaiting my flight. On the airport wireless because…well, I'm me. And over the PA I hear (paraphrased) "Folks, I know there's a lot of people in the gate area waiting for standby seats. And I want to let you know that the chances are slim to none that that's gonna happen. The Pope was in town this weekend and everybody came in to see him and now they're trying to get home again. Your own hope is that there are people who checked in at home on their computers and we don't know if they're actually here at the airport or not. So as Jesse Jackson says, 'Keep hope alive!'"

As a P.S. to the coda, there was a booth at Comic-Con that was selling Exorcism Kits. "The Pope needs your help!" Priceless.

This promises high speed internet. This connection is about as high speed as me, in full snow ski wear, running through neck deep Jello while angry ferrets try to gnaw the eyebrows from my forehead.

In other words, it's utter shite. So much so that I'm blogging this on my phone because it is faster. If I could hook the printer to my phone my boarding pass would have been sorted a half hour ago. It's a testament to how much I don't want to have to–

Oh, downloading the driver will take an hour. Fuck it, I'm finding a Kinkos.