Twitter exists solely for people to answer the question "What are you doing?", and its users have been answering that question thousands of times per day since it launched. In an effort to find out what exactly Twitter's users are doing, I checked a sample of 500,000 tweets to see what the most common "-ing" verbs were. Listed below are my findings: the 101 most common actions and the number of times they appeared in the 500,000 messages.

Some interesting observations: "going" beats "coming", "sitting" tops "standing", "listening" outranks "talking", "downloading" wins out over "uploading", and in the feel-good story of the year, "loving" (#53) reigns supreme over "fighting" (#93).

My family was in town this week, and my dad brought with him a gift for me. He related to me how they had been doing some cleaning at their church, going through some areas of the old building that had been neglected for far too long, when a staff member came across an interesting item that appeared to be very old.

Despite its age, it was in excellent condition, but it most likely hadn't been seen by anyone in many years. My dad, knowing my interest in antiques, asked if he could have it to give to me. The other church-worker, apparently unaware of the value of this relic, consented.

So what was this antiquity, this ancient artifact retrieved from the bowels of a church? Click here to find out.

I've optimized my blog (and thus my Greencode Wordpress theme) for browsing on the Nintendo Wii. So if you read my blog on the Wii, it will look like this:

It was pretty easy, and you can do it too, by following these two simple steps:

1. Create a Wii-friendly stylesheet. This is similar to creating a mobile-friendly stylesheet, and it involves enlarging the text, removing superfluous crap, and just making your site easier to read from a distance. You can see the stylesheet I created here.

2. Serve the Wii stylesheet to Wii users. The user-agent string of the Wii will be something like Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en), so in PHP, you can accompish this like so:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], "Wii;") !== false){
[... wii stylesheet ...]
} else {
[... regular stylesheets ...]
}


And just for fun, I also added an "Optimized for the Nintendo Wii" watermark in the top-right corner and enabled the Wii stylesheet for anyone who adds "?wii=1" to the end of a URL. For example, here is the Wii-friendly version of this post.

My "Firefox 2 Addons Team" t-shirt finally arrived in the mail! I'll have to look into getting AOL to spring for shirts that say "I worked on Netscape 9 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a great browsing experience."

I've been thinking recently that it'd be fun to see what domains are listed first in the auto-complete for my URL bar for each letter of the alphabet. Shall we?

archive.org: a digital library of Internet sites. Most recently, I checked it to get a cached copy of the RSS 0.91 DTD.

blog.netscape.com: the official blog of Netscape Communications Corporation.

calacanis.com: The blog of Jason Calacanis, Internet entrepreneur.

digg.com: User-driven social content. A great place to stay current on (mostly) tech news.

chrisfinke.com: Duh.

fark.com: It's not news, it's one of the Internet's greatest time-wasters.

gmail.google.com: The best webmail application ever.

hyperculture.typepad.com: A fairly interesting blog that covers various tech news.

imdb.com: The Internet Movie Database. I probably used it last to see what other movies the actors from The Office have been in.

jacob.chrisfinke.com: My little brother's website.

kb.mozillazine.org: Documentation for Mozilla products.

lifeintheoffice.com: A blog that covers all things Office.

meatgasm.com: A blog focusing on the wonderful world of meat.

netscape.com: Social news with editorial oversight.

opera.com: The Opera Web browser.

php.net: Documentation for the PHP programming language.

q - None. Apparently, I haven't visited a domain starting with "q" in the last month.

reddit.com: Another social news website.

slashdot.org: The place to discuss the latest tech news.

techmeme.org: The place to find the latest tech news.

userstyles.org: A repository of styles for Mozilla applications. They have some great Firefox customizations.

videos.netscape.com: The Popular Videos channel of Netscape.com.

woot.com: An online store: One Day, One Deal.

xulplanet.com: Documentation for the XUL markup language.

youtube.com: Oh, you haven't heard of it? It's this obscure unknown website where people upload videos of themselves tubing down various rivers of the world.

zefrank.com: The funniest three minutes of my day.

I think this list sums me up pretty well. I'm not sadistic enough to try to turn this into a pyramid meme, but does anyone else want to reveal the A-Z of their browser history?

Time to download 698MB Ubuntu ISO via the University of Minnesota's fat pipes: 4 hours

Time to download 698MB Ubuntu ISO via 37 different users using uTorrent: 21 minutes

Here's something I can't stand about Digg:

Say you're not logged in and browsing the front page, opening stories and discussions in tabs (or new windows, if you're stuck in the past) as you go, and you see a story you want to either digg or bury. So you go to the login box on the left and enter your information.

Now, any decent system would process your login and send you back to the page you logged in on. (A better system would prompt you for login information when you try to vote for a story, and after logging you in, process your vote and send you back to the correct page.) Digg, however, will always redirect you to the last page you loaded in Digg, whether or not it was the page from which you logged in. So if I've opened a Digg discussion page in a new tab since loading the home page, I'll be sent there after logging in.

That is extremely lazy programming; instead of checking which page sent the login request, Digg must just store your last loaded page in the session and assume that's where you want to go. Come on, Kevin; is it that hard to just add something like

<input type="hidden" name="referrer" value="<?=$_SERVER["PHP_SELF"]?>" />

to the login form? With as many users as Digg has, you'd think enough people would have complained about it by now for it to be fixed.