I recently wrote a post that contained 140 characters of Lorem Ipsum for you to use when adding dummy text for twitter posts on sites and that.

Apparently, proper dummy content shouldn't be Latin because blah blah blah, pedantic pedantic pedantic ...

I don't see the issue. It's all just letters bunched together with spaces and punctuation to form words and sentences.

But anyway. I'm an accommodating kind of chap. So - for the peculiar particular amongst you - I proudly present: Philip the Purple Otter:

Far away, in a forest next to a river beneath the mountains, there lived a small purple otter called Philip. Philip likes sausages. The End.

* Oh yeah, and read this post in full for details on how to play a part in Philip's on-going adventures - and win a prize of reasonably good proportions! ...

Here you go:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed nec purus in ante pretium blandit. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nulla libero lectus.

:) Oh. And for those who prefer "real" content: 140 alternative characters to Lorem Ipsum

I'm currently looking through a number of my old sketchbooks and portfolio pieces from my time at art college, and also from my time studying for my Graphic Arts degree at university.

I plan on scanning / photographing a number of my best / most interesting pieces of work to add as bonus material on a semi-hidden area of my online portfolio on this website.

This material will only be accessible via my RSS feed, and also via links associated with blog articles that I may decide to write about the work.

To get back on point: the process of going through this stuff really sent my mind wandering back in time to some of the experiences and wisdom that I gained during my time studying. There are a number of useful things that I learnt back then that I still apply to my professi0nal practice today. One area that stands out is in regard to criticism.

Read onwards. Well. Downwards ...

Well, well, well. Seems it's all been kicking off today with all this 'twitter @replies' stuff.

Basically, the twitter people have taken away the option for users to see all @replies - having them hidden by default. See: Twitter puts a muzzle on your friends.

Folk went mental! And it didn't take long for a #fixreplies hashtag to get thrown in the mix for users to show their anger.

But now it seems the people at twitter are (kind of) back-tracking by making all @replies display by default (well, sort of I think?). See: We learned a lot.

Now. I had replies turned off by default when the replies were directed at people I don't follow, so this is going to be a pain in the bottom for me now. Meh!

But, my little beaky friends, I have an answer ...

Every body's doing it, doing it, doing it, picking their nose and chewing it, chewing it, chewing it ...

Nah. "Tweeting". That's what everybody is doing.

Twitter.com has been big for quite a long time, especially within the geek community, and now it's gone well and truly "main-stream". You can't move for tweets from Dave Grohl telling you he's 'just had some toast', or Gorden brown announcing that 'the downstairs loo is blocked' (made them up btw :P).

I will be warbling on about what it is that makes it fly, and what about it makes me spit feathers (you can't beat a good pun or two :P) ...