My mother sent me a txt msg today:

Subject: None

Message: Duh

FourSquare Logo

Until today I had really only been sliding around on FourSquare, making my self known when think about it, but now I have to up the ante.

Today I was unseated as the Mayor of Wal-Mart (4800 South 900 East, Salt Lake City, UT), by David. This will not stand!

Mayor of WalMart?

So in FourSquare you are basically playing a little game of land grab, only there is almost never any real land grabbing to do at first, so you can simply check in everywhere you go and eventually become the mayor. To become a mayor you have to qualify a few criteria:

• Have a FourSquare account
• Have a Profile Pic (on your FourSquare account)
• Have the most check-ins at a Venue (e.g. Wal-Mart)
• Have a previous check-in within 2 weeks

So until today at 2:15PM MST when I got this email:

Hey there -

Sorry for the bad news, but David has just replaced you as mayor of Walmart!

http://foursquare.com/venue/221122

Don’t take it too hard – a few more checkins and you could be back on top…

- foursquare

I was Mayor of my local Wal-Mart.

So?

So, the funny thing is this. Until The other day I was really already tired of FourSquare because I seemed to be the only person in my area using it, and that means I was pretty much winning everything all the time. Just as I was about ready to end it all, FourSquare made me a Super User – Level 1.

What does that mean?

Super User – Level 1 lets you edit other people’s venues, and is only a few promotions away from Admin when you get to create badges…

Badges?

Yes, badges. When certain criteria are met you get badges and apparently you can add new badges if you are an active enough player.

So now that I have been notified that I can become and Admin (if I keep playing) and now that I have been removed from Mayorship, well… I have to start playing harder.

So if you follow my @twitter I am sorry about the double tweets from FourSquare.

BTW – If you have an iPhone or Android based phone, you should play FourSquare

Cover Art

I recently finished reading Coders at Work, written by Peter Seibel (@peterseibel), and published by Apress. What an amazing book to read, I can’t even begin to express how much I actually enjoyed this book, and I know I am gushing, but this was a real treat for me.

I have always been amazed by the past of computing, the idea of computers as large as houses, filling entire warehouses for simple punch card technology, hell punch cards! I love hearing the stories of how things were, getting the first networks going, writing the first program for any technology, making something that everyone everywhere now uses and doesn’t think twice about why it works the way it works.

In Coders At Work Peter Seibel interviews some of the legends of technology including Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google Inc.), Jamie Zawinkski (major Mozilla contributor, @jwz), and plenty more.

Read more

Knowing you have a backup, and knowing you have a working backup, two entirely different worlds… as such I am now only updated to April of this year. Which sucks, because some cool stuff has happened. On the other hand, I have a fresh install of WP to work with.