I remember those words from my childhood: "We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by." The words were usually accompanied by a test pattern, and hopefully after a few minutes the station would "resume regularly scheduled programming."

Well despite our technological advances over the last thirty years, we still experience "technical difficulties" from time to time. At least the graphics have improved:

Aw, isn't he cute? The Fail Whale, as he's commonly known, shows up whenever Twitter is over capacity. Expect to see more of the big guy during the World Cup.

As adorable as the whale is, I don't quite get the accompanying message. "Too many tweets?" Yes, I know that means too many Twitter users at once, but the picture suggests the opposite problem—not enough "tweets."

"More birds! We need MORE BIRDS!"

I was looking back over some of my old posts today, and I stumbled across this one:

Why Are We Still Talking About It

You can read it for yourself—please do, I think it's pretty good—but the gist of it is this: I banned a list of fourteen topics from this blog including Number 8: "Any Twitter feeds not from Iran." At the time, I had no interest in tweeting myself and never imagined I'd have a reason to change my mind.

Well now I'm on Twitter and by mentioning this fact, even somewhat in jest, I violated my ban. Worse, now that I'm tweeting I'll have to drop this ban altogether.

I apologize for breaking a promise I wouldn't have made if I knew better. Consider me being on Twitter as my penance.

My wife Julia started a fun little game with Anna about a year and a half ago. Anna had just figured out how to pout to try and get her way, so one day she was pouting and Julia started tapping her index finger and thumb together like a bird's beak.

"Tweet, tweet, tweet . . . plppbt!"

"Wa Dat?" Anna asked.

"That's a bird coming to poop on your lip," Julia replied.

Soon Anna caught on. One of us would pout—as a joke—and she'd tap her index finger and thumb together.

"Teet, teet, teet . . . plppbt!"

"What was that?" one of us would ask.

"Da a boid dunna poop on ya lip!" she'd reply with a big grin.

One day I noticed that Anna had her lip sticking way out, so I decided to take it to the next level:

"Squawk, squawk, squawk!" I said, flapping my arms.

Anna pulled her lip back in and covered her mouth.

"I think I hear a condor!" Julia said.

Soon Anna picked up on the condor too, and the first time I saw her flap her arms and squawk I practically fell over laughing.

So why do I bring this up today? Well, after last night's Mid-Valley Willamette Writers meeting, I finally gave in and signed up for a Twitter account. I put it off as long as I could, but if I'm going to pursue this writing thing as a career and not just a hobby I've got to network, and the place to network is Twitter.

So after a year of resistance I've started tweeting. I just hope that my first impression of Twitter wasn't accurate:

"Tweet, tweet, tweet . . . plppbt!"

I just stumbled across NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), the idea is to post to your blog every day for a month. Apparently, there isn't a set month, unlike NaNoWriMo which is held every November. Just start blogging daily and do it for a month.

So let's see what happens. Either I'll succeed at NaBloPoMo and more than double the size of my blog by August 1st, or I'll FalFlaOMFa—that is Fall Flat On My Face.