Were it not for this laziness, I would have no idea about shell scripting, cron jobs, rsync, and other wonderful things techie.
I started to think about the subject of laziness as I was helping, in a super small way, the wonderful folks of the Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance on a campaign against the awarding of a contract at the airport to the shady company called ATS...but back to talking about being lazy!
Once the campaign had verbiage and an URI/URL for the action, the next challenge was to keep the URI/URL in circulation. If most posts to twitter and facebook have a 6 second lifespan (i read that somewhere...), then this campaign, to get traction, would have to get reposted with very little intervention on my end.
For that, I chose Sendible (http://www.sendible.com) because it is a tool that has a great slew of basic features and fills my needs for this campaign (oh, and sendible is free/gratis). Every 4 hours on facebook, and every 8 hours on twitter, the same 140 character message is posted with a link to the action. The best part about it is that once the action is moot, January 10, 2010, the messages will stop without any intervention on my end.
That's how a sysadmin has to think: take 10 minutes to find and sign up for a service that makes it seem like you do a lot of work...while the reality is that you did the work on the front end and can spend the remainder of your time procrastinating...or doing more work.
Another example is using something which takes 15 minutes to become comfortable with, Tweetdeck, to manage twitter and facebook feeds. Or, if you want something in your browser, Hootsuite...which now is getting better because it can schedule posts to wordpress blogs! Imagine that, from within the same tool you use to manage your twitter stream and social network (FB/LI) updates, you can also schedule posts for publication. Hootsuite is http://www.hootsuite.com and Tweetdeck is http://www.tweetdeck.com --.
I'm not someone who always works smart..but when I can, I will. If you want to support the taxi workers, please participate in this campaign: http://citizenspeak.org/node/1856 --Thanks!
PS: for the campaign itself, I went with a tool I used for anti-Sensebrenner HR 4437 at the behest of the ever kind and sweet compadre Greg Simons of CHIRLA (http://www.chirla.org). The tool is the free (as in gratis) Citizenspeak (http://www.citizenspeak.org).
