BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

Bored? Not anymore!

So let's say you're there at home practicing your thumb twiddling.

 

 

And you're getting really REALLY good at it!  Well you have two options... 1: you can either enter the national thumb twiddling championship contest which I MAY have just made up and probably doesn't exist.  Orrrrrrrrrrr... 2: you can go out and do something!

But let's say you say well but there's nothing to do!  Or I don't know what to do!

Ok hang on there hombre or hombrette... or whatever a lady hombre is... I've got a solution to that conundrum.

Check... this... out...

Here's what you can do:

People like to post lots of things on twitter.  I know I'm a twit-a-holic.  I post all kinds of things up on that site.  Well, so do lots of other peeps!  Annnnnnnnnnd most of those peeps that be posting are out doing cool fun neat random nifty things!

You ask... well that's great but if I don't KNOW those people how am I supposed to find out what COOL things they are doing?????

Ok well... here's how!

Head on over to a website called twitpipe... www.twitpipe.com

That's a nifty site I found today that lets you filter real time tweets based on keyword and location.  It's mostly used for business's to promote their product and such by finding people who might be twittering about their business or product in a certain location and try to build customer base.  Ever had a random business follow you after you tweeted about them?  That's one of the ways they do it.

But you can use it to find cooooool things happening around you!

So yes go to the site and you'll see a few fields you can fill out.  The first thing you can fill out is within Miles or within Kilometers of a certain zip code.  You can leave that blank and it will search everywhere or you can say 20 miles within your location.  Depending on how much gas you have in your tank you can set that accordingly.

The next 3 fields are keywords.  You only really need the first one and you can ignore the rest if you don't care about monitoring more than one thing.   But you can also use all 3 for example I plugged in 10 miles and then I plugged in "Open Mic", "Karaoke", and "Quizzo" to see if there was any of those 3 going down tonight.  If people are doing it... and tweeting about it.... more than likely they are telling you the place they are at too!  Soooo then you can get an idea what what's happening where.

But let's say you don't want to do either of those three things... well there's another site called 4square that exports location "check in's" to twitter.  Now in computery world as long as things are consistent they can be used in a programming way.

Lucky for us 4square always posts tweets starting with "I'm at...".   This means if you plug in "I'm at" but without the quotations... just the I'm at part... you can see all tweets within let's say you chose 20 miles of your zip code.

I did this today and found a couple of cool things... for one... a lot of people were drinking.  That makes sense... it's St.Patties day... which is like an official drinker-y-ing holiday.  I worked today and then I came home and ran and then worked on music and watched a movie on netflix.  Sooooo no drinking for me... but yes lots of people were out gettin their pre-games/post-games and everything in between on at various pubs.

But there were other things that showed up too!  Some people were at the store... eh... not terribly exciting... some were getting gas... again... probably not something you'd want to do instead of twiddling.

BUT... in my quick messing around search of only a few minutes I did find two cool activities!

So the first thing that showed up was someone was at the Schuylkill River trail biking!

http://www.schuylkillrivertrail.com/

That's a neat fun activity to do!  Especially on a day like today.

Then I waited a bit longer and someone else checked in at the Sugarloaf Craft show!

http://www.sugarloafcrafts.com/

Both of those seem like pretty great solutions to the boredom thing.

There were some other fun things going on too... lots of resturants and things.  Some places I'd never heard of!  As well some people were checking into rock concerts and things.

Now another good way to see what's going on in your town specifially is to plug your town name in... usually people tweet stuff with town names when they are doing things.

So that also shows some interesting ideas.

 

If you are looking for specific activities you can always just plug in that activity and maybe see what's around.

Well there you have it so the next time you've got a lack of direction for your day... head over the twitpipe and see what others are doing!  Brain storm a little and then head out to something fun!