The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469

I can’t help feeling a little sad.

The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were – in the truest sense of the word – delightful.

Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.

As I tweeted when I first started following her:

I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873

Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.

Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.

16-bit Intel 8088 chip by Charles Bukowski

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
five one dot five one zero five
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
minus zero dot one two five one four one
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Confused? This should help you out.

*Actually I believe @philcampbell mentioned it first and I agreed.

I tried it out once on Twitter but it didn’t really work. Plurk’s self-contained conversations are much more suited to it though.

Knowing that there was a small team of folk online and ready to go I began with:

Once upon a time on a dark night, something stirred in a Birmingham side street… what happens next plurkers?

It was greeted enthusiastically and a handful of people began contributing to the narrative.

You can read the story here.

The story was location-based so I thought it could be fun to plot the locations on a Google map. Someone on Twitter suggested the Birmingham side street could be ‘Needless Alley’ which is a real place in Brum. Perfect!

In creating the map I was inspired to add satellite co-ordinates into the narrative as a plot device so these were discovered engraved on the back of the protagonists watch in chapter one.

Quite how the map element evolves, and whether other web elements are invoked remains to be seen but I like the notion of layering the narrative in this way.

Because he’s a master of such things, @philcampbell suggested creating a podcast out of the story but I’m not best qualified to take this on.

What I do think could be fun though would be doing a live reading, with two or three voices and possibly someone ‘operating’ the google map etc. But we need to see how the story evolves first. What particularly excites me about this is that the story might be being ‘performed’ as it is being written by the audience.

We’ll have to see about that. For now though, come to Plurk and help write Jonny Snake’s destiny.

April is going to be a busy month one way or another so I thought I’d draw up a list of nice things to do in the moments when I’m not in total meltdown…

• Visit Kew gardens (inspired by Catster and Jude)
• Take a dog for a walk (anyone got one I can borrow?)
• Get along to Mapping the imagination at the V&A and Listening Post at the Science Museum
• Spend an afternoon at Spitalfields
  (although I won’t be getting my camera out – thanks for the tip off @helenium)
• Buy peonies from Columbia Road flower market
• Picnic in the Rookery
• Go to Dungeness
• See Persepolis and Lars and the Real Girl
• Say ‘hi’ to everyone at Tuttle Club (in person, not via Twitter!)
• Redeem my Sanctuary voucher

And now for something I don’t want to do this spring (but have to anyway):

• Say ‘au revoir’ to my bezzie mate as she and her man are moving to the Isle of Lewis

Question: Who are the most eligible men in UK tech?

Nominations (and phone numbers ) in the comments box please!

Of course, most of the time the things we use are so badly designed it isn’t actually the person using it’s fault. But sometimes, just sometimes, it can be blamed on sheer stupidity.

People who know me will also know how much I LOVE Charlie Brooker.

I love complex gadgets. What I can’t stand are idiots who don’t know which buttons to press…

Thanks to Daniel Miller for this particular insanity.

Shunt:

The two stars missing is down to the DJ playing a somewhat random mix of quite bizarre tunes. All vinyl though which is why it’s a 10 and not a 9.

Would make a fantastic date venue (c’mon boys!).