I sometimes see people post on Twitter to the #followfriday category. Today I decided to go for #unfollowfriday.

It was a tough decision, honestly. I like the variety of what the people I follow on Twitter bring. Some are of a professional interest, others were of more personal interest to me, and still others were friends. But I have so much crap flying by on Twitter that I rarely even fire up a Twitter client because I just don’t care.

So I went for broke and removed most of the high-volume Twitterers I follow, along with a few that I never should have followed like snoopdogg. I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings, but I just couldn’t keep up with all of the tweets. Now I’ve got a pared-down offering so I can savor each tweet.

Russian gas giant Gazprom formed a joint venture with Nigeria’s state-gas company, and chose to name their new venture Nigaz. Most people reading the news respond with, “Are you serious?!,” or just burst out laughing.

The BBC has an article about the poor choice, explaining that it’s not pronounced the way you might be tempted to pronounce it (but not in mixed company), and interviews a branding consultant who states, “People will soon forget that the name sounds bad.”

Really? People will soon forget that naming your African joint-venture “Nigaz” sounds offensive?

What do the gurus think of this (barebones motherboard + Dual-core Atom 330), this case, and a pair of these? Oh, and go whole hog on the memory.

$335.45 for a PC-based fileserver with 2TB of disk, 2GB RAM, and minimal power usage. Put Linux on it and make it an iSCSI target, or use NFS. And Samba gives Windows clients support, too. Maybe you want something like Openfiler?

In an ideal world, I’d spend a bit more and have a machine with a “good” NIC (a high-end Gigabit card), hardware RAID (just basic support is fine), and three or more disks. But this is small and simple. I want to set it in a corner and forget it, and just mirror the drives via software RAID. Thoughts, anyone?

Could I just go on record as stating that raining nonstop for a month is not natural? Something is wrong.

I just checked the 10-day forecast. Guess what? Eight days of rain! Saturday, July 11 will be warm and partly cloudy. Although, frankly, I don’t believe that.

Anyone want to help me build an ark?