Just a small post tonight. As I was going through my Twitter list, I’ve been noticing that a good number of people have been updating their avatars. I guess it has something to do with the change of season. I kind of felt jealous so I opened up Photo Booth on my MBP and started taking random shots. After some consultation, I decided to go with the following one.
I think specifically I like the hair and the intensity I have in the eyes. Works for me!
You know, watching the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics has totally been transformed by tweeting and contributing to the chatter at the same time. Everyone is so damn snarky and appreciative at the same time. It really does feel like I’m tapping into the collective mind.
If you ever get a chance, I recommend following along next time there’s a big spectacle that you know most are going to be watching. Twitter’s totally enriched this experience for me.
I was on lifehacker a few minutes ago and saw a link for EggWatchers. It’s a site that times out the cooking time needed to cook an egg to your specifications. After putting in your egg info, it prompts you to put your egg into boiling water. When you click on “start the timer” it picks a random YouTube video that’s as long as the required cooking time. That way, you get a perfectly cooked egg, all while being entertained. Neat, right?
Just as a test run, I told it I had a large egg that was straight out of the fridge, and I wanted it squidgy. It told me the cooking time was 6:40 and picked out an appropriate video. I was expecting something random and boring, but the video it picked up was actually quite cool. I just wanted to share it with you all here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d-tNXxTRBA
Chainsaw Maid: THEY are coming for your FLESH and BLOOD!
No kidding. If I was really cooking an egg I would have been thoroughly entertained.
Most of my thoughts over the past few days have been dominated by the race and all of the necessary preparations. However, that wasn’t the only interesting thing that happened over the weekend. On Saturday I actually attended a small get together of some other bloggers in the Toronto area belonging to the 20SB group. That group is a community of sorts for twenty-somethings that blog. I joined that group a while back and over time it’s put me in contact with a group of people that I would likely have never have known about otherwise.
It’s really fascinating how a group of relative strangers can get to know each other and feel slightly familiar without ever having met. For the most part, reading the thoughts that these people have put online as well as having a look at the occasional photo have brought life into the words. Part of me knows that there is a living, breathing, angsting 20-something on the other end typing away and crafting their own niche of the Internet. Even so, the image that’s most often generated in my mind is pretty much limited to an avatar and a generic voice. In the end, even if we’re in the same region, there’s a tendency to just draw a line and note the separation. It’s like: I’m doing my own thing, and they’re doing their own thing…and there’s the vast wasteland of the Internet that separates us. And so, this is where the meet up comes in. Bloggers tend to share personal thoughts and feelings, right? All of that is still impersonal to some extent. It really only becomes truly personal and engaging when your mind can make the connection between the words you see and an actual person that you’ve met. And that’s why I’m thankful to have had this weekend to meet some these people.
Now, I suppose I won’t go into too much detail over what I saw and what happened because, really, Erin already wrote about the night and put a good amount of detail into it. At this point I don’t think there’s all that much to add, if I’m being honest. Yes, it’s possible to meet a couple of crazies on the Internet, but immediately I knew that this wasn’t one of those times. From first impressions it seemed like everyone had a good head on their shoulders, which made me feel a bit relieved. If everyone was completely out to lunch I would have been running for the hills. Luckily, we all had a good time. I think there’s a great related point that Erin brought up in her post. We were kind of taught early on about the perils of meeting people online. Well this time nothing went wrong.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about how I’d be received. I think I came off well. Prior to the event I told myself that if I just acted like my usual self I’d be fine. In the end, I really was fine. Then again, I think the fact that this wasn’t the first time I had met people from the Internet helped me keep things in perspective. Prior to this, there was that cross-Japan tour that I did with a guy from Connecticut that I knew through a forum. Two years before that there was the Tokyo tour with nine others whom I hadn’t met at all. Interesting to note that I’m good friends now with one of those people. And before that there was a small group I met at what must have been the 2005 Fan Expo. So no, meeting people from the online world isn’t too new to me at all. Don’t get me wrong, the results can still be a bit too wacky for my tastes, but overall it’s been all right.
Hear that everyone? You’re aaaaaaaall right.
OK, so I’ve fallen asleep on the couch again while writing this so I’m ending this entry right here.
It’s an easy going Saturday night. After having my mind be all muddled over the past day or two, I don’t think I can write anything all that deep tonight. So, I’ve been thinking, why don’t I write about something a heck of a lot more terse. Maybe something that has a limit of 140 characters per missive.
Hmm. I wonder what that could be.
Oh, Twitter. I don’t understand how I got hooked onto this thing while I totally avoided Facebook. I suppose I saw it as an extension of blogging, which I’ve been doing regularly. It’s not uncommon for the term “micro-blogging” to be tossed around when people describe this tool. See! Blogging! Micro-blogging! It’s all related!
Anyway, I took a look at TweetStats just to have a look at some of my Twitter habits. It looks like I post tweets mostly in the evening with an emphasis at 10 p.m. Another popular time for me seems to be just when I arrive at work. I wonder what all of that says about me.
TweetStats tells me that the five words that I use most in my tweets are: “good, going, really, run, day.” Actually, until recently the word “work” was in that list. This seems to tell me that I tend to be optimistic and that I often write about my runs. Makes sense. If I were to make a graphical representation of the text of my tweets, this is what I’d get:
Over at Twanalyst, it’s telling me that my Twitter personality is: likeable, sociable, and fair. My tweeting style is: chatty and coherent. It’s telling me that I’m a “TALKER,” i.e. a “general keen conversationalist.”
Am I crazy to be watching such stupid statistics? Umm…yeah, I am. Even so, I find it kind of fascinating to have various things analyze stuff that I’ve written. Twitter’s 140 character limit forces people to get creative in showing their personality/values through their messages. You could almost say that the stuff that appears there is kind of distilled from a lot of noise. Is that making sense?
I’m nodding off. Before I sleep, I’m going to catch up with some of the people I’m following.
My friend sent me a link to one of those avatar making sites earlier this evening. This one is called Face Your Manga. As you can gather from the site name, it allows you to make an avatar in an anime/manga style. In order to feed my sense of vanity I decided to try to make a likeness of myself.
Man, doing that is harder than one might expect, eh? Your mind plays a bit of a battle between what it knows the avatar should look like and how it wants it to look. The mind is a wonderful thing, in that sense.
In the end, I figure that there are some traits that I needed to get in there: e.g. strong eyes, angry eyebrows, mild sideburns if they had them. Everything else was kind of “best fit.” In the end, this is what I ended up with:
In all honesty, I think it’s an OK fit. I think the brown jacket and chocolate shirt do it for me. If there were shorter sideburns, I would have used those.
Anyway, go on, waste your time, then go show me how yours turned out.
Due to various circumstances, over the weekend I paid a visit back to my account on LinkedIn account. I consider it a good thing to go in every now and then to make sure my information is relatively up to date. I also go through periods where I’m interested in adding new contacts. You never know when an occasion will arise when you’ll need to poll whoever you’re connected to for whatever reason, right?
Anyway, why am I mentioning this? Well, I was looking at my current position, and it said that I’ve been at it for 2.5 years. For an IT job, that’s a long time, isn’t it? With the amount of people coming and going, I’m almost sure that I’ve been there longer than more than half of the current employees there, if not two-thirds. It raises the question then, what is the shelf-life of a developer like me in a job like this? At some point I’m going to feel something that will tell me flat out that it’s time to move on. Thing is, give my personality, I may well be missing those signals altogether.
Is it even a good sign that I’m questioning myself like this? I’ve had these rumblings before. In the past I’ve always just stuck it out. I kind of fear that one day I’m just going to end up saying “enough is enough, damn it,” and everything will just fall apart from there. Of course, it might also put me in a favourable position such that I’d be on the verge of greatness. Ha! Wishful thinking, isn’t it?
For now, I’m able to merely entertain these thoughts before stashing them away. I will continue to be patient with this job because I do take a lot of pride in my work. I pray though that one day I will just know when it’s time. I want it to be obvious just so that there’s no questioning or doubting.
Of course, life generally doesn’t work that way, does it?
I need to preface this video with a bit of an explanation because, really, there *is* a train of thought that led me to post it here.
I was surfing around some random blogs at work (yeah yeah, I know) and came across a post by Muse @ I’m the Dot about her visiting a website about flatulence that amused and educated her. Edutainment at its best, I suppose.
I posted a comment there saying that she should look up this Frenchman named Joseph Pujol that lived in the late 19th/early 20th century. He learnt at an early point in his life that he had great control over his sphincter and had an easy time with air intake. What started out as a parlour trick for his peers developed into a full-fledged act. The act involved musical instruments, sound-effect imitations, blowing out candles from a distance, etc. That’s right, he became a professional fartiste. His stage name? Le Pétomane. You could crudely translate that into English as “the farting maniac.”
Side note: how the heck do I know about this guy? I think there was a mini-documentary on the guy that I saw long ago on Discovery Channel. Yes, my mind is a a reservoir of useless info.
Anyway, thinking about the farting maniac made me wonder if there were any professional farters in existence in this day and age. Then, I suddenly remembered, “Yes! There is!” I remembered back years ago to when Howard Stern had a TV show. I didn’t watch the show, but upon flipping channels I’ve caught a few segments now and then. One of the segments involved this guy from the UK named Mr. Methane. Yes, professional farters do still exist. I looked him up on YouTube and came across this video.
I swear, I don’t want to come off as the blogger that constantly talks about toilet humour. That being said, I can’t deny the fact that I actually have a blogging tag flatulence. I suppose this post isn’t going to help my case in any way, but this video needs to be shared.
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