As we bid farewell to 2008, I’m looking again at the places I’ve been spending my time online. Last time, I attempted to chart all the places where I actively create content. I decided this time to catalog just the sites I use the most, and try to classify the activities that take place on each. I came up with these categories:
consume RSS feeds in Google Reader, music on Last.fm, all sorts of stuff on miscellaneous sites
Some of these sites span multiple categories (e.g. - most sites have features that support conversation), and I do show some crossing over between two, but I’ve just tried to show the categories they fit in best, based on my most typical uses. I’ve also started drawing the connections that track the flow of info from one site to another. I’m mostly interested in how publishing can be automated, so in future explorations I want to try to focus on individual flows (e.g. - a photo on Flickr is used in a blog post, which gets automatically published to the Twitter feed, and aggregated in FriendFeed).
(Tips and Tricks from 4 Grad Students Who Made Over 50 Games in 1 Semester)
Old post, but a good one, exploring concepts like rapid iteration, embracing failure, and encouraging creativity with constraints.
Read the post on Gamasutra.
I’m working on a new Twitter bot. It’ll be a fun one. Mass-user participation. Tied to an existing brand. I expect Cease and Desist letters to come swiftly. But… we’ll see.
I may have the opportunity to design the jerseys for a local mountain biking team. Here are the designs I pitched, initially. The logo was a real challenge to work with, as I wanted to come up with a bold, aggressive design for the jersey, while the design of the logo does not feature any strong lines, and is contained in a very static circular shape. As you can see, I’m suggesting a departure from using the logo as is…
I was tagged by Rosie and Vinnie in this seven-things meme. (That doesn’t count as one of the things.) Here’s the deal:
Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
Let them know they’ve been tagged
So, here are my things:
My last named used to be Brubaker. My mom was single when she had me. (Call me bastard if you want. I prefer lovechild.) She married the guy I call Dad when I was one. We took his last name and he adopted me.
I’ve been working as a graphic designer long enough to have done “paste up” with a hot waxer. (But it was at a newspaper, so you really never know how recent that could have been… for the record, I think it was 1997)
While in college, I worked as a bicycle courier in Washington, DC. On a BMX bike at first, until I saved up for a mountain bike. Saw the insides of a lot of cool buildings. Best job ever (except when it rained).
I was a graffiti artist during the college years as well. The courier gig was very handy for scoping routes and finding new spots (spots for legal painting, of course…). Being a courier really made you want to be a graff writer, as evidenced by all the pen & marker tags you’d find on the walls in the freight elevators…
My best friend in college died sophomore year. We dropped him off at the fraternity house early one morning after being out all night. We got a call later that day, and learned that he’d died after apparently falling from the roof. We never learned exactly what happened, but there was no shortage of speculation, or feelings (and accusations) of responsibility. I remember him fondly, and am reminded of him almost every day by something I see or hear that I know he would’ve enjoyed.
I raced in the 1997 BMX world championships in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CN. I had no hopes for a top finish, but a top 10 national rank qualified me to go, so I did. (Bonus observation: Saskatoon is hella boring.)
I was a casualty of the dotcom bust, when my company let go about 75% of its employees, and all but one of its lines of business in December 2000 (happy holidays!). I think they spent way too much dough on marketing, and too little on, uh, actual work-ish stuff. I still have the mugs to prove it. And the mousepad, and the t-shirt, and the personalized jellybeans that look like pills… okay, now that’s kinda strange. Anyway, I quickly got a new job at a software company, but come December 2001, once again I was laid off. Flash forward to December 2009. Bank of America, my current employer, announced yesterday that it will lay off about 35,000 employees over the next 3 years, as a result of the Merrill Lynch merger and the general in-the-toiletness condition of the economy. I’m hoping I’m one of the keepers this time around…
Reverted my blog theme to default temporarily, to demo this event calendar plugin (over there on the right) for a client. The super-awesome theme I was previously rocking was making a few weird things happen… Update: bye bye default template
We just spent $200 (a month before the holidays, in the worst economy I’ve seen in my lifetime) to send my daughter on this mandatory 3-day field trip, close to $100 more to outfit her with all the required items on the list, and another $200 so my wife can chaperone, because there’s no way in hell we’re sending our 9-year-old on an overnight trip without us. To top it all off, the destination is some sort of Christian retreat/ministry. Can I get a “W.T.F.”?! (This is public school, by the way.)
Supposedly, the curriculum will focus on environmental and ecological issues. Let’s hope they stick to that and don’t get too Jesusy on us. I’ve encouraged my (Jewish) wife to be skeptical and speak up, especially if anyone needs to be reminded about evolution, or separation of church and state…
Expectations are high. Do not screw this up.
Update: I got a text message at 9:47 am that the bus finally arrived to pick them up at the school. They were scheduled to depart at 7:00. Not off to a good start…
Had a great time at WordCamp today. The crowd was a great mix of individuals with a highly varied level of experience with blogging. Twitter was a popular topic, and by a show of hands, it looked like about 80% of the ~100 people in attendance were Twitter users.
Personally, I saw a lot of familiar faces, connected new faces to familiar names, and connected with some folks for the first time. Here’s the run-down, in no particular order, as best as I could manage:
Wow. That’s a boatload of Twitterers. And that must only be about half the people who’s hands I saw raised. If I forgot to add you, or just never caught your twitter name, please let me know in the comments.
PS - maybe I should mention that I am @budesigns. :0) Also, the event has a Twitter presence at @cltwordcamp.
