TweetClouds.com is a tool you can use to visually analyze the topics you talk about and words you use most on Twitter. I ran the tool on my tweets, and apparently I use the word “really” too much. Linguistic crutch alert!
Author: josh
Caleb’s First Words
A few weeks ago, Caleb said what we consider to be his first word. It’s a bit of a cheat, since it wasn’t exactly correct in definition or pronunciation, but I’m willing to count it. The word was, “mamamamamamamama…” and he says it whenever he is distressed, upset, or uncomfortable. We think he knows it’s connected to Steph, since when he says it, he invariably wants her to come and pick him up or fix his problem, whatever it may be. It’s as though he believes her name to be synonymous with “Help!” or “Comfort me!”
Friday or yesterday (I can’t recall which), he said his second word. It was “Lella-ella-ella-ella-ella”, which is what he calls Ella. He doesn’t use the word when she’s not around. He doesn’t babble it. But he says it when she first enters a room or comes running up to where he is. We’re pretty sure it’s purposeful.
This afternoon, while at Dairy Queen, he said his third word. And I’m proud to say it was “Dada.” He looked up at me from across the table and just said it. Steph and I paused for a second, like, “Did he just say that?” Then he said it again. We encouraged him about it. Then Steph took him away for a minute and brought him back, and when he returned to the table and saw me again, he said it again. It was really exhilarating for me! I know I came in 3rd place to Mama and the dog, but I’m OK with that.
The thing that I’m pretty amazed about is that only yesterday he turned seven months old. I don’t know anything textbookish about child development at all, but people who do know tell me that’s pretty early for him to be picking this stuff up. So I’m excited about that too. We’ve got a real talker on our hands!
Now I’ve just gotta work on “iPhone.”
Upgrading to WordPress: the Good, the Blog, and the Ugly
WordPress 2.5 was released about a week ago, and it looked absolutely delicious to me. Seriously, I salivated. I was using Movable Type at the time, but it was extremely old (Perhaps four or five years old! Software! Web software!) because I had neglected to upgrade it. I should also point out that, having worked for years in a group whose sole purpose was to facilitate the updating of software, this is the height of irony. And yet I trudged along with MT 2.64 (or whatever) for years.
May I tell you what I’m getting out of this upgrade? Please? That would make me happy. Note that these aren’t necessarily new things in WordPress 2.5, they’re just new to me in terms of blogging software. These are mostly older ideas.
- Blogging via email. I did this post almost entirely from an email message! It’s like the blog software just disappears and I’m just writing email. That means I’ll probably post more frequently, and it’s more likely I’ll do so while I’m on the road or away from a regular computer. I can do email on the iPhone just fine, but I don’t want to write 500 words in a textarea in Safari Touch.
- Akismet spam blocking. Anyone who followed my old comments feed knows that while I often crowed about blocking so many thousand comment spams, quite a few still got through every day. For every fifty I would block, five or ten would sneak through and hang out for half an hour before I noticed and removed them. Still, I’m not one of those people who wants to moderate every comment and only show comments I approve. This is the Internet. It’s supposed to be a little Wild West. That’s a strength, not a weakness. I want you all to be able to have a little comment party with each other when I’m not around. I can’t do that if I’m playing monitor. I’m hoping the algorithmic brain in Akismet will work its magic so I won’t have to, and we can all feel satisfied knowing our comments are published immediately.
- Friendlier archive URLs. When my tracking software tells me someone went to /archives/001545.php, what does that tell me? Nothing. That’s what. And that URL doesn’t tell you anything either. But if I see someone visited /2008/03/26/bus-etiquette/, I know exactly what that is. And so do you. It’s nice.
- The rotating tag line is back. See, up there at the top? Yeah. Don’t get too attached: it could disappear just as easily. Just enjoy it for a little while. Also, it doesn’t change every time you reload the page. It’s something like every 5 minutes. So don’t drive yourself nuts. Just read early and read often.
- No more “rebuilding.” Movable Type 2.whatever always made me rebuild my blog. Perhaps because it was created before the widespread dissemination of PHP and MySQL on small-time hosts? I don’t know. Either way, rebuilding is a dead concept. Yay!
- A huge plugin repository. If I want to augment the functionality of my blog in any way, it’s likely someone else has already written it, and it’s up there now. Sometimes the quality isn’t what you’d want, but it’s all open source, so I can geek out on the code and fix it if that’s needed.
The design you’re seeing on this blog (shown here for posterity) is temporary. It’s really just a half-hearted attempt to get things looking somewhat normal (without looking identical to the default, that is) before I have time to redesign the thing. Hang in there. I don’t like the way it looks now, but I’ll be making tweaks over the coming weeks, and steering it towards where I want it to be. I’ll keep the archives and search functionality this time.
Enjoy! And thanks for reading.
Bus Etiquette
Many things have changed drastically for me over the last few weeks, but one of the bigger changes in my day-to-day life has been in my commute to work. Previously, my commute was only a 10-minute car ride, and parking was always free and usually plentiful. There were even times at which I walked or took a bike to or from Apple because I lived only 3 miles away.
Now, it’s a 35-mile trek each way, no matter how you slice it. What used to be a total of 20 minutes a day is now over 100. However, I don’t want it to sound like I’m complaining! My commute has become one of the most peaceful parts of my day.
When I first started commuting, I assumed I would drive. Then, being the cheapskate I am, I looked at what it was costing me. When I realized it was about $11 in gas each day and added the $7 in daily parking on top of that, I knew something had to be done. (Note to Al: if you want to make people passionate about their carbon footprint, don’t appeal to their morals or sense of eco-justice. Appeal to their wallet.) I discovered that a new “express” bus route had opened in Forest Lake only a few weeks ago, and a round-trip fare was only $5.50. Bingo! The travel time is almost identical to driving, but I don’t pay for parking and I don’t have to watch the road. I try to ignore the fact that my commute to the bus stop is now three times longer than my entire commute used to be.
I’m enjoying my bus time far more than I thought I would; it gives me a little while to read news, listen to podcasts, and write blog entries. Like this one! Which was mostly written on the bus this morning. I don’t have to disconnect from the Net if I don’t want to (Yay iPhone!), but it’s pretty easy to do so if that’s what I need that day.
The interesting thing so far has been learning about bus etiquette by observing the other folks on the bus. These are a few things that are totally new to me:
- Greet the bus driver when you get on the bus, and thank him when you leave. Almost everyone does this. Part of this could simply be the local “Minnesota nice”, but I think another part of doing this is purely functional: you want him to recognize you and not drive right past you. If you’re not at a standard bus stop, but at one of the in-between ones instead, it could easily happen.
- Speaking of non-standard bus stops: if you’re not at one of your route’s pre-scheduled stops, you have to be pretty aggressive about stepping out and waving an arm to flag down your bus. Mine almost left me once. On the flip side, if your bus isn’t the one approaching, step several feet back from the curb and look disinterested, or the driver might stop for you. And then you’ll feel dumb.
- When you’re paying for the bus, a non-obvious rule is in effect. In the morning, you pay as you board the bus. In the evening, however, you pay when you get off the bus. I have no idea why. It might have something to do with tracking each person’s point of origin and final destination. That’s all I can guess.
- The strangest / stupidest rule of all: when an express route bus stops at its final destination, the bus is still 95% full. In this case, do not stand up and prepare to disembark unless you’re in the front row. Wait for the row in front of you to stand, get their stuff together, and step into the aisle. Then you can stand. The first day I rode the bus I ignored this completely, treating it more like an airline. I just grabbed my stuff (assuming all the while that everyone was just being really slow), walked past a dozen or more rows of sitting people, and got off the bus. I probably cut three minutes off my commute just by doing that! The second day, I began to do the same thing, noticed absolutely no one else was standing up, got creeped out, and went and sat back down. Only since then have I bothered to notice the rhythm they’ve got set up. No one enforces it. No one has ever spoken of it. It’s just what everyone does. Honestly, I’d prefer we all treat it more like an airplane and just get our stuff and stand up, but apparently that’s somehow bad or foolish, and I don’t want to be a jerk, so I’ll play along. Perhaps that’s what everyone else is doing too.
Simplicity in Design
A couple nights ago I sat down and combed through some of my old entries, looking for a particular one, and just having fun reading them while I was at it. It’s not something I do very often, but it’s really wonderful to be able to go back over your personal history, see how far you’ve come and what you’ve been through, read your own story like a book, take the power those memories give to you, and then turn your eyes forward to your future.
One of the career-related entries I most enjoyed reading was Redesign (Whoomp, There It Is). I’m so glad I included a screenshot of the original. (Ow, background! Lesson learned: when you’re talking about visual things, include a static copy of that visual thing for posterity. Don’t assume it’ll always be there.)
Still, the fact that this blog’s general design is almost four years old strikes me pretty hard. On the one hand, I feel like it has held up amazingly well. It doesn’t look outdated to me at all. It’s very sparse, and that helps it to age well. The only significant changes I’ve made since the “HOLY COW ORANGE STRIPES” design were to mercifully turn it green about six weeks after I had created it, and six months later, make the background slowly shift through the color wheel. (What, you haven’t noticed? Come off that RSS feed and just sit on the actual webpage for a minute.) OK, I also added a simplified, floating drawing of my own disembodied head in the upper left-hand corner, and recently fixed it to display properly in Firefox, too! Also, IE 7, but we’re not on speaking terms right now.
I have to acknowledge amidst all the cool stuff going on here, the design has some downsides. I talked to Kevin Hendricks over email today about some of the issues after he really baited the hook on Twitter. (Apparently living with me for a few years has given him knowledge of my reactionary nature.)
I think it’s fair to summarize our conversation by saying that Kevin believes my blog would be benefitted by having an “about” section and some kind of archive access for old entries, perhaps visible and accessible on each page. (Correct me if I’m wrong there, Kevin.) Such things come as part of the standard package on blogs, and you’ll notice they’re missing from mine. Almost everything is missing from mine, in fact, and that’s purposeful.
My response to Kevin was that while I understand on very rare occasions people will go spelunking around in my well-hidden archives (as I myself did recently), it’s not what the vast majority of my audience is doing. 99% of you guys are coming here to get the latest news, and move on. So I want to dedicate something reasonably near 99% of my UI to that task. Kevin rallied that archives and “about” info are useful in many situations. He also agreed that they don’t necessarily require a traditional “side bar” (where archives, widgets, and other little info bits gather on blogs), as I let slip I was planning something more unorthodox and dynamic.
In the past, I’ve promised a side bar. Now, I’m considering reneging on that altogether and never having one at all. It would take up about 200 pixels of width on my screen, and it takes those precious pixels from the main content area where my almighty text, awash in its own splendor, resides. I want that space. I’m protective of that space.
But even more so, I’m zealous about displaying less where less will do the job. I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to bring out additional functionality and widgets without forcing you to lose those pixels. What I need to hear from you is simple: do you want access to my archives? Is that useful? Have you ever missed them? The rest (an “about” page, additional personal info, etc.) I’m pretty much sold on, but I’m not sure about the archives.
What say you, gentle reader? Do you pine to scour the depths of my textual time capsule, or are you content in the here and now?
Thank You
Almost four weeks ago, Steph and I boarded a plane in San Jose, California, bound for Minnesota. A lot has transpired since then, but rather than going into all that yet, I think it’s even more important that I take a minute and thank the folks who are responsible for us getting on that plane on time. Note this isn’t an exhaustive list, and doesn’t include all the wonderful time we spent with dear friends and coworkers, reminiscing and saying goodbyes. These are just the people who really broke a sweat to make this move happen for us.
Torrey and Shirley came to our house on the last day of packing and cleaning to help in any way they could. Torrey helped me to pack the final few boxes of our stuff, including the precious “nursing glider,” and gave me some sorely-needed friendship. When all your stuff is in a big white box and you’ve been living out of a suitcase for several days, it’s refreshing to have a friend who knows the proper response to, “I haff tvelve metchsteek.” Shirley, having never been to our place before that day, was happily cleaning kitchen drawers and a disgusting ceiling fan within 10 minutes of stepping through the front door. That’s some solid character. Where can one find more excellent people like these? I don’t know what I did to even make their acquaintance, but it must’ve been done very well and entirely by mistake. I have never earned such things.
Thank you, Torrey and Shirley.
Jenny and Kristin flew all the way from Minnesota just to help us out, and were absolutely instrumental in every phase of the operation. They helped pack. They helped organize. They kept us sane. They took us out to dinner. They put us up in a hotel! (This is a big deal when all your stuff is in boxes and your life is in chaos.) When it came time to give the house its final scrub-down before inspection, they worked miracles, taking on all the back-breaking tasks I knew had to be done but hesitated to start doing. I wish I had before-and-after photos of the laundry room. What a job!
Thank you, Jenny and Kristin.
Bob and Val brought their beautiful little newborn over to our house during a heavy and pivotal time of “PODS unit tetris.” Val and Steph kept each other company while they took care of the little ones, swapping stories and having what seemed to be much-needed downtime for Steph. Val also put a big dent in our kitchen packing to-do list. Meanwhile, it turned out Bob is some kind of packing prodigy, able to shift and twist objects in his head, combining them in unexpected ways to put large things into small spaces with no wiggle room left over. I learned quickly that if Bob said, “Maybe we should turn this on its side and put it up there…” that was exactly what we should do. Only those who want their stuff packed inefficiently question Bob. I did not. The PODS unit barely fit all the things we needed it to fit, and without Bob’s efforts, our impromptu Everything! Must! Go! yard sale would have been a lot more heartbreaking.
Thank you, Bob and Val.
Jason P. came over several times to help pack, and did a lot of the heaviest lifting along with Bob. But he also spent a little time with me, speaking to my soul, telling me what Steph and I have meant to him and others he had recently spoken to, and admitting that he hoped to find a way to sabotage our move so that we wouldn’t be able to leave. To the best of my knowledge, the closest he came to such sabotage was replacing the real box content lists on some of our packed boxes with lists containing items like “Death Star” and “lasers.” It didn’t slow us down, but like Jason himself, it was grade-A material.
Thank you, Jason.
Brian D. caravanned behind me for a 90 minute drive to Tracy, California, the first half of which was during rush hour. He has a newborn baby at home and barely had an hour’s notice to do this, and he volunteered. All so I could ship my Hyundai Elantra to Minnesota on time. Take special note that Brian loves politics like I love Apple, and he did this on Super Tuesday in the evening when he could’ve been at home, comfortably enjoying CNN. That’s like me missing a Stevenote. Heavy.
Thank you, Brian.
Ted and Scott came over more than anyone else to help pack and shift things around. They were both instrumental in the early planning phases of our PODS unit’s internal layout. Ted even came a couple times late at night. But he did far more than that. I was having difficulty selling my Honda Element with only just over a week-long window in which to do so, and I couldn’t afford to ship it. Ted’s response? He has some folks he’d like to see in Denver and Minneapolis, so if I can pick up the bill for gas (less than half the cost of shipping), of course he’s willing to drive my Honda from Cupertino to Mineapolis for me. Oh, and he’ll take only two days to do it. Is that OK?
Thank you, Scott. And thank you, Ted, times 2000 miles.
Let it be known: these people are amazing, and I am very lucky to count them as friends.
Twitter in Plain English
I don’t expect that you’ll all immediately go, join Twitter, and start posting. I don’t even expect that you’ll start following me there. I’d love that, of course, since it’s where I do most of my updates these days. But until then, I figure I’ll just show you what Twitter is about, and that’ll be useful enough. Enjoy the clever “Twitter in Plain English” from the fine folks at Common Craft.