… but I never know how to express them. 

Fortunately, I have Wordle to help me. 

 
(click to enlarge as PDF)

The above graphic represents my tweets. 

What’s that you say?  “What’s a tweet?”  A tweet is something I twittered.  It’s a short one-liner I presented to the world through twitter.  And the above “word cloud” represents all the words I used in all my tweets since I started using it in October 2007.  The more common the word, the bigger it’s representation.  Common words like the, and, a and wtf are removed for clarity.

Here’s how I did it:

1. I took all the words in all the tweets I’ve done so far on twitter
2. I massaged them a bit with vi and command line text tools (to make it all lower case, get rid of URLs and HTML, and get rid of “new blog post”)
3. I submitted the resulting text to Wordle
4. I got back a word cloud summarizing all of my tweets.  Made the graphic and the PDF.
5. (I found Wordle through Jonathan Coulton, who found it through Brad Sucks.)

Yeah, I guess I have some kind of twitter-crush on Dave2 (blogography).  Whatever.  I also see absurdist and snackiepoo and gally, avitable, watchdog, jestertunes, mr_shiny and martymankins.  All these people are on twitter and get replies or messages from me.  You can join twitter with us and get in on the fun.

This got me thinking - what do my post titles look like? (what do I write about?) What about all my posts? (How do I write about them?)  What about the comments?  (What do YOU write about?) I didn’t have to wonder long - I just exported my comments, titles and posts from my WordPress blog’s database, did the same massaging and then made myself some graphics.

whall.org post titles Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

whall.org posts Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

whall.org comments Wordle:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

I especially like the java interface where you can change the font, layout and color scheme and it renders in real-time.  Very slick!  Nice job, Jonathan Feinberg!

And the final result?  If I mash up all the posts, post titles, comments and tweets?  I get a decent summary of my online presence:

(click to enlarge as PDF)

Yup.  It says it right there - “good blog.”

What do you think of when you see this icon?

Evidently, we’re SUPPOSED to think of a thumbtack marking a spot on a map.

I, on the other hand, think of someone on a drinking binge.

But that’s just me I guess.  And for me, this specific someone has a different colored arm than their face, and is probably a distant relative of Pac-Man.

I think I “get” the geotagging concept - you write a blog post, take a picture, tweet or utterz something, and you tag your GPS coordinates to the entry itself so you can map it.  Maybe the device you’re using (camera, phone, computer, AI) does it by itself or maybe you add the tag later.

I can see some uses for this - like Twittervision is kind of cool (especially the 3d view), but it’s not literally geotagging.  It does get the idea across, however - you can see visually where things happen.

Do you use geotagging? 

Time Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Internet service offers a $10/month “turbo upgrade”, which makes the already-fast broadband connection accellerated to 15MB/s download and 2MB/s upload.

(Wayne dramatically waves arms in horizontal arc)

Discuss.

Based solely on the title of the Microsoft Roundtable discussion I attended yesterday, I must say my expectations were not met at all.  Here’s the invite I originally received:

At first, I thought - hey, Microsoft is joining Ford and Mcdonald’s in their open embracing of the Gay & Lesbian agenda and actually hosting a lunch by, with or for Bi-sexual executives.  At the very least, I figured I’d learn something new, since I have virtually zero experience with bi-sexuals.  (this also means I have zero experience with virtual bi-sexuals).

Well, I did learn something new.  Evidently “BI” is short for “Business Intelligence.”

(crickets)

Tough Crowd, Tough Crowd.

Anyhoo, we learned Microsoft’s open embracement of business intelligence tools, and about portals, reporting, data presentment and all sorts of buzzwords they call their own.  Of course, BI is not foreign to me, but it’s not my main focus at my job.  I do pieces of this via pockets of technology, as do other departments, but I wouldn’t say we have a specific BI initiative at our company where we all rally behind one common yell of “monetize our data!”

The main take-away I had from this event was to learn about a product from Microsoft called PerformancePoint.

The guy ran through some demos of this product and WHOA HOLD THE PHONE CHUCK (note to self: call starkist).  I’ve never seen a tool so cool as this for drilling down through data and pivoting this, that and analyzing stuff.  I’m an avid user of PivotTables so I’m used to cutting through large amounts of data and getting anomalies out there into the open.  But this thing blew me away.

I’m definitely going to be playing with an eval version after we finish our migration from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS (SharePoint) 2007.   Since we have corporate data in many locations (five major campuses) via many sources (Oracle, SQL Server, mysql, Project Server, sharepoint, fileshares, email), utilizing something that can help consolidate it will definitely be of use.

Actually, I’m not talking about the following video: 

Although, it is quite a cool video.  And song.  I vote this video for Most Creative Use Of Treadmills In A Music Video.

No, I’m talking about NewsGator Go!, replete with trailing exclamation mark.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with a “feed reader,” here’s the concept:  Reading blogs, although fun and good for your health, can sometimes be a chore, especially if you have to remember to visit each of the sites you like to read, and if you have to calculate how long it’s been since you’ve been there, and if you have to scroll down to find the last entry you read.   Sometimes you waste your time simply by going to a blog and they haven’t written anything since the last time you visited!  The NERVE!  Don’t they know I’m sitting here, waiting to be entertained?!!?!? 

Why can’t someone invent something so I can more easily read all these blogs?  And sheesh, I left a comment yesterday somewhere and I don’t remember where it was or which blog entry, but I sure would like to see a response!

That’s what a feed reader does.  It’s kind of like reading email, but instead of reading up on the latest male enhancement product or must-have narcotic, you can be notified and manage the new posts (and comments) that people write on their blogs.  Most blogs support a little thing called “RSS” which is a fancy way of saying “it works with a feed reader.”  It makes it possible to read and catch up on hundreds of blogs instead of just a few.

I’ve tried a few feed readers along the years, like Bloglines, Google reader, Opera, IE7, and found them all a little helpful but not tremendously helpful.  When I tried FeedDemon a couple years ago, I liked it a LOT and decided to buy it (it’s free now, by the way.  Way to help a brothuh, guys.)

The unique thing about FeedDemon / Newsgator is that although you might read blogs from many different places (browser, desktop, cell phone), it syncs up your feeds and read/unread blogs between all of them.  This is huge!

I can read my feeds from my desktop with the powerful FeedDemon client (Windows only).

I can read my feeds from any web browser with NewsGator Online.

I can read my feeds from my blackberry with NewsGator Go!

It is so incredibly productive and pleasing to me that I can be on my cell phone, catch up on a few blogs, even comment, and then when I get back to my desk, those entries are marked “read” and I don’t have to catch up again.  If I add a new blog to my list while browsing the web, it’s added everywhere.  The converse of this is probably more important - when I remove a blog from a list, it’s removed everywhere.

I can even install a toolbar into my web browser that lets me auto-subscribe to feeds that it auto-finds as I browse the web. 

Band Name / Album Art Meme

So I did a meme post yesterday (wrote my own) and realized I’ve never done a meme before.  Never was interested in them.  Mostly they seem pointless, too long, and frankly, a little too nosey for my tastes.

But a few have caught my eye.  On Avi’s site and Sarcastica’s site and Dave’s site I noticed the Band Name / Album Art Meme.  And what they came up with was actually eerily like an album cover.  I could totally see someone’s album looking like that!

So, would mine look good?  Would it seem inspirational?  Would it interest me in purchasing the album?  Let’s see.

Not bad.  Not too good, but not bad.  The rules are here for your convenience (copied from Sarcastica)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article is the name of your band.

2. http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last 4 words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The 3rd picture, no matter what, is the album cover.

Then make your picture and post it on your blog.  (note: if you don’t have a blog, but you follow the steps, you could email me the results and I’ll make your album cover and post it in the comments here)

Wayne’s note: it seems that this would be pretty easy to automate, so instead of having to do the work, a script went out and got the things, randomly placed the text on the image and voila! you have your album cover.  Anyone seen that yet?

Dilbert Widget

Those really smart and funny people over at dilbert.com have come out with a widget, and it’s in pre-release. You can embed it in just about any blog or web page, and it even integrates with some of the services to just add right in. I do my embedding the old fashioned way (via code) but I was still impressed with what it supported.

What does the widget do? Well, it has all the comics, IN COLOR back to 2005. Not only that, but you can rate the comic. A nice future edition would be to be able to embed a specific favorite comic strip in a blog posting, either by day or some other mechanism.

So I’m going to try to embed it here to see if it works. My only complaint is that I use a 150-pixel wide sidebar (as do many people) and the thinnest widget they have is 160px. I don’t want to change my theme to support this one widget, so I’ll keep it in this post for now.

I was reading a Scott Adams blog entry recently and he mentioned Predictify.  I hadn’t heard of it, so I clicked and browsed about a little, signed up, did some predictions, etc.

And now just a few days later, I actually got an email saying I “won” 10 cents as part of one of my predictions.  So far, I’ve only gotten one prediction right and the others were off:

Now, I’m totally unsuprised at getting sports stuff wrong.  I don’t feel bad.  For example, the Peyton Manning touchdowns, I guessed 2 and the right answer was 3.  No biggie.  I’m surprised I was within 50 of the right answer.  I *am* surprised at getting the Yankees Manager correct, because I just guessed.  As far as I know, the guy I chose was thrown in there as bait for bad guessers, and maybe he was dead or something.

I’ve put in some more predictions and will continue - in fact, I feel confident to predict that I will be using predictify on a regular basis.  I don’t think I’ll be able to make a living at it, at least not until people start paying for predictions on things I actually *know* but it’s fun in the meantime.

In the meantime, I can take that dime and apply it towards Jaden’s college fund.  And doing as many guesses for the “paid” predictions as I can.

I don’t blog on Saturdays.  But I might start Twittering.

I’d not heard of Twitter ever until I saw it on Blogography.  I wasn’t sure what it was about or whatever, but it became much more clear once I signed up.  Some use it as a tool to help others keep track of them (stalking, cyberstalking, whatever you call it), but I see it more as a convenient mini-blogging tool and a semi-public diary.

So I’m going to try it.  I really like that you can use web, instant messaging, or text (sms) messaging to do little one-liners. 

And of course, my brain is already filling up with all the scenarios how this can be horrendously bad in the future, but I’m going to play along for now.  Maybe I’ll write up my concerns at some point.  Feel free to submit your own concerns as comments here.  In my case, I don’t expect anyone to actually be interested in following / tracking / stalking me, but I’m going to like having the time-line diaries because I’m fairly horrible at tracking time myself, so if I can go back and see “walgreens survey on Saturday” I don’t have to keep a real diary!

It’s like having a diary without emotion.  And I’m pretty good at hiding emotions since my natal moon is in the 12th house.

So become “a fly on the whall” if you wish.  Or add the RSS feed to your feedreader.

PS: how narcissistic will our society become?  I hearby coin the term “blogceited”.  Oh crap, someone used it already.

I decided to follow the meme (post #1, post #2) of posting Google Maps and MSN Live maps of your home.  I spent a little time pondering the security implications of this, and then ultimately figured that it’d be fine as I’m not disclosing my address or anything. 

So, first the Google Maps picture of our little plot

Then the MSN Live picture, which i find to be superior in quality and “youth”

We had a driveway put in a few years back and you can see that on the MSN Live picture, so that tells me it’s more up to date.  Also, I find I can zoom in a little more on MSN Live and can actually see the little toy sandbox with umbrella we had out there for Jaden some time back…

The Ford Explorer is also there for our viewing convenience.

Now what I *don’t* understand is the shadows.  The MSN Live map shows the shadows correctly - and I can tell that this was taken mid-morning since the Sun rises in the East, the shadows are to the West.  In between that umbrella and the house we have a small deck that we can sit on and read, and it’s nice because it’s so cool in the mornings, and not until noon or sometimes after do we get sun on the deck itself.

However, the Google Maps picture shows the shadows going NORTH.  Maybe it was at a time in the year when the ecliptic is lower than the equator, giving our house a shadow to the north instead of straight up-and-down.  Obviously the sun was not directly overhead because our house has a pretty long shadow going towards the north. 

Any astronomers out there want to guess what month that our latitude (Austin, TX is 30 deg north) would have that kind of shadow during midday?

You can see a neat video of the worlds lights. The video shows the world spinning and looking at the lights of the world go by.

Here’s a quick snapshot of it. Click on it to view the video.