Happy

There are many things that cause happiness to swell inside me.  Here is one of those things:

Dave from Blogography is going to have an Austin Event!  Now I gotta get prepared.  My list so far includes, in no particular order:

• a ton of butter
• pulled pork
• good supply of Pez Candy
• Golden Oreos
• A trip to our local Apple store (yes, Austin has one!)
• Coke w/Lime
• Lego Star Wars I & II
• Finding the nearest Johnny Rockets
• Suggesting potential meeting spots: The Oasis, Iguana Grill, Eddie V’s, Freda’s seafood grill, Baby A’s, Hula Hut, Trudy’s
• A special “proselyte to Wayne about Macintosh” session
• Making sure my camera is fixed by then so I can do a special DITL (”Dave In The Life”)
• Obtain a Psychlo uniform so I can dress up as Terl (as played by John Travolta) in Battlefield Earth.

Not Happy

Then there are the things that DO NOT cause me to swell up with happiness.

One of those things are insane required sexual harassment courses that assume everyone reads at a 3rd grade level

The thing is blinking in red at me and YELLING (do you see the exclamation mark, or is that just my imagination?) to slow down because I took 56 minutes doing what would be optimal to do in 60 minutes.

So us speed readers end up writing blog entries on the side in between slides. This causes me to appear more “normal” to the training-bot.

Whew. 

Question: why doesn’t it berate me for being SLOWER than Optimal?  Why are the overachievers the only one who get the negative feedback?

Someday it’s going to use the embedded camera in the computer and notice me rolling my eyes, yawning and calling my coworkers my beyotch (especially the HOT chick down the hall) and then flash a picture of some nice boobs at me, and the camera will notice my eyes looking at the picture, and then automatically file a complaint electronically.  Isn’t technology grand?

… 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.”