We interrupt our irregularly scheduled post for breaking news

ONE MORE DAY TO DAVESTIN
(see Dave’s Event Page)

I sure was link-happy in that post, wasn’t I?

Ok, where was I? Oh yeah, the world ending.  I guess it had to happen sometime. And here, I thought it would be October 28th, 2011 or maybe December 21st, 2012.  Others believe it will be when McCain is sworn in early next year, but I digress.

But NO!.  Actually, it started this past Sunday.

WAAHAHHAHHHHHHH!

Nobody is following me on twitter!  What’s next?  Nobody will read my blog?!?!??!?! 

GAH!  That’s already happened, too!

Wow… Sixty WEEKS of stuff you don’t want to MISC. Actually, I guess that should be stuff you *didn’t* want to MISC, because when I post it *now*, it’s present tense, but now that it’s over, it’s past. Or is that passed? (Pssst: I think I might get pissed tonight at pool) (btw, “pissed” is the british term for drinking). (PS: it’s not offensive unless you take it that way).

heh, I just PS’ed.

Vacationing Vicariously

Good ol’ Dave from Blogography has been in Hawaii for the past, oh, forever or so, making everyone both happy and jealous with his photos.  

How he finds time to photograph, upload the photographs, write blog entries, *and* vacation is, well… just like me.  Yes, I admit, I’m a horrible vacationer, but aren’t vacations supposed to be good for the individual?

Yes, I *like* having my laptop on vacations.  Yes, I *like* my blackberry.   I *like* my gadgets.  To, me it’s relaxing to just play with my technology instead of have to work with it.

However, I suppose there are times where I wish I had a week or so without a laptop, without the blackberry, without a phone at all, and just a neat little emergency button in case something big happened, like getting an ingrown toenail or if I was like super hungry or something.

Anyway, go and check out his eleven days in Hawaii and look at the amazing photos.

• Day 10 has a great picture of a river that looks like a fish to me
• Day 8′s Lava Tube picture is mesmerizing
• Day 3‘s sky picture is awesome!
• Day 2 has jellyfish

Astronomy Picture of Day (APOD)

Speaking of photos….

A bunch of you have Ipods or Zunes or some kind of MP3 player. But many of us who have been around the Internet forever know about APODS (Astronomy Picture Of the Day)

Here’s today’s APOD:

(click to enlarge)

Isn’t that a great picture?

Every single day, this NASA web site displays a different image from somewhere in the universe, complete with a professional astronomer’s written explanation, which usually contains links to more fascinating information.

Best of LOLcats

Bonus! There’s a cool little Ninja cat in the youtube video below. I first saw this as a related video to the Spider-Puppy video I saw on Avitable’s site, but ICHC also showed it.

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.”

http://www.blogography.com/archives/2006/12/titillating.html

Heh.  He said “wet willy”

This article embodies one of the many reasons I read Blogography.