roy

A monster update ahead, since it's 5am and I can't sleep. This should catch my future self up on what 2005 Roy was up to (I do go back and read my old entries once a year or so).

. . .

I haven't felt this high in a while. High on life, baby! (I feel like a lame-o DARE commercial). I love that feeling that you're really getting something worthwhile done.

I'm not very good at accepting compliments because most of the time I don't think they're warranted. To that end, I'm pretty hard on myself - I rarely am happy with my own work output or the way I act, but I think that's a good thing. It pushes me harder to become better as a person. I think very few people actually understand how hard I am on myself - it's not so bad that it's self-loathing, but I think it can be troublesome at times.

Case in point: Tabulas 2.1. The next generation of Tabulas, for all intents and purposes, is ready for release, and has been for months. The control panel is done, and with about a week's worth of work fixing up the front-end, I could push it out. But I'm not. Why?

This troubled me for a bit, but I nailed it down to a few items: (1) I'm a perfectionist, and I'm still not happy with certain aspects of the user interface and the programming quality and/or (2) I'm honestly afraid that the upgrade will fail and the Tabulites will flock en masses to Xanga (or something far worse... MySpace). It's always very scary to risk something that works OK for something that could potentially be very kick-ass.

It also boils down to some left-over self-esteem issues from middle school, but we'll burn that bridge some other time.

In any case, the past few weeks I've slowly been gearing up the work engine so I can start getting lots of projects out of the way (and feeling confident enough to maybe tackle Tabulas 2.1, which is quite an ambitious undertaking, even by my standards).

Things are tougher now that I'm employed full-time, which sucks about nine hours a day, but I'm doing alright (for now). This is perhaps the second or third week I've been able to consistently work on my own projects outside of work.

I just wrapped up a HUGE weekend of personal project stuff:

• rykorp now is my 'centralized' location for all my projects - I'll keep that blog updated with updates on each project. I'm leaning towards setting that up as the actual legal LLC entity (since I figure one day I'll actually be dealing with money and with that comes the necessity for legal protection), but we'll see. For now, you can visit that site to see all the projects I work on...
• I'm roughly a week away from the first release of Audiomatch. It's currently in private beta, and I'm pretty pumped with its scalability, the featureset, and just the general coolness of the site ... I'll be pushing it to a public beta either tomorrow or Tuesday, so that's a huge feeling of relief.
• A few months ago, I developed a totally Web 2.0 application called "Lists" (now called "Listfoo") which basically let you keep a todo list on a webpage. This, in itself, isn't remarkable. What was remarkable was that it was completely Ajax-driven; you could drag each todo-item around, edit items without reloading the page, remove/check items without reloading, add items, etc. etc; it was incredibly interactive for a webpage. I had finished a big bulk of the work back in June, but dropped the project. The topic of todo lists came up in a conversation a few days ago with Neeraj, and I mentioned I had prototyped a rough beta ... I showed it to him a few days ago and he seemed pretty impressed with it. This was enough to persuade me that after Audiomatch.net, I would patch up Listfoo and push it out. So that's scheduled to hit probably late January ...
• And of course, I keep getting these really cool ideas for Fuunk and Tabulas that I keep jotting down in my little black book. I'm literally swimming in a ocean of ideas for all these little fun projects ... after Listfoo I'll tackle some fundamental Fuunk problems and then probably try to develop Tabulas 2.1 in parallel with Fuunk.

Now if I could only figure out how to make money from these durn things... oh well. I'm grateful that I can at least experience the joy from creating something new and watching other people use them and gain something from them.

. . .

While I'm here, a few notes:

Books: Philiip Pullman's Golden Compass is a great book! Thanks, Jenny for the recommendation! I still have not finished "Confederacy of Dunces" because the plot just isn't enough to draw me to read it. At this point, I'm just reading it to finish it. I started (as in, the first chapter) of "The Fountainhead," a book I've been told to read since high school.

Movies: "Just Friends" is a fun film. "The Family Stone" is a very solid film; totally wasn't what I expected (and I went to see it for Rachel McAdams!). "King Kong" should have been 30 minutes shorter, but it's still very good. I'm in love with Naomi Watts; enough that I redecorated my homepage with a message to her, in hopes that she'll read it. The hopeless romantic in me will never die.

DVDs: "Deuce Bigalo, European Gigolo" was much funnier than I expected. Someone keep me away from the Blockbuster used DVDs section, because I can't pass up 3 used DVDs for $25 everytime I go.

eBay: More notes besides the ones I wrote here. Auctions that end midday on the weekdays fare much better than ones on the nights and weekends (guess people would rather eBay from work than home). Charge at least $10-$15 for shipping/handling, because after PayPal and eBay both take their cuts, you're down roughly 10% on the total cost.

Random tech ramblings: Delicious was sold to Yahoo! for a couple million (nobody knows, 10 mil? 15 mil? 20 mil?). Yay for them. Looks like Yahoo! is snapping up great Web 2.0 companies... but I'm still not sold on that meaning anything for their future successes. Their homegrown projects seem quite lacking (Yahoo! 360?) ... I'm not sure why, but I have a feeling that the best Web 2.0 projets are gonna still come from small shops. (Got to do some ego-stroking, but I really hope with Tabulas 2.1 that it comes to replace Blogger as the de-facto blogging site).

Random tech rambling #2: Why is everybody and their mommas in love with widgets? Everywhere I turn, I either hear about Mac's widgets or Konfabulator or Google's widgets. Widgets, as far as I'm concerned, are more free-form versions of the late '90 portal sites. Remember those sites? You could choose to have your news appear hear, and your stocks appear there, and your weather appear there... It's like we keep repeating the cycles. I don't ever use my widgets on my Mac ever, and I hate using sites with their little portals. I tried using Google's personalized page, but that thing loaded so SLOW (syncing multiple services through the web = BAD BAD SLOW SLOW) and Gmail didn't load about 3/4 of the time. The news had 3 or 4 headlines; the only useful widgets on Google's homepage were the quotes of the day (which actually led me to wasting 20 minutes as I clicked for more).

People loved Google for its simplicity. More crap on UI real estate is a bad thing...

Personal rambling: This is the first Christmas I'm spending as a real working man. No sense of relaxation for me. Doh.

Ok, I'm spent. Maybe I can sleep now (probably not). I gotta wake up in three hours... WEE!

"I'm burning through the sky yeah
Two hundred degrees that's why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit
I'm travelling at the speed of light
I wanna make a supersonic man out of you - Queen "Don't Stop Me Now"