"To be an adult is to be alone." - Jean Rostand

What I miss most about my life past is having somebody to talk to. There was always somebody, but not anymore. I've been going through some stuff lately, and I've been internalizing all the frustration, which isn't healthy.

Who can I talk to? I never felt comfortable confiding in my parents about the bad stuff, lest they worry too much (many lessons learned from that). My sister, bless her heart, is still too young to understand what I'm going through. My close friends from NC ... the reality is that time does break down those brotherly bonds, whether we want them to or not. An ex who I've remained close to throughout the years ... can't get too close (obviously). My problems are very deeply rooted in my job, so that eliminates anybody at work.

The problem with the way I've approached life is that when I don't feel fulfillment at work, there's nothing else. And those small little troublesome bubbles from work balloon into personal problems - to the point I've even been questioning my humanity (sounds totally emo and lame, I know... shut up). I'm either completely happy or completely miserable. I can take the misery as long as I have the happiness, but the happiness has been far and few in between.

Corey said he likes my journal because it's so open - I'd say the openness is a reflection on the fact that this is my only avenue of venting, which is pretty pathetic if you think about it.

So for all of you reading out there who have people to talk to ... don't take it for granted.

. . .

Guerric made me realize that I could write about my physical characteristics in CSS:

#roykim {
   color: #ff0;
   background-color: #fff;
   font-weight: normal;
   border-top: 2px solid #000;
   padding: 6px 1px 0px 1px; /*huge ego, gaining some weight, short */
}

Representated in visual format:

this post, courtesy of lunestra which is coursing its way through my whole blood system.

this weekend, i realized a few loves: lunestra, IRON MAN, and the clash (thanks to rock band).

speaking of which, i finally played rock band for the first time (i've never played guitar hero before), and it's pretty fun. i personally don't think it's all that great, but i can see why people get obsessed over it.

speaking of a second which, (man, i wish i had something relevant to say about the salem witch trials, cause that would have been a killer pun) ... oh crap i forgot it.

think

think

think

OH! i remember. i can't wait for starcraft2. i've been telling people around the office i've been saving my vacation days - whether they want to believe it or not, i will take at least 2 vacation days for starcraft (assuming it's not around a major scheduling date).

i love san diego! i love life! i love mindtouch!

but you know what people hate? grammar nazis. and unfortunately, i am one of them. and i spent a big portion of today reading about the subjunctive mood.

let me explain why it's good grammar is so important to me: (oddly enough, this is going to come from a post that is filled with sub-par style and probably more than one grammar error) we are human. we distinguished ourselves from animals with our opposable thumbs and our creation of culture. unfortunately, due to the lack of literary in early generations (and the transience of the written mediums (parchment), we lost them. There are so many things .. had they been written down ... would never be lost from the sum of all human knowledge: languages, cultures, people ...

we're at a pinnacle where long-term digital storage is becoming possible. everybody has a voice now. the least we can do, for the generations which follow us, is to write clearly and effectively ... let's communicate our hopes and dreams, so they can understand what life was like now. the more information they have, the better they'll know how to not repeat our mistakes.

. . .

why is calculus being taught in school? how many people end up engineers? how many people, who took calculas (outside of engineers), ever uses it in a casual format? This has largely to do with America's persistence that producting more engineers is a great thing (mentality popular in WW2, no doubt). The more we can do math, the better we'll be engineers, to defeat the evil Russian empire.

But nowadays? We need to teach the real English grammar. And also everybody should take a basic statistics class and a basic economics (I'd prefer macro, since it's pretty much a fake science anyways). Standardized tests are fine (in fact, my AP chem teacher from ECHHS, Ms. Kuhl (are you still out there?) was one of the best teachers I had - it was a combinatinon of her structured teaching and Dr. Mullis' unstructured style which really taught me a lot. In retrprospect, I think I learned more those two teachers than I did my whole freshman year in college (apparently, even though I had taken Mullis' version of orgo chemistry, they wanted me to take it again). I went in the first day of class, saw it was pointless, and showed up for the mid-term and the final. My final grade? B. Colleges are so pointess. But I'm glad I received the degree.

. . .

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE WEST WING. I love all of Aaron Sorkin's stuff, so this should be no surprise .. but man. This show's been great (only in Season 2). I love how these shows build such a close rapport amongst the staff. And you know what? The harder I work, and the more stress I guess, the more understanding I can towards some of the stupid arguments they also always have.

I wish my life were more like a sitcom. I'd take a show like Friends, but I'll also settle for Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, or West Wing.

Ok, I definitely need to this more often. Lunestra is helping my mind wander (and it's making the screen in front of me seem like a mountain top... the words starting running into resistance .... but when the sentence completes, they're at the valley.

. . .

Whatever happened to Coolio?

. . .

I will get reamed on the Yahoo! stock tomorrow. Here's my plan: I took out my stop losses. I want to gauge what happens tmorrow and plan accordingly. If you remember the $19/share was the low point, but that was also factoring in the credit crisis. Since then, other news has been factored in. Eyeballing the numbers, I'd say that a fair price would be in the low twenties (~$20.50). If Yahoo is serious about doing something with Google, I welcome it. Yahoo!'s expertise is all in the human networks. Human networks. Isn't Cisco doing something with human networks? Maybe Fox'll throw up their Fox Media group (MySpace) with AOL that'll merge into Yahoo. Holy crap, my sentences are sitting in rows. Google's sitting back at from the third row and he's giving me the evil eyes.

Either way, I don't think this is death knells for Yahoo. They still have excellent engineers, and a (descent?) track record of shipping. What I'd really like to do is visit these companies and see what executives do in big company. WIth so many engineerings, why aren't they shipping out something new every 3 months? MindTouch is only like 6 core engineers and we're shipping cool shit every month.

I really want to know what that's like. I wonder if I can ghost a couple of people at Yahoo for a day or two. Be incredibly enlightening, I'm sure

. . .

So while I'm mentioning hopes and dreams (i really hope i get a cool lunestra dream tonight), here is what I'd eventually like to do in my life:

• Open a CHEAP sushi place with lots of eating areas and lots of green teas and stuff ... just like a coffee shop, but with asian-themed foods. it'll be really chill. free wireless. woot.
• Start a school for children in Peru (I saw the idea here) ... if blessed with financial freedom, I'd probably do more of these schools
• Start a school for disadvantage inner-city kids ... I know I've written a post on this before, too lazy to bring it up now
• Start a technical start-up company ... an incubator. Kind of like the Y Combinator stuff, but more personal (and pursuing my ideas). Give kids straight out of college (with a few mentors) the ability to make some impact *now*.
  

Such is my life.

holy crap. my itunes is alive.

so i'm listening to daft punk's "alive 2007" album while preparing some blueberry muffins. the bootleg version i have is one long file (1:20 long) ... so when it finally ends, and i'm washing the dishes (about to pop the muffins into the oven as i wait for the oven to preheat) ... itunes decides to play ...

wham's "wake me up before you go-go". dear lord, even my computer makes fun of the life i lead...

orange mocha frappuccino!

p.s. i'm using a modified version of the default tabulas template on my account, which i think i'll convert the default one to pretty soon. it's got a new markup, and better styling for all the sub-pages. minor tweaks ... fun.

My Tabulas is of great import. It influenced my coworker Corey to drive down to the tri-KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut down in Coronado after I posted about it. I can't wait to get into work and regale ourselves like giddy schoolgirls of the awesome diversity of that fast food mecca ... (By the way, Oliver pointed out that I mistakenly attributed ownership of those restaurants to Pepsi - they are owned by Yum! Brands ... apologies! )

Anyways, I had a Southern-style chicken sandwich from McDonald's today:

Looks familiar, doesn't it? They ripped off the Chick-fil-A sandwich ... but you know what? It was still pretty durn good.

I love West Wing. I've been diligently getting through the episodes when I can ... I saw an episode yesterday where the primary speechwriter for the White House, Toby, gave this monologue:

You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here? That's 'cause I'm a speechwriter and I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises income. You see what I did with "lowers" and "raises" there? It's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites and now you end with the one that's not like the others. Ready? Free trade stops wars. And that's it. Free trade stops wars! And we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace. I'm sure I've seen that on a sign somewhere.

I love the flow of those words... is there a de-facto Bible of speechwriting?

Update: Here's the video...

One thing from shooting film positives that will never be replicated by digital will be the sheer surprise of examining abandoned slides. Finding myself in need for a distraction a few nights ago, I dusted off my lightbox and slide collection from my trip to 2002 Korea/Vietnam trip. (Apologies to long-time readers who tire me of writing about this subject time and time again).

The trip being the first time I was shooting on flim, I remember my fears - was I shooting correctly? Would the pictures  come back exposed? How was my composition?

Roll after roll I diligently shot, labelled and stored away in a Ziploc bag. My original plan was take take all 60-odd rolls and develop them at once in the States ... but I couldn't resist the temptation to re-imagine what I had already seen.

So I took them down to the local Korean slide development shop and got all the slides developed.

I remember the joy, as I huddled over the lightbox that night, perusing my giant collection of slides. By golly, these were mine! I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, and the little stories that associated each photo.

I don't know if you remember, but in 2002, digital cameras were not widespread. Flickr didn't exist; easy photo-sharing sites were a rarity. This made photogalleries from amateurs rare.

I remember excitedly scanning all my positives and putting together a photo gallery that I could post on the web. And boy, was I proud of it.

. . .

Six years later, I still like to look over the slides from time to time to reminisce. That trip was the last time I can remember being unburdened with responsibilities; I was just a kid with a camera who wanted to see something different. Now I've grown for the better, and it makes me see other things in the exact same exposures. Maybe it's the years that make me appreciate the little details I missed first time around.

Check the salaryman on the left. He put aside his responsibilities for a night and partied with the kids. And it was totally cool and nobody judged him for it.

roy

i want to apologize for this post. i was about to pass otu (lunesta induced), when i had an idea for deki wiki which i think needs to be captured now (in case i forgot tomorrow morning). so if this makes no sense ... sorry

abolish the site navigation. problems as i see them: we can't organize shit inside wiki.opengarden.org. it's hard. i'm not even relying on the nav pane most of the time. if i wanted the site navigation, i'd just push wiki.tree() out to skinning variable. 

it occured to me when i was thinking of our last blog post about an xml-rpc extension wrapper in php ... the location of the information is under a user page on our wiki ... not really the correct spot.

but who cares!

instead of having an automatically generated opt-in hierarchy, each new page should start from scratch. it should be forced to make it association to whomever it wants to generate that navigation.

could the freeform association ever mesh with the directory listing in a usable UI manner. i know i'm probably in the small minority of people who think the new link dialogs are actually awesome, but we've already done it there. two modes: search for freeform, and directory for listing.

this mentality is equally applicable when creating relationships between pages.

currently, the hierarchy is very strongly embedded inside deki wiki. but what if we took it step by step. 

first step, remove the existing nav pane from the UI... second step: create a new dialog called "associate page".  implicifit associations to parents, children, and siblings are already created (hierarchies aren't removed in this scenario).

the dialog has a similar view as the link search dialog, except it lets you make muitliple selections; each selection becomes an association. screw that; first iteration, you simply match all pages which have the same tags. you can choose to remove any of those pages from your list (wont' delete the tag, just store a ui state). 

these associations show up along the left side, where the old nav pane existed. you can move these around all over the place. oh snap, maybe you can even do an inline display title edit. that would be nasty. how the hell could this be done accesibility? i've gone ahead and created the js dream version ... but it needs to be accessible first.

i mean, for larger wikis, hierarchies break down incredibly. its impossible to get a few people to create correct hierarchies ... and then there's always overclassification of content to the point you need like 10 pages to find what you were looking for (a search would have performed remarkably better).

each additionally page could be sorted in any order, and you could make an ajax call to see subchildren and sort those, to

Pros: it demphasizes the hierarchical behavior for trying to organize content. people keep messing with hierarchies by organizing, organizing, organizing ... it becomes equivalent of trying to fit a  triangle into a smaller circle. It requires no API changes: this feature could be built in parallel with minimal API work - putting together a PHP prototype would be trivial. (Maybe my weekend activity if sober roy doesn't shit all over this idea). hierarchies are awesome when there's a clear path to follow to apply permissions, and delete files.

so maybe in the same we decoupled the display title and url title in the front-end, we can also ... shit shit shit lost the idea. this song is making me do a really gay dance in my chair. oh yeah, we can decouple the "relationships" between pages with the "organization of the pages". relationships = tags, hierarchy = organization

i'm working on the deuce skin (finally). this would be an intersting for me to try it out with the enterprise skin. woot.

cons: it's a whole knew paradigm for the users. do people understand tagging? right now, tagging sucks as a feature, so i don't even know if it will work. fortunatekly, it's on tap to be fixxed for the next big release, and i'm going to write the specs for it.

well, the freeform associations eventually lead to a wiki that's completely unmanagable (since everybody's doing whatever). the biggest question: will it even work? my mind, right now, says yes. although it refuses to let me see through the haze for the solution.

for the record, aaron had a similar idea to this, but since he never got it down in writing, i win! (that, and i'm spectangularly awesome.

good god, this lunesta really fucked me up. time to try to cral back to bed.[

please, p[lease make sense tomorrow morning

do you feel the weight of the world singin' sorrow
or to you is it just not real
cause you got your own things
and we all have our things, I guess...

- rocket summer "do you feel" (track uploaded as the top track of my mixtape)

I felt an immense sadness when I read this comment left in my journal yesterday: "they've grown up and stopped blogging or blog very infrequently because that's what happens when you enter the real world... "

Why is this? Why is it, as we grow older, when we have more wisdom to offer ... the less we give? Why is it, when we have more reasons to stay in touch with people from the past ... we withdraw?

There seems to be a few recurring themes from people who disappear:

• The minutiae just isn't fascinating anymore. Let's face it - most people who write online don't add anything meaningful (this site being a great example of this). Growing older, there seem to be more important things than writing about your mom saving money by "splitting" jewelry (don't forget Mother's Day is Sunday, a fact my mom didn't let me forget when I called her today). Me, I love the details. It helps me get through my day by breathing levity into my idealistic (and thus disappointing) worldview.
  
• It's embarassing to capture naivety online. There's nothing more embarassing than reading some vague entry pining about some girl. Memories are suppressed for a reason - online journals make it impossible to forget. Of course, since I have no shame I feel no regret in posting pictures like this:
  
  
  
  
• Being busy. Probably the most common reason I hear. Of course, these same people manage to find time to watch shows like American Idol and reality shows on MTV.
  
• Having nothing to write about. The most important fact of human nature (and this rule applies to everybody) is that people love to talk about themselves. People love to talk about themselves, and I'm pretty sure they love to write about themselves, too. What people fear is the empty response from the void ... so when people really say "they have nothing to write about," what they really mean is, "I have tons to write about, but I never get a response." At least when they're talking to somebody who's (seemingly) listening intently (a skill I've mastered), they can believe somebody is listening. But here's the thing: just because there are no responses doesn't mean nobody's reading.
  
• Privacy is important. The one legitimate reason. The growth of sites like Wordpress and Facebook are rather depressing, because they reinforce the (false) belief that controlling privacy across the web is impossible. Facebook's spent a lot of user goodwill on their continual privacy blunders, and that debt carries over to other social networks. People are simply scared that what they write cannot be controlled, and that really truly sucks ... because it's totally not true. (LiveJournal is a great example of this). Whenever I try to imagine where the web will be 5 years from now, I don't imagine much of a difference from the present. The biggest thing in five years will be authenticated data portability - everybody is figuring out data portability now, so granular ACL on that data is logically next.

. . .

and as they strolled along
his heart broke out in song
from all the things and the thoughts and the assumptions he had wrong

- rocket summer "never knew"

. . .

Personally, all the warts of an online journal (loss of privacy, protential for embarassment) don't come close to outweighting the benefit:it is proof of my growth, as a person, through the past five years. Every story of my life, every feeling of my insignificant life, every transition (and lackthereof) ... I can go back at any time and read over it. And to read heart-felt comments on personal posts from long-lost friends reminds me of the good times and all the people in my life who've helped shape me into who I am today.

Anyways, I wish more of my friends would write. I miss you guys.

. . .

and show me everything you've got
i know you're scared
but let your words destruct
you gotta take that step, and your heart, just let it pour out

 - rocket summer "show me everything you've got"

. . .

. . .

( I'm willing to entertain the possibility that my continual journaling is the result of never outgrowing immaturity, in which case the burden is clearly on me to grow up and find a life; thus discontinuing my disjointed ramblings! )

roy

I finally got around to updating the default Tabulas templates. I've been fixing up the markup coming up for the gallery and journal views, and I figured the default templates should look decent.

I'm not sure what to do with the "other" default templates. They look so ass-y, I'm tempted just to delete them.

. . .

I also recently switched over all new user accounts to use the new control panel by default.

If you're not using it yet, I suggest you make the switch ASAP, cause I'll be forcing everybody to migrate over soon (let's find those bugs together!)

. . .

Things are so busy lately. Fortunately, I've started a weekly MindTouch poker game at my place to balance out work & play (but it's with coworkers, so I don't know if that's a net plus or not). We've played twice, and I won last week. I hope we play again this week ... it's good fun ;D

. . .

Holy crap, Madonna/Timbaland/Justin Timberlake's latest has an awesome bassline (the video sucks, it's only here so you can listen to it):

As much as I love the bassline, I hate that Madonna's a part of this song. I find her incredibly annoying - all that incessant name dropping by JT is grating. Yes, I can see an old lady gyrating. Yes, I realize that's Madonna. :(

How long do you think before the NBA adopts this song as their theme song for some playoff series (if they haven't already done so)?

I literally spent 8 minutes (I can tell cause I listened to Madonna's "4 Minutes" twice, which conceivably should be about eight minutes long) trying to determine when to use "fast" and when to use "quick."

I tend to get anal about our MindTouch press releases and newsletters when it comes to phrasing and grammar (amusing, I'm sure, given the atrocity that is this tabulas). Because of this, I try to read through all our public releases at least once.

One line in a email newsletter caught my eye today: "For those of you in need of vendor-backed support, we have updated our support plans for our Enterprise customers with response times as fast as four hours and emergency bug escalation."

Can anybody catch what would bug me? "... as fast as four hours"

It's was my previous understanding that fast is a function of speed, while quick is a function of time. The implication being that something that is fast naturally has a lot of speed (you don't describe a car as quick), while quick is something that happens in a short period of time. You don't describe Tywon Lawson as fast (3360 hits on Google), but you certainly describe him as quick (33,600 hits on Google).

So which is it? Do we have response times as fast as four hours or as quick as four hours? I thought it'd be pretty clearly quick, but it didn't feel right. The explicit time to response ("four hours") which seems to set a time period throws off the whole flow of the sentence. (And of course, we lose the whole alliterative aspect; as fast as four sounds nice). I'm also pretty sure "as fast as" is one of those phrases you can't break up (what are those called, again?)

After about 30 minutes, I've resolved to leave the sentence alone. Pretty pointless, huh?

Edit: A Google search seems to back up the etymology of fast vs. quick. On LiveJournal, of all places...

Since when do pubications publications (granted, it's ESPN) allow photogs to publish using a fisheye lens? (source)

I love it!

i got promoted to director of engineering at mindtouch. weeeeeeeeeee.

i will be studying episodes of "the office" for as much inspiration i can find from michael, the ultimate model of leadership. if that doesn't work, i'll study dwight schrute.

in all seriousness, let's hope i can live up to the title.

for those of you who want to know what this job is like, this hilarious commercial from EDS sums it up completely:

Here's a few links you may find interesting:

• Facebook | Engineering @ Facebook's Notes - how they implemented Facebook chat - lots of cool technical stuff on scaling and technologies used.
  
• “The Connection Has Been Reset” - great article on how the chinese internet firewall actually works 
• A reminder of the scale of the US economy: (permalink)
   
• Another perspective, from a states => country perspective: (source)
   
• Gandhi’s Top 10 Fundamentals for Changing the World
• Skills for Men - Things Men Should Be Able to Do - Esquire 
• mezzoblue § Image Replacement + Google - google says image replacement via CSS is OK! phew... 
• A fascinating backstory written by the artist who made this t-shirt:
  
  
  In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone to an orbiting space station for what would be called Mission Six- to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed all four crewmen of the last research mission.
  
  By the third day, Peckmann's broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He claimed that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him, and that he had to keep moving to evade them. He shouted that if he could capture consume these spirits himself while he still had strength, he could move to the next level of consciousness...Truly the rantings of an insane man.
  Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman....pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons.
  
  He had exhausted the entire cargo of vitamins, pills, and fresh fruit well ahead of schedule. There was no way another crew could be assembled to rescue him before he starved. After one rather violently garbled transmission, the static cleared and the last live image on record is that of Peckmann's empty, wilted spacesuit on the cabin floor.
  
  It was determined that another mission to recover any remains or gather any more research would be a waste of the people's money, and the station was allowed to drift out of orbit and into space- a failure never to be mentioned again. It was ordered and assumed that all video and paper evidence had been destroyed. 
• The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash by Eric Janszen (Harper's Magazine) - "The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle." sounds like chicken little 
• Ten Thousand Cents - really cool art project done via amazon's mechanical turk - the US $100 was split into 10,000 components, and people were paid $0.01 to redraw their component by hand ... final result looks good!

. . .

Oh Netflix... how you failed me. Being addicted to West Wing, I added the whole series to my Netflix queue AND SPENT CLOSE TO 15 MINUTES moving all the other movies underneath all seven seasons (I had added them out of order, so I had to reorder them a bit). 

And guess what Netflix decided to send me last week? Yep, no West Wing. The movies from the bottom of my queue. Nice. 

Because I'm an impatient bastard, I ended up just buying the whole series on Amazon instead ... but to offset the $200 cost, I'm canceling my Netflix subscription until at least 2009. 

Oh Netflix, if only you had sent me the correct DVDs...

We're doing some performance work for Deki Wiki 8.05.1. Being a front-end monkey, I usually accomplish performance gains by removing all the usleep(50) I have scattered throughout the code (setting low expectations = win).

Max, on the other hand, tends to obfuscate (previously) elegant code to make it look like it was written by an eight year old: (I expect to be showered with praise at how short it took me to parse the SQL query and determine it sucked... oh man I need a life.)

MindTouch Deki Wiki: Powering your Enterprise!

Edit: The developer who wrote this code wanted to disavow responsibility - I've since edited his name out of the screenshot.

"when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." - oscar wilde

Pete is funny

this past weekend, i was refilling my drink at the local in-n-out when these two twin brothers (who weren't older than seven) were struggling to reach the lids and straws (they're on top of the drink machine).

"excuse me sir," (they were amazingly polite) "could you please help us out?"

i handed them two lids and two straws.

"thank you very much!" ... and they sauntered away. (seriously, the politest children i've interacted with in a LONG time)

one thing i love about growing up is how my perspective changes about the "big" things in my life. (i mean this in both the literal and non-literal ways)

i remember being young and having both parents tower over me. they were like giants!
i remember when i got a "b+" on a test in elementary school and worrying about the coming apocalypse.
i remember getting my first "b" for a full quarter class in middle school and worrying about the coming apocalypse.
i remember getting my first "c" in college and worrying about the coming apocalypse. (do you notice a theme here?)
i remember getting out of my first relationship and thinking i'd never date again (hey, wait a second...)
i remember having 1.90 GPA and worrying i wouldn't graduate from carolina (i did, with a 2.01, barely over the 2.00 threshold)
i remember the grief of rejection from a horrible situation with a girl ...

it's funny, looking back, and how small my problems were. knowing this, i try to make light for any self-perceived problems in my life ... knowing full well that next year, my problems will seem small. i'm not sure what i ever did to deserve such blessings...

gotta keep growing!

This past Sunday, I managed to make it from Point A to Point B on this map without hitting any red lights. Awesome. I created a Google map of it:

View Larger Map

I bet all of you guys are really wishing you were living my life right now, don't ya?

Anybody who reads this Tabulas probably has a hard time believing that I'm actually NOT a narcissistic in any way, shape, or form. I'm sure it's also confusing cause I keep posting pictures of myself ... let me just say that I really do dislike pictures of myself and I do not go get silly pictures taken as a hobby, even though normal people would NEVER get pictures taken like this or this. However, I am a huge fan of self-deprecation (if only to keep my ginormous ego in check), so hence the pictures.

Anyways, I got suckered into taking pictures for the new MindTouch website, and even though the session was "serious," one thing led to another and I ended up taking this picture:

FIRE MARSHALL ROY IS COMING FOR YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

One day, I really will regret ever making this Tabulas public. Alas

Wow, that 3 way day weekend went by fast. It's going to be a hellish few weeks at MindTouch (we have a bunch of deadlines early June), so updates should be sporadic. Hope everybody is doing well!

Edit: Man, the "3-way weekend" typo was pretty embarassing. Being a gentleman, I did not intend to kiss and tell. Apologies.

So I manage the Russian team, which means I generally have to stay up late speaking in broken English to coordinate work items (always an interesting task). Of course, morning Roy hates night-time Roy because of the hours, but sometimes these chat session lead to a proverbial gilded goose laying a golden turdnugget that makes me go "WTF?"

Tonight's:

Hmm... in cold blood, I will sleep...

The last few things I've been excited about: Amazon S3, Yahoo term extraction, and Akismet.

Guess what? SixApart just released a free comment spam filter - TypePad AntiSpam! Woo hoo! I'm paying $50/month to Akismet right now; I want to switch ASAP ... would go a long way in keeping this little project afloat ;)

So my complaint: the documentation is atrocious. The "Developers" and the "Getting Started" section are pretty much the same thing - "here is how to install the plug-ins."

What I'd really like to see is the actual API documented - they have a claim that TypePad AntiSpam is compatible with Akismet's API - does this mean they're exactly the same? Where is the entry point? Required parameters? If they want plug-ins to be written, they'll need to provide some more documentation :)

I downloaded the TypePad AntiSpam plugin for WordPress to try to reverse engineer the calls - once I'm done, I'll post them up here.