Author: Michael Wyszomierski

Followup on Transport

A few months ago, I signed up for Transport, a service from Macminicolo.net, which allows you to back up to an Apple Time Capsule (which you own) located in a data center in Las Vegas.

My initial experience wasn’t that great. My initial backup failed, and since it takes so long to transfer a hard drive’s worth of data over the Internet, I gave up on it for a while, intending to troubleshoot on a free weekend. I think the failure may have had something to do with my 100 GB hard drive being nearly full. As far as I know, the initial backup needs to be completed all at once, so if it fails at any point, you have to start the transfer from the beginning.

After booking my trip to Vegas at the beginning of this week, I was reminded of the fact that I own a Time Capsule there, and it was about time I put it to use. So I tried it again, this time with my lighter load of about 70 gigs. It took some time (a couple of days), but the transfer did eventually finish. Now, everything seems to be working just fine. It’s connecting to the server automatically and backing up every hour. The backups are a lot slower than connecting directly to a drive via FireWire or USB, even if you’re not transferring much, but since it happens in the background, it’s not a big deal.

The Time Machine interface itself (which you use for restoring files) works over the network but is pretty slow. If I ever do need to use it, it would probably be a complete disk failure and in that case I’d just have the Time Capsule shipped to me.

I think the service is a neat idea, and it’s working fine for me now, but unfortunately with the speed of today’s Internet it’s not quite the solution I was hoping for. If you’re considering this for yourself, I’d suggest just using Time Machine with a local Time Capsule or other backup disk for your immediate backups, and keep an archive of your backup off-site (at your office, etc.), updated every week or month.

Vegas

As previously Twittered, I’m going to visit Las Vegas on the weekend of the 27th. I have a ticket to see Blue Man Group at the Venetian. I’m in the poncho section, so it sounds like my seat will be pretty close to the action. This will be my third Blue Man show (I’ve been to New York and one of their traveling shows), and I’m really looking forward to it. I already know I like Blue Man, and based on other Vegas shows I’ve seen (Mystère and KÀ), it will probably be the best yet.

Wysz and Blue Man

I’m mostly going to Vegas for the show, practicing my “do what you want” advice. I wanted to see the show, so I bought a ticket, even though I didn’t take the time to coordinate the trip with others. It will be a short trip (arrive in the afternoon, show at 7, leave at noon the next day), so the only other attraction I’m planning on seeing is the Bellagio fountain, which I have missed on my two other trips to Vegas. I really like fountains, so I’m actually just as excited about the free fountain show as I am about Blue Man.

After hitting up the fountain at the Bellagio, I’ll probably just walk into the lobbies of the various hotels/casinos until I get bored or run out of money. If you have any other suggestions for things to check out in Vegas (on the Strip so I can walk, and preferably free), let me know in the comments.

Wysz: Where is he now?

Sometimes when I’m up late, I think of college, when I had the sleeping “schedule” of, well, a college student. “This is just like when I was in school,” I think, as if nothing about me has changed. But I have changed. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this blog entry since I’m in the middle of doing something, so after thinking for a few minutes, I wrote out a list of things that are different about me now compared to when I was in school. I deleted most of the list, because it really boiled down to one thing:

Now, fear of failure or embarrassment does not stop me from trying.

A few years ago, I only tried something if I was relatively sure I could succeed, or at least not fail horribly. I spent most of my time alone in my room.

My own words, in my own handwriting

I remember years ago seeing an ad in an in-flight magazine for a service where you could fill out a form, mail it to a company, and then receive a custom font representing your handwriting.

Two things have changed:

  1. You no longer have to mail it.
  2. It’s free.

I learned about YourFonts.com from one of Matt’s recent tweets. Even though I printed out the form within minutes, I didn’t even retrieve it from my printer for several days. But last night, Mike emailed me with his own custom font. Well, if Mike had his own font, I had to have mine. I spent a good deal of time tonight filling out the template. I hardly ever write stuff on paper, so it was a real challenge. Being out of practice and writing letters in a grid reminded me of kindergarten. Adding to this feeling was the fact that it soon turned into an arts and crafts project, as when I messed up (the first character I messed up on was b), I fixed it by writing the new version on a different sheet of paper, cutting it out, and taping it to the template in the correct location. In kindergarten I actually used paste more than tape, but the nostalgia was there. Anyway, I completed the template, scanned, and uploaded. YourFonts.com then provided me with the Michael Wyszomierski font.

Speaking of kindergarten, you may notice that the character 5 in my font looks a little funny. You can see an example of it here if the font is showing in my blog titles. Mike noticed it within seconds of installing the font, and correctly identified that the 5 is, in fact, wearing a hat. You can find the reference in this old blog entry. (Yes, I remember everything that I blog about. Really. I wouldn’t lie about that.)

Continuing to speak (write) about kindergarten, is paste ever used outside of kindergarten classrooms? I’ve never encountered it since then. Even later in school I never saw paste. Older kids utilized glue sticks, Elmer’s Glue-All, hot glue, and rubber cement as their preferred adhesives. Did you ever cover the palm of your hand with Elmer’s, blow it dry, and then peel it off? Yeah, that was awesome. I remember in high school there was a group of students who used to write funny articles for the school paper. One was about eating glue. It was one of my favorites.

If you’re viewing this page in a browser supporting CSS @font-face rules, you probably see the title of my entry uses my custom handwriting font. I wanted to incorporate it into my site somewhere, and that’s where I currently have it. I initially tried using for the main text of each entry, but not for the headers and other navigational text. That mix of handwriting and machine type did not mix well. So, I tried using my handwriting for all of the text. While I did like the look of it, I realized that this just made everything harder to read since my handwriting isn’t very skimmable. So, I settled on using it for my titles, since on pages with multiple entries it actually enables skimmability by standing out and breaking up the type. If you find my use of the font too annoying, let me know and I might just bump it to my currently dull homepage.

Update on 4/10/10: I’ve just removed the @font-face bit from my blog in an effort to speed things up a bit. If you still want to see my handwriting on my blog, you can still opt to download and install my font.

If you think my choices about web design make no sense, you’re probably right. In 2004 I revised my homepage layout and colors and received these comments:

“I’m not a fan of your new look.”
“It seems to be a melange of different design philosophies.”
“Get a new color scheme.”
“It borders on blinding.”
“The new color scheme makes your page hard to ignore.”

I do plan on always utilizing the font somewhere on my site, since fonts really can become part of one’s identity. Just be happy I didn’t use Mike’s suggestion to “just use it everywhere.”

Seinfeld/Gates Microsoft ads

I’m not going to comment on Microsoft as a company, Bill and Jerry as people, or the ads as effective marketing, but I will say that I find the commercials entertaining so far. I appreciate them taking a risk.

Related quote from Seth Godin:

If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you’re going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

Interior decorating FAIL

TV stand placed in front of door, which opens towards the stand
Image from DIY Network.

I see that the TV can move up and down, but does the stand drop into the floor or something when you want to open the door? I found the picture here.

Why I was browsing DIY:
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to own a house. When I lived at home, I liked doing stuff like cutting the grass and other home maintenance tasks. When I had cable, I watched HGTV and fantasized about having my own homeowner projects to deal with. Even though the concept of home ownership feels like a distant dream at this point, I still read about houses online and occasionally walk through hardware stores.

 

If you read this, then please read this

Short version so you don’t really have to read:
Don’t take anything you see on this blog seriously.

A note to my readers about context:

This is my personal blog. In case you haven’t been reading since the beginning of my blogging existence, let me use this post to explain why you should not take anything you find here seriously, unless you find some other reason, outside of my blog, to do so.

I started a website in college because I was hitting the size limits of my AIM profile, where I posted silly thoughts. This is the same profile where, during high school, I announced that I was selling the top 25% of my “senior page” in the yearbook to the highest-bidding advertiser. To the people who I chatted with online, it was obviously a joke, since they knew I liked to make ridiculous claims about corporate sponsorship, including offering to have an Apple logo tatooed on my forehead so we could get more video equipment. In college, after hearing that my high school alma mater would be getting unifoms, I quickly mocked up a sample shirt that would bring extra money to the school:

Back of a polo shirt with school logo on top, followed by corporate logos including Marlboro. Also includes the logo of Penn Charter.

Again, I really hope that anyone who paid attention understood that it was a joke, especially since two of the logos are pretty extreme. Penn Charter could be considered a competitor, and Marlboro is, well, a cigarette company.

Over time, as I really got into the blogging thing, I developed a bit of an online persona, who was different than the “real” me. Some features were exaggerated, and others were completely new. I created an angry arrogant character who constantly proclaimed to be awesome, and sought to avoid all interactions with people. In reality, I actually like people, I’m generally happy, and I’m more social than ever. (If you don’t think I’m social now, ask someone who knew me a few years ago. It’s all relative.) It didn’t really matter who this character was, because most people who read my blog would never meet me in real life, and those who did knew me before the blog, and understood it was an act.

As my blog developed, it became a mix of satire/humor, venting about college life, miscellaneous announcements about my life, and other random thoughts on subjects such as technology. While I did have categories, the posts weren’t explicitly labeled as “joke” or “serious.”

Sometimes I would create fake news stories:
Shopping is Random
Apple announces move to all-black product lineup
AOL to Shut Down Free Instant Messaging Service
Analyst: Apple’s Fifth Avenue Store Doomed to Fail

Or stories that were only partially accurate:
Apple NEWS ALERT

Or just make stuff up:
My First Lecture
Inside The Blog
News Bit and/or Announcement 

They weren’t labeled as humor, because it’s generally not my style to announce a joke. I later learned that this is similar to Steve Martin’s approach, where his jokes don’t have punch lines. I am a bit more extreme, since my jokes aren’t all in the context of a standup act. As I said in the previous paragraph, they’re listed right along with my serious posts. With some jokes, I don’t even expect anyone to find them funny except for myself. Like when I tell people that I’m Canadian. I don’t find it hilarious, but I do it anyway because it’s a harmless lie that nobody has a reason do disbelieve. It’s like telling someone that I had spaghetti for dinner last night when it was actually angel hair pasta. It’s only funny to me because it’s such a random thing to lie about. So on this blog, I may be joking at any moment, and it may not always be obvious.

When it came to the complaints on my blog (I even promoted it as “mostly bitter complaints” for a while), in most cases they were about things that didn’t really bother me. I only blogged them because I thought it was funny to make such a big deal about it. People do this all the time when they pretend to be really concerned about something like donut-cutting etiquette. Seinfeld made millions doing this. If I really was upset about something, chances are I would consider it too personal to blog about. As I’ll tell you in an upcoming paragraph, my blog isn’t a diary.

I understand that this lack of distinction may cause confusion for people, but since it’s my blog, I don’t see this as a bad thing. I’ll make the content appropriate for me, and not worry about what everyone else on the Internet may not like about my approach.

Now someone may say that I shouldn’t treat everything in life as a big joke. That’s true, but this blog is not my life, and it’s not about my life. If this blog was about my life, it would be one of those boring diary blogs, where nearly every post would look like this:

Today was pretty good. Nothing hilarious happened, but nothing made me notably upset either. I spent a lot of time on the Internet. I had a sandwich for lunch. It tasted like it always does and that’s why I like it. Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.

But that’s fortunately not how my blog is. I generally only blog about things that I find exciting, annoying, or funny. If some people misinterpret my blog as my general, everyday thoughts or mood, then they probably don’t have an accurate impression of the “real” me. I get to be the real me in real life, where I (usually) am careful not to say anything too extreme if I don’t think people will know it’s a joke. My blog is where I can do whatever I want. For example, today in the café someone had left a folder on a counter that said “University of Calgary” on it. Someone asked me if it was mine, and while a potential joke queued up in my head where I would pretend to be offended that someone accused me of being Canadian, I decided not to go with it and just said, “No.” On my blog, I totally would have gone for it, and not really cared if she got it or not.