Category: Geek

I’m kind of addicted to checking stats online, whether I’m tracking site visitors, search queries, or stocks. Today, I figured it was about time I activated the stats feature on Flickr. They told me that my stats wouldn’t be available immediately, and included a randomly selected animated GIF to entertain me while they “dig up” my stats. Flickr is not one for bad taste, so I can safely assume that these graphics were included as a joke. Here they are, from donotenter.com, for your viewing pleasure:

When I don’t have any commitments, I naturally fall into a nocturnal schedule. This happens on many weekends, including this one where I again find myself awake at 4 AM. At least this time I’m sitting on my couch and able to move, but there’s still a problem: There’s not much to do at 4 AM. So, I’ll let you know about something I brought up once when asked if I had any hidden talents.

Back at my home in Pennsylvania, we have an older CRT-based TV. I learned at an early age (probably when I was around 10-12 years old), that I could consistently get it to do the old-school shrinking circle thing when turning it off. Most of the time, turning it off will not cause it to look exciting at all. But, if I turn it on, and then turn it off right before the picture appears (about five seconds), then it does the cool circle thing.

I forward all of my email to one account, but I like to reply from the address that the message was sent to. How can I do this using the Mail app on the iPhone? I don’t want to open Safari to send an email.

Please set me on the right path in the comments, nerds.

Lots of purple in this picture.

People often ask me, “So what exactly do you do at Google?” Well, I work in Search Quality. One of the best ways we can improve our quality is by improving our understanding of content on the web, and we count on webmasters to help us out with this. Webmasters get more relevant listings in our search results, and we get happier users.

To help you help us, we invest a lot of resources into free tools and education for webmasters. You’ll find all the relevant info at Webmaster Central. Today I’d like to specifically direct you to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, where we’ve announced our third live chat with webmasters. So if you want to hear me and other Googlers talk about search, or just hang out in the chat room, please get registered now and join us tomorrow. Start submitting your search-related webmastery questions, and make sure you give me a shout-out in the chat!

And as a special sneak preview, here’s a question I’ll be asking YOU in the chat:
What other webmaster-related videos would you like to see us produce?

Sometimes web pages don’t behave as you’d expect. Usually this is bad, especially if it’s caused by advertising. I don’t like popups or interstitials. “Page peel” is an effect best left to someone’s first video editing project or the iPhone. I get frustrated when I hover over what looks like a link and it shows me an ad or thumbnail. I complain when I can’t find basic information, have trouble locating important information, or get confused by what looks like an expected element.

Sometimes, however, a surprise is welcome, even if it is an advertisement.

This online store from HEMA seems traditional enough at first glance, but study the design carefully and you’ll see what makes it just a little more lively than a typical product listing.

There are some creative “Get a Mac” ads which break through the boundaries of traditional banner advertising.

And most recently, Nintendo has had fun showing off the fun of Wii with a YouTube channel*.

*Disclaimer

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.

Two fun ways you can celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day:

1. Set your language preference in Google to Pirate.
2. Wear this shirt.

I think Beah will be happy to know that the “pirate guys” will be spending the day in Philly.

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.”

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.