Wyszdom

I’m about to hop on a shuttle up to San Francisco, where I’ll be helping out with YouTube Live, the first live streaming event on YouTube.

I was lucky enough to visit the YouTube office yesterday, and it’s pretty cool. Nelson, Beah, and I were treated very well as we accompanied Henri, and YouTubers have a strange obsession with puggles. Seriously.

It’s a good thing I’m attending in person, because my AT&T DSL connection has been disconnecting like crazy for the past two days. It was a challenge to even get this blog post published; I had to go to work for the WiFi. Hopefully AT&T has good tech support on the weekends, because I’m calling them as soon as I get back tonight.

Let me know if you watch the show! K, shuttle’s here, I gotta bounce. Grind hard.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for this, because I think Nelson is a cool guy, and he doesn’t really like a lot of attention. But I’ve been told that I do a good impression of him, so I’d rather not let that go to waste. I’m willing to risk losing a friendship for a few extra pageviews.

If the quality is bothering you:
I was going to record it with a nicer camera but I couldn’t find my power cable, and I wanted to shoot it before The Office, so I just shot/edited using my laptop. I can’t find an equalizer on the new iMovie so sorry for the background noise.

Two heartwarming stories:

Earlier tonight, I went to Wendy’s because I was so hungry that I couldn’t wait to make my own meal, or even wait for In-N-Out. My total was $6.04. I handed the cashier $7. He looked at it, said, “It’s cool, bro,” and handed back one dollar. I was pretty exhausted and hungry at the time so those four cents made me feel good.

And just a few minutes ago, I checked out the latest XKCD:

Aww. I was even more excited at first, because I believed it to be a parody of Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, which I still have on VHS somewhere at home, taped off of TV at some point in the ’80s. It’s fun to watch stuff taped off of TV, because the first part of the special is always commercial-free, as my parents were savvy enough to pause the tape during the breaks, but then at some point they fall asleep or get distracted, and you get to see old commercials for OshKosh B’Gosh and old promos for that night’s upcoming edition of Action News.

After taking note of the title, however, a quick Google search let me know that it was the title of a short story. I assumed that the story had the basic plot I was familiar with from the Sesame Street special, but I wanted to be sure, as I fact-check all of my blog entries. But the short story is about a page and a half long, and what am I, a grad student? So I went to the Wikipedia article instead. Boom— plot in six sentences. Thank you, Internet. It’s 1:11.

900 feet up to 1300 feet…

As I mentioned on Sunday, I like to check out stats on the web. It’s really interesting to see how I fit in to the web, and to do this I check Google Analytics daily for referrals from search engines and other sites, and also take a look at link data in Webmaster Tools. But enough about the Google products… I get to talk about them at length every day. Let’s take a walk down the street to my neighbors in Sunnyvale… Flickr!

I recently enabled stats in my account, and they became available to me tonight. Since I share my photos pretty liberally with a Creative Commons license, I’ve searched for references to my photos before, using Google searches for phrases like [“Photo by Wysz”] or simply [“Michael Wyszomierski”].*

From this, I’ve found my photos in a few interesting places, which is quite fun. A few examples:
BART
PhotoPermit
LAist

I’ve even made it into the main design of websites:
Vibrant Software
Techtel Marketing

And at least once I’ve appeared in an unfortunate news story. An unfortunate story with an unfortunate lack of a “This is not a picture of the real guy!” caption. My first thought when I found this? “This explains a lot…”

And a little off-topic, since I heard about these via email, but I’ll brag about being offline as well. This photo was reportedly printed on about five thousand fliers for some anti-ticketing service in San Francisco. And this one almost made it onto a billboard in West Virginia, until the organization decided not to go with billboard advertising.

But where were we? Oh, yeah, Flickr stats. Usually, if you don’t completely control a page, you’re left somewhat in the dark when it comes to statistics. But Flickr has opened up and given some pretty good stats for photo pages that you own, including view counts and referring pages. Let’s take a look at the referring pages and see if I can find anything new and interesting. Here we go, I found a couple of note:

1. Denver Post
2. This picture was linked in a deleted segment of the Wikipedia article: “List of bow tie wearers,” which is up for deletion in its entirety.

Admittedly nothing terribly exciting at the moment, but my Flickr stream has been pretty stale for about a year as I’ve been playing around with Picasa Web Albums recently. Maybe I’ll try to get the two in sync someday so you can view the photos in your preferred interface. Yeah, right after I convert all of those old home videos to DVD and scan all of our old photo albums.

*At work, we put [queries] in brackets, so everyone is clear on exactly what the search was. So, [“phrase search”] represents a user who searched for those words using quotes to specify a phrase, and didn’t simply do a [keyword search].

When we don’t feel like taking a seven hour drive, my family will fly into Manchester to visit our New Hampshire-based relatives. The airport is over an hour away from their house, so the first order of business when getting out of the airport is to get fueled up with stuff from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s. With Thanksgiving fast approaching I’ve been in super-nostalgia mode, and was checking out the location on Google’s Street View since my relatives’ house is not on it at this time. I thought it was a nice touch that they were able to include the Golden Arches in a flower bed:

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