Well, the results from the little test poll I ran a few days ago turned out roughly as I expected. People prefer text, and they're split about 50-50 in whether they like to read it on the site or through an RSS reader. Only two people were interested in the idea of a Sleepless in the Seattle Metro podcast.

I was actually curious what it would be like to record myself reading a few of my posts, so I did. It was kind of amusing for a while, if a bit time-consuming. I don't really have anything in mind to do with those recordings, though, so they just sit on my computer. I don't actually even know what people do to listen to podcasts—if they just download MP3s and stick them on their player, or if there's some standard RSS thing, or what. I was interested partly because I want to, relatively soon, record myself giving a few short demos and tutorials of the World of Warcraft mods I've created, as one in particular is pretty hardcore, and difficult to get started with. They'd be videos, but I'd just be a voice-over.

Labels: blog

I'm trying out a web poll thingy. You should answer it. (Note that I'm not necessarily changing anything about my blog... I'm just curious, and I want to try out this poll service.)



Update: I found a much nicer polling service. Kinda slow to load, though.

Labels: blog

I was thinking earlier tonight... YouTube channels are, for a lot of people, basically video blogs. Personally, I'd rather read what people have to say than hear them say it (podcasts), or watch and hear them say it (YouTube). (Or, in most cases, none of those things.) I'm only subscribed to one channel on YouTube, that of Chris Cendaña, and that's just because he can sing.

Actually, though, there's some appeal to the idea of posting my thoughts in video form instead of text. You can get a lot more nuance in speech than text, and I really like talking. The downside is that I hate the sound of my voice, don't like the way I look all that much, and greatly enjoy being able to edit and correct and fine-tune my text whenever I want. I wouldn't worry about Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area becoming a YouTube channel anytime soon.

Labels: blog

Since I mentioned my odd and/or lazy way of writing the lowercase letter "a" in a previous post, I was asked how you tell the difference between it and "z". Here's an image to demonstrate "a," "z," and "2."



Z is the easiest letter to tell apart since I've crossed my Z's and 7's for about ten years now. The tough one is A and 2, but about half of the time I curl the number 2 so it's more distinct, and the other half of the time you can tell what it is from context.

I try to write a bit more legibly if I'm writing something that someone else needs to read, but writing significantly less legibly is slightly faster, so I kinda default to that.

Fun related fact: when I was designing this blog template I got most of my feedback from one person. Like everyone else, I had to prod him to give any sort of negative criticism. The only comment I got at first was that I needed to choose a different font for the header.


Currently listening: Hybrid—If I Survive

Labels: blog, travis

I've been pretty light on the posting recently, but it sort of reflects my state of being, if you will. I'm trying to take it easy these days. I've been attempting to find the correct balance between gaming (Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3) and productivity (my World of Warcraft mods, my websites). As it turns out, it's not very interesting to talk about, and given the choice between posting something mostly worthless and not posting at all, I generally choose to not post at all.

Labels: blog

Sometimes I will start to write a post, and then I'll just save it around in draft form until I go back and finish writing it later, or decide I don't want to write about something. I'll also occasionally just type ideas for future posts into drafts, so I can fill them out later. I just noticed that I have a draft from 15 March 2005 at 12:53 AM saved that I never posted. I never did anything with it because it's an awful, awful post, but now that it's been sitting in my drafts folder for a quarter decade, it's funny in a what-the-hell sort of way. So, I thought I'd share it with you (perhaps "inflict" is a more appropriate word)—complete and in its original, unaltered form.

Okay, so here's an idea: first, buy skeletonsaresilly.com. Then, put up a page that explains that the site is all about hilarious pictures of skeletons doing silly things. But then, the twist: every page is just pictures of real dead people. Maybe even with backstories. It would be funny because it would be so horrifically unfunny, and not at all what people were expecting.

Labels: blog, random

As you either noticed immediately because you read my blog on the website directly, or otherwise wouldn't because you only read the RSS feed, I've rolled out a new design for Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area. I'm particularly attached to it. I wanted a single design theme that I could use for both my woefully empty travisspomer.com site and this blog, and I finally got around to doing it. I chose a "blue and light" motif. There's a little bit of content on the main non-blog site now, with empty promises of more content to come.

There are some refinements I'll want to make over time, but I decided it was good enough to replace the old theme right now. I hope you enjoy it. Special thanks to Rohan, Sean, Marc, and Matt for your feedback while I was doing my last-minute tweaks.


Currently listening: Mute Math—Break the Same

Labels: blog

I'm currently (well, not currently; I'm still at work) working on a new design for this blog and my main travisspomer.com site (which is currently a placeholder), and I wanted to include handwritten text in a couple places. After painstakingly writing things out by hand on my tablet, I realized that it didn't look nearly as nice as the placeholder text I was using in the font I created based on my own handwriting style. In effect, I've trained my computer to write more like me than I do.

(Examples: "Sleepless in the Seattle Metro Area" in the image currently to the left is handwritten, and "blog.travisspomer.com" is using the font I created. All of the handwritten text on travisspomer.com is currently using the handwriting font.)

Labels: blog, travis

Well, here we are, three years and 1,800 posts later. In three years, I think I've learned to deal with my introverted nature just a little better. I've increased my writing skill somewhat. I've thought out loud about a few things that I probably wouldn't have thought about. I've shared a few embarrassing secrets. I've ranted. I've raved. I've maybe even convinced a few people who didn't even realize I had a blog until recently that my life is somehow interesting enough to warrant hundreds of thousands of words describing it, whether or not it actually is.

Well, as far as I can tell, there are at least a few people who read this thing. (Don't be a stranger; leave a comment every once in a while.) So, I see no reason to stop now.

Labels: blog

A few people have asked what's up with my current blog sidebar picture. So, here's what's up with it. It's not my eye, and I Photoshopped it a bit, partially because I wanted to just play around a little bit, and partially because I really like eyes. Here's what I did:

• I lightened the skin tones. I actually prefer darker skin tones, but I was going for a more surreal and dreamy look, and lighter colors seemed to go along with that.
• I lightened the whites of the eyes a lot. This picture wasn't underexposed or otherwise too dark; the eyes were roughly the correct color in the original.
• I smoothed out the skin texture.
• I sharpened the eyebrows and eyelashes to make them a little more distinct.
• I removed some distracting reflections in the iris.
• I changed the color of the iris—it was originally brown with some colored reflections and highlights; I recolored it entirely.
• I played around with the contrast of the iris and pupil to make it stand out a little more. It's now definitely fake, but not distractingly so.

I'm happy with how it turned out.

Currently listening: Enigma—The Eyes of Truth

Labels: blog

Crap, I just noticed that Google deleted all of the photos that I uploaded a while back when I was on a photo-posting spree.

Labels: blog

I was finally given the option to upgrade to the new version of Blogger, so I did. This gives me the ability to add labels to my posts so you can find related posts I've made in the past. I'm not planning on going back through 1000 posts and adding labels to all of them, but I labeled a few in the archives to try it out. Look for "Labels:" at the bottom of future posts.

I can also now make blog.travisspomer.com the primary address of this blog, and the old address will automatically redirect to this one. Since those updates take a while to propagate, my blog might disappear off the face of the internet this weekend.

Labels: blog

Occasionally I think about how everything I write here will be preserved forever, archived by Google and the likes. That's sort of creepy. If I say something I shouldn't have, I can't un-say it later, just like in real life. This doesn't frequently have much of an effect on things that I say (I'm keepin' it real, yo), but I do have to at least keep it in mind.

Let's say there's an intern on my team, and I decide to post one of the following things about her:

"A new intern joined the team this week. I haven't talked to her much yet, but wow... hot."

"This week I've been exchanging a lot of emails with the intern. I don't know how exactly she got this job, but it certainly wasn't through competence. At least she's cute."

"Recently I've been eating lunch with one of the new intern girls quite a lot. It's strange, but I find myself really wishing she gets a job with our team; I'll hate for this to all end for good at the end of the summer."

All of those things, while potentially true, are embarrassing for different reasons if the person in question finds the post at some point in time. Maybe she finds it by accident, or adds me as a friend or Facebook, or something like that. If she goes through the post history, she'd find one about her. Creepy for her, embarrassing for me.

(This strikes me as a relatively new problem. A decade ago, nobody blogged, there was no Facebook or MySpace, and this sort of thing was unlikely to be a problem for anyone. Now it's pretty routine for some of your personal thoughts to end up archived on the internet forever in some way or another, whether or not you intended it.)

Finding a way to balance that unfortunate aspect of things with actually wanting to post things that relate to me personally instead of just random quotes or musings can actually be difficult. But, usually, I have to end up eliminating all assessments of people I know or might know in the future. I imagine it detracts from the context of the post, which is unfortunate. But, I think that being vague on the internet is better in the long run than later regretting a post I made long ago.


Currently listening: Linkin Park and Jay-Z—Collision Course—Faint / Jigga What

(Five years from now, am I really going to want it to be archived for all time that I was listening to that?)

Labels: blog