Posted by Skrud at Friday, February 9th 2007 at 8:27pm
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is looking for stories about how the web (or some other app) changed people’s lives. I was writing this up in an e-mail to her project when I realized it would make a good blog post, too.
There are two instances of huge importance that I can think of.
The first story one dates back to … oh, early spring 2003, on the ol’ IRC. I used to be an operator in a heavy metal IRC channel. At the time, I was 19 years old and just finishing up my CEGEP curriculum, planning to attend university in Computer Science in the coming fall. By chance, I was discussing my future goals in the IRC channel with one of the channel’s regulars, “FiG”. I mentioned that I would be heading to Concordia University in Montreal. His response was something along the lines of “No way! I’m the president of CCSS: the Concordia Computer Science Society! I can get you free beer! Come by our tent at Frosh or drop by the office some time!”
On the first week of school, I made sure to drop by the CCSS office where I met not FiG, but some other geeks. We had a friendly chat, and I continued to drop by there regularly, eventually meeting FiG. I started participating in all their events (camping trips, coding competitions, etc.). The following year (even though I had transferred into a “Software Engineering” major as a direct result of CUSEC 2004’s influence) I ran for a VP position and got elected. We were shorthanded a few executives so I actually took up extra work myself. I networked and befriended people all across the university, including students in various disciplines as well as the faculty members. I brought in speakers and recruiters from local companies (Ubisoft and EA, for example). My efforts even got me a faculty-wide award “for outstanding contribution to Student Life”. The year after that I was President of CCSS, running the society myself with a team of executives. (I wasn’t a very good president, but that’s another story.)
I’m still heavily involved in student life at my school, I’ve met some amazing people and have a wonderful group of friends. It’s reached the point where the thought of graduating actually produces tears – I’m going to miss everyone! And all this because of an IRC conversation almost 4 years ago.
As for FiG, we are still very good friends and talk regularly… which leads me to story number 2.
Around November 2003 I started a blog. There was a hosting company (1and1) which was offering a full-featured hosting package absolutely free for one year. It was just the excuse I needed. I bought a domain name (skrud.net) and set up a simple blog. As an afterthought, I installed a simple forum script and promptly forgot about it.
After a couple of months, people actually started posting in it. Edward was the first, and then a few more of my friends (including the aforementioned FiG, who also brought along his own friends). And then people started signing up whom I had never met before. These were people who were new to Concordia in some Computer Science or Engineering discipline and found the forum and blog by chance, by Google, or by looking over someone else’s shoulder in a computer lab or classroom.
Now the forum is a modest-sized community of friends, and even one professor. We get together every so often as a big group and take over a bar, restaurant, or house. The forum has become the online presence of my circle of friends – which has expanded to include friends from before and during university life – and it keeps growing! Some of my favourite people and best friends I might have never met were it not for the forum. And the cycle continues! A number of the newcomers to the forum end up becoming actively involved in student life; the people who ran as my team of executives when I was president of CCSS were mostly forum members.
And there you have it – the internet has played an extremely integral role in making me the person I am today. :)
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging | 6 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 6th 2007 at 12:00pm
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. According to Google Reader, exactly 65 of them. A lot of those feeds are the rarely updated blogs of friends (or in the case of Angelo and Heather, regularly updated).
The nice thing about Google Reader is that it has a “shared feed” feature, which lets me choose posts out of any of the feeds I’m reading and share them. Those posts get packaged together and displayed, even given their own feed). You can notice that little feed widget on the left side of the screen for my shared posts, too.
On top of the geek and programming blogs and webcomics, there are bunch of feeds I follow that are – for lack of a better word – uncharacteristic. At least, they’re feeds that you probably wouldn’t think I would read. I figured I’d profile them here…
Cognitive Daily
Cognitive Daily is a blog about cognitive psychology, published by Dave and Greta Munger. Greta is a professor of psychology at Davidson College and Dave is a writer. Together they report on peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology – stuff like What we hear, how it affects what we see and Insight into how children learn cultural values.
I have no idea why I’m interested in this stuff, but I love it. I suppose on some level, my interest in the subject was piqued with Kathy Sierra’s presentation at CUSEC 2006 (listen to the podcast, though it’s not as good without the visuals). Kathy brought up interesting insights about how pleasing your users, and creating passionate users, is about understanding how humans think and feel and react. Although I know I’m more of a head-buried-under-the-code type of programmers and probably don’t think about users (other than myself) nearly often enough.
Deep Astronomy
I discovered Deep Astronomy thru Digg, when there was a post about How to Destroy the Earth with a Coffee Can. Astronomer Tony Darnell writes about various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, with a lot of tongue in cheek humour that makes it entertaining (and you learn a ton) – like How to Avoid Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Sickness in which he describes the universe as “one very big microwave oven.”
Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
Retrospectacle is a very recent addition to my feed aggregator. I discovered it when there was a post on microscopic images of beer. Beer is extremely pretty up close. The blog is written by Shelley Batts, a 3rd year PhD candidate who researches hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, in the opes of using it as a therapy for hearing loss. She recently had a post about the basic concepts of hearing that was a great article about the ear and how hearing actually works.
Again, I have no idea why I find this stuff fascinating, but Retrospectacle is definitely an interesting and fun dose of science.
Seed Magazine – I Can’t Believe It’s Science
Astute readers will notice that two of the above three blogs are part of Seed Magazine’s “ScienceBlogs” section. Well surprise, surprise, I subscribe to Seed’s main feed as well. But the only thing I really read from this feed is Maggie Wittlin’s weekly ”I Can’t Believe It’s Science” column which documents interesting and weird sort-of-related-to-science things.
Tenser, said the Tensor
Named after a song from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Tenser, said the Tensor is a blog about linguistics. Unlike more generalized linguablogs like languagehat – which I used to read – Tenser, said the Tensor focuses on linguistics in science fiction. One example is a post about the language of the Children of Tama in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode. Linguistics is a subject that’s always interested me to varying degrees. In fact, I probably would have gone into Linguistics or English Literature if I didn’t get accepted into Computer Science when I started university. (Just imagine! Skrud the linguist instead of Skrud the programmer!)
Mind you, I don’t think linguistics and programming are all that different. At some level, you’re still dealing with grammars, syntax and semantics. The only difference is that computer languages are context-free. (Mmmm… finite state automata…)
The Dilbert Blog
The Dilbert Blog is Scott Adams’ blog, and thusly named as he is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. Scott Adams is hilarious. His blog covers tons of things I’m not interested in at all (politics, philosophy, etc.) yet with the delivery of a stand-up comedian at a Just for Laughs gala. Sometimes he posts about current events and warns asexually reproducing Komodo dragons to stop giving our human women ideas. Or he’ll write about a gender test and how ridiculous a test like that might be.
TVInJapan
Finally, there’s TVInJapan. The best thing since prepackaged, sliced bread. TVInJapan is loaded with tons and tons of random, hilarious, interesting and often absurd clips from television in Japan. Clips can be loaded with Ultraman doing the Scatman, or the reproduced-everywhere Hand-made Star Wars. Sometimes there are television commercials with the infectious Tarako Cupie Girls or Superpowered School Girls. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Greased-up movers, Surprise crowds of 100 people chasing random pedestrians and much, much more. On TV. In Japan.
Unfortunately Japan is pretty anal about copyrights and those clips constantly get removed from YouTube, so in order to make sure you really get the most of TVInJapan you definitely need to subscribe to the feed.
And there you have it … a small subset of blogs that I read that have nothing to do with programming – though I guess they could still count as geek blogs given how heavily science-oriented they are.
Enjoy!
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging, reading, science | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, June 27th 2006 at 7:56pm
If nothing else, the internet surely has a hand in shaping how I receive information. Not only that, it influences how I expect to get at my information. Every now and then my father would ask me if I heard about so-and-so happening in some-faraway-place, and my reaction is almost consistently “that’s old news.” That’s because he still gets his information the old fashioned way, through TV, radio, and even print (ewww).
The Obsolescence of Traditional Media
I’m going to lump “print”, “TV” and “Radio” into one huge lump and called it “traditional media”. All these forms of communication share at least one thing in common, and that’s lag.
News on the radio is the least susceptible, with talk radio stations giving updates every hour or so… but how often do you listen to the radio? I think for most people that’s an activity limited to the morning and afternoon rush hours.
With television, a number of selected stories are researched, compressed, edited, compressed even more, and finally presented – usually from one perspective – at 6pm and 11pm on your local TV station. If you’re lucky you’ll get a 5 minute feature on some interesting story and the rest will be little more than headlines. You’ll hardly have enough information to go on.
Finally there’s print, which suffers the most from lag. Newspapers, as far as I know, come out once a day. This has the advantage that the stories tend to be fuller, researched more thoroughly and presented with more detail compared to a news cast. However it also has the disadvantage that whatever news you do get is at least a day old. Furthermore, you’re at the mercy of the reporter writing the story, and you have only his/her context to rely on. I haven’t read many newspapers, but my experience with the Gazette has been less than stellar. Despite the top notch comics pages, it seems that every time the Gazette reports on a topic that I’m knowledgeable about (computers, for example), they’re dead wrong. And if they’re wrong about the stuff that I know about, how can I trust them when learning about stuff that I don’t know about?
Magazines are a different story alltogether. Magazine articles are usually written some two months before they actually appear in print. This isn’t a big issue if you’re reading magazines about stuff that doesn’t change very rapidly, but in technology that’s just not the case. Countless times, during my subscription to Wired I’ve come across articles that no longer hold up against new information that came out between the time of writing and the day the magazine appeared at my door.
I no longer subscribe to the magazine, but I’ll occasionally read articles on their website.
The Web
It used to be that I’d logon to slashdot multiple times a day and learn about a ton of stuff that was going on in the world, especially in technology. New stories would come up every 20 minutes to an hour. But even slashdot has editors which painstakingly process each story, often skipping over stuff they don’t think should be published.
Thanks to the glory of the internet, you could always find a multitude of sources covering the same story and if you were so inclined, compare them to determine where they converge (or diverge, as it were). This would let you filter your content and factor out the perspectives of various reporters.
The Web 2.0
With blogs and RSS feeds, it suddenly became possible to track sites and topics that I’m interested in. I could be notified instantaneously (okay, maybe with a delay of 15 minutes or however often I check for new data) of new stories, new articles, new technologoy, new ideas… It’s a massive amount of information. I have my regular bloglines feeds and that’s more than enough.
Then digg came around, with a crazy scheme: Let the people decide what they want to read about. digg allows anyone to submit stories, and other people who see those stories can “digg” them. The more “diggs” a story has the higher it rises on the site, until it reaches the front page. This allows the readers to be their own editors, and the mass hive mind of the internet is the only filter. I subscribed to digg’s RSS feed for a while and quickly decided it was way too much information. Instead I settled on making digg.com my home page.
Yesterday, digg v3 came out, and it no longer carries only tech news. Now it covers all kinds of news, which is when I started realizing, with a mix of wonder and fear, there’s a lot of stuff on the internet. I can’t really keep up with all of it.
Revolution?
This kind of social computing is changing the way information propagates. It’s no longer at the beck and call of the mass media. There’s no editor in between a blogger and his/her readers, and there are fewer and fewer barriers to the distribution of information. Stuff that previously used to slip through the cracks in the mass media system can now get picked up by the web.
I think it’s really cool, and has the potential to revolutionize the way we think and communicate and learn. It also makes me worried that things like Net Neutrality might be lost (if big businesses and politicians get their way) and the whole thing will come crashing down.
(I swear I had a point when I started writing this – damn it. Next time I’ll make sure to plan an outline. :P)
Tags: geek, internet, media, tech, web | 10 comments
Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, April 26th 2006 at 4:28am
I love personality tests. I find them to be an excellent waste of time – regardless of how meaningful they are. Often I find them to be pretty accurate, and all too often brutally honest about my faults. I suppose that’s a good thing, I should learn to be fault tolerant.
Harley pointed the forum-goers to the PersonalDNA test, which is a pretty unusual test as far as online personality tests go. It was very well done, and you can see my results in this PersonalDNA Profile if you’re interested. Spurred on by this renewed interest in my own personality, I decided to retake TheSpark’s Personality Test.
TheSpark’s Personality Test is a staple of Internet culture. I remember taking that test for the first time when I was about 14 years old, and seeing all those neat “compatibility” charts with my friends. (Of course, I’d be mostly incompatible with virtually every girl I knew at the time). I scored a “Dreamer” (Submissive Introverted Abstract Feeler) the first time I took the test. Here’s what they say about Dreamers:
You are a DREAMER (SIAF)— reserved and imaginative. You are basically the shy, silent type. You don’t have much interest in facts and figures or most of what’s going on around you, but the internal worlds you build for yourself are rich and complex. Luckily, your creativity and strong heart mean you have a deep personality evident to anyone who gets to know you. It’s just that not many people do. Talk to yourself less, other people more.
I used to retake the test every six months to a year or so, to see how I might have changed since then. Every single time I took the test, though, I would invariably be a Dreamer. Other interesting factors that I remember, is that I’d be right at the edge of the Introvert-Extrovert spectrum; almost all the way on the “Introvert” side. Also, I distincly remember being exactly 50/50 on the Thinker/Feeler spectrum.
The PersonalDNA Profile, however, said I was extroverted. This is a change in my personality that I think has surfaced only in very recent years. Coming to university and finally feeling like my education is justified has given me some sense of self-worth. Keeping a blog has made me focus more on expression. Being comfortable with the state of my academic career and learning so much, and understanding so much has given me incredible confidence. Making some amazing new friends, with a group of people on the forums who proudly call themselves “skrud.netters” has given me a major boost in social confidence. Take all of these factors combined, and you have a Skrud with an inverted polarity bit on the introverted/extroverted scale. That facet of my personality has been completely turned around.
I decided I would take TheSpark’s test again, since it has remained constant for so long, to see if there were any changes this time. Lo and behold, I am now a Guru (“Submissive Extroverted Abstract Feeler”):
You are a GURU (SEAF)— kind, knowing, giving. Like Buddha of old, you can be a persuasive speaker, and you use your creative talents to further the objectives of your heart instead of your mind. But be careful that your friends don’t take advantage of your relaxed nature.
Above all, you like going with the flow. That’s cool. Oh yeah, you like to talk a lot. That’s cool, too. Whatever.
What’s amazing is that not only am I an extrovert, but the scale was almost to the end of the spectrum. As if that part of my personality really did do a 180-degree turn. The other interesting thing, is that once again I am exactly on the midpoint of the Thinker/Feeler line.
All this makes me wonder about how everyone else might have changed (or grown, if you prefer) over the past few years. So I ask you, readers and fellow bloggers: How have you changed since the last time you took these tests (and since you’re on the Internet, I’ll assume that you took them at some point)? How has your personality changed since entering the current stage of your life (be it University, full-time work or whatever)?
Tags: culture, internet, personality, psychology | 3 comments
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, March 10th 2005 at 1:39am
The dead?.docs have a long history that dates way back when to the days of the BBS.
Dedaparamaxxaginos Productions consisted of a group of raving lunatics, and by that I mean lovable geeks. The stories focus on a fictional
Gainesville, Florida BBS. At least the Not-A-Cray BBS was fictional. At least I hope it was. And if it isn’t, would anyone want to lend me
the Cray? …
Enough rambling. These stories are classics of geek literature. They have floated around the BBS circuit and have come to rest on the internet
in various places. The current stable place of retrieval (and it has been for the last few years) is the Dead Documents
mirror on iago.net. Since I have no idea how long it will be around, I figured I might as well host these docs
myself. Also, it’ll save me a Google search everytime I want to look for it.
Well I’m no longer curious about the annotated versions … In fact, two people have e-mailed me with a ton of information (more than I had ever anticipated) on the subject. Some of it was pretty interesting, and all of it was unexpected. But thanks to some scrounging around on the Internet Archive I managed to find the old copies of the annoted versions. A huge thanks to Brian Kern for the detailed info and to Right Reverend Bang The Clueless for helping me track down the annotated versions as well as contact the real Morgan Bluejeans to find out what’s up… also for the extremely amusing e-mails. I’ll be putting the annoted versions up in a bit, once laziness subsides. (Of course, the email exchanges I’m talking about took place from January to February (2005)… so laziness may prevail a while longer)
These docs are a must read for anyone who has ever used a BBS. So enjoy.
The DEAD?.DOCs: A Musical Drama in -V- Parts
Tags: bbs, deaddocs, geek, history, internet | 4 comments
