Starship Century Symposium: 21 May 2013

Joe is a high caliber Javascripter. Joe is a hump day hero who seems to work best in the morning.

Joe’s behavior is quite similar to pdokas‘s but pdokas spends more of their time commenting on issues. It would also be impossible to look at Joe’s activity stream and not compare it to those of shishkin, buzzdecafe, thedjpetersen and mboinet. It seems—from their activity streams—that Joe and david-sabata are probably friends or at least virtual friends. With this in mind, it’s worth noting that david-sabata speaks more languages.

Statistics

The two following graphs show Joe’s average weekly and daily schedules. These charts give significant insight into Joe’s character as a developer. The colors in the charts indicate the fraction of events that are watching, pushes, and issue comments.

Based on this average weekly schedule, we can describe Joe as a hump day hero. Since Joe’s most active time is around 11am, I would conclude that Joe works best in the morning. It is important to note that an attempt has been made to show the daily schedule in the correct time zone but this procedure is imperfect at best.

The following chart shows number of events of different types in Joe’s activity stream. In the time frame included in this analysis, Joe’s event stream included a total of 18 events and they are all watching, pushes, or issue comments.

Joe has contributed to repositories in 3 different languages. In particular, Joe is a serious JavaScript expert. The following chart shows the number of contributions made by Joe to repositories where the main language is listed as JavaScript, Python, or PHP.

I’m on a header jag. Photos galore result in headers galore.

five fifty-five
five fifty-five

a cinq cinquante-cinq
ante meridiem
too late to end it now
too early to start again

five fifty five
five fifty five

soon the morning will arrive
can i begin another day?
whilst this old day is still alive
refusing to be put away

five fifty five (no sleep tonight)
five fifty five

like a beast awaits its fate
laid here with time to kill
the very dead of night
where time and space stand still

five fifty five
five fifty five

five fifty five (no sleep tonight)
five fifty five

a cinq cinquante-cinq
nothing will ever change
on the altar of my thought
i sacrifice myself again
and again
and again (five fifty five)
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Get it on Amazon.

Clicking through gets me to a grid of easily purchased items under the headline: “Choose a Gift for Phyllis.”

Social media, Facebook, knows who my mother is. It’s smart enough to know that. And in spite of the fact that she died in October, 2010, I can’t bear, yet, to initiate the process of disabling her Facebook account. I know a few other dead people with Facebook accounts, and people occasionally “visit” and leave messages. These messages inspire me. They give me pause. I find them ridiculous. I find them moving. They’re what the word “bittersweet” was made for.

My Mom would have been 67 yesterday. And Sunday will be another Mother’s Day on which I think about her and am not able to give her a corporeal gift. No Starbucks card. No flowers. No mug with a funny message.

Instead what I have to offer is intangible. I choose “whimsy.”

For the last few months I’ve been trying to live my life differently. I am trying to embrace whimsy as a life philosophy. In any particular instance, what is the whimsical thing? What’s more fun? What’s more surprising? What’s going to delight someone?

At work many months back — maybe a year ago now — I started “thought-leadering” the word “delight” as something we should be trying to inspire in our customers. It’s a value that seems silly. “Delight” is a silly word. I read about delight as a value in writings on UX. But I think it’s my Mom, and her silly and fun nature, that set me up to think of delight and whimsy as things worth moving toward–in work and in day-to-day life.

Interview of Alexa O’Brien @carwinb by @theharryshearer on Le Show is riveting on the Bradley Manning Trial. Listen @ kcrw.com/etc/programs/ls

— Joe Crawford (@artlung) May 6, 2013

Additionally, I made a new header. First header I’ve made since 2011.

I read quite a bit. I never blog.

Revisiting the Original 1992 WIRED Media Kit by Brian Dear.

Refuse to be terrorized.

Tim Bray buys some BitCoins:

Bought some BitCoins; yes, a bit of a Sprawl-trilogy flavor.Wonder if I’ll ever see the money again? goo.gl/NlY3r

— Tim Bray (@timbray) April 10, 2013

Susan made incredible Paleo deviled eggs:

Paleo- style deviled eggs in authentic Red Wing dish, ready for tonight’s #MadMen dinner with @leahpeah and @artlung twitter.com/twocitygirl/st…

— susan myrland (@twocitygirl) April 7, 2013

Blink is a big development in browser rendering engines. Forks in open source are always news. More from PPK about it.

And lastly, here’s me and my mother-in-law, obscured by flowers. Taken by @leahpeah

I was inspired by Jorn Barger and Andy Baio. This predated twitter, and Facebook of course. And providing an updated list of “what’s cool” was really fun to do.

I gave up on it in 2005, and found the original del.icio.us and moved everything there. In the 8 years since I added thousands of links there.

I want to make sure I have a copy of my own links somewhere I control. I intend to make it searchable and navigable. Last night I took some time and imported all those delicious bookmarks and have revived, symbolically, “Semidaily.”

One thing I may do is integrate these links, along with archived tweets, along with anything else I can think of, into the old pages of the blog – basically integrated bookmarks, blog posts, tweets, and photos retroactively. So at any one time I can see everything I was doing in a particular month.

They used to call some of this lifeblogging, and I remember Mark Pilgrim called a combined feed of all his RSS content “the firehose” – but I think I don’t really want it as I live my life. If you want to aggregate me, go for it.

But for me, I like it more retroactively. To see what made me laugh, to see what made me smart, to see my news sources.

So there it is.