The Simian Downtime Analyst

Not too long ago I would have described myself as what is affectionately called an early adopter. Very little made my day more than having a nice new service or piece of software to play with before anyone else.  I thoroughly enjoyed having stacks of beta invites in my inbox just itching to be clicked and consumed.  It was a glorious time, and there was very little better than showing off my new toys to my friends.

Even when I was knee deep in newness, at some point it became taxing to keep starting over. Once where I was overjoyed to build something new, it felt like a chore.  More often than not it was beginning to work my nerves to keep having to enter in my birthdate for all the profiles that would soon lead to nowhere. To combat this, many of the developers caught on to the annoyance and found ways to use existing services for login purposes.  At that point it was already too late.

I must either be getting old or I have just found a set of tools that work great for my needs. I don’t go out of my way asking for invites to things and half the time ignore the ones I already  have.  I do not want to use this thing over here that looks just like this other thing, which isn’t broken and does not need to be replaced.  I do not want to have to invite my friends to something else when I can already keep up with them in 90 other places.

I do not want green eggs and ham.

There are plenty of folks left in the world who are still chasing that “Ooh Shiny” high, and they can have at it. The downside of the trend is that at some point when the shimmer starts to wear off, some of them treat the people that remain in the communities built like they are flaming dog crap on the front porch. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not even intentional and even the early adopters themselves are beginning to splinter off into smaller groups over it.

Choosing the tools over the people is always going to cause more problems than it is worth. Following around some random guy you never met on the quest for the technological equivalent of a sugar high is not good for you either. I am sure there is some middle ground where you can appreciate the aspects of both can be reached.

Starting off the month drawing a complete blank for an entry.

So I’m just going to play Tiger instead.

Ok so that thing that I do that keeps me away from here and makes me a bad blogger….
There is a awards thing for podcasts and you should totally vote for it.

Vote for The Random Time Lords!!

It is that time of year again.

Today I was focused on making a couple of banners for a few websites (SDA included).   I decided it was time for a web search intervention so I would not spend an entire day doing the wrong thing. In one of the top results, I found a nice straightforward video tutorial at Hiphop Makers.

This tutorial was done by Mark Valenzuela of New Ice Media.

While we still dig the idea of what Disqus does, it is about time for us to reevaluate the necessity of it.  To be honest, it was installed in an attempt to gain conversation.  When conversation did not happen, it didn’t bother me that no one was talking, but it felt like we put this big honking new engine in a car that nobody wanted to drive too fast.

This was the case until Disqus added a new feature, social media reactions. I saw it as a chance to ditch the plugin we were using to import Friendfeed comments and the like, but the update has not quite made it to our humble little home.  On another blog which I felt needed a different approach, Backtype Connect is installed.  Since that does function correctly, it is possible we will be using it in the future.

Also, lately I have been on a kick to seriously clean the code up on every WordPress blog I can get my mitts on. In each instance Disqus is installed,  validation is more difficult. This might not be an issue if I knew Javascript, but I don’t yet so there is another compelling reason to let the platform go. Maybe it is time to pare down a bit.

Amber has been a tad bit occupied lately.

Random Time Lords podcast.

Me and Steven Perez discuss things that are going on.

Check it out.

Also don’t forget about the comic.