Monthly Archives: August 2009

10 Levels of Intimacy in Today's Communication

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10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication (Ji Lee) .

I have a thing for infographics, and a lot of Ji Lee’s work is awesome. Word as Image is especially cool.

The image, although an interesting take on the different levels of intimacy per communication medium, I would reorder, remove, and add certain levels.

And the important thing here is that different people would order this differently. Some who never use Twitter won’t even have that on their spectrum. I hate text messages, so I wouldn’t have that in my graphic.

I had a project years ago that never left my brain trying to capture this data: How different people use different channels of communication, and how people infer certain data based on the usage of a certain medium. Yeah, I still don’t know what I’d do with it, but it kinda made me think of that project from long ago…

Nostalgia's Curse

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The concepts of difficulty today and difficulty of yesterday are completely different things. Where today we measure difficulty as how intelligent the A.I. is or how quickly the difficulty curve rises, the games of yesteryear were about how many times you died. Difficulty was about the number of times you would die until you had the patterns of enemies and stages memorized. After all, there was no abstract A.I. constructs like there are for games today, so they had to rely on the “pattern” to throw people off their game. This also factors into today’s games, the whole memorization concept, but it’s intertwined with all that modern technology offers. That’s why we revisit these nostalgic games and find ourselves being trounced; we’ve become used to how modern games conceive their difficulty and have forgotten the old method of “Die until you get it.”

Destructoid – I suck at games: Nostalgia’s curse.

Both old school and recent titles can provide challenges, and it’s interesting how hardware limits (like for A.I.) has caused developers in the past to structure difficulty in a different way.

Can One Man Out Do Google Reader?

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No. But I’m pretty sure I can do something awesome in the world of feeds.

FeedSt, as an idea, has been in the back of my head, ever since I started using feed readers. (I actually need to sit down and piece together some history.) From the get go, I knew the dangers of creating a me-too company, a situation where the basic features of the original company are copied plus some additional feature set.

It’s been many months since I started thinking about FeedSt, but I still feel like there’s enough people out there demanding there is a better experience dealing with feeds. I hope to show these issues through blog posts and code.

The Playing Field

Them: A seven person engineering team from Google, with stacks of cash and years of dev time. (I’m assuming that the number of contributors on the Google Reader Blog maps directly to the people who are working on it.) The majority of this team is probably incredibly smart and experienced.

Me: A single dev, with very little runway left and a couple months of time left. Not so experienced, and actually is lacking in a huge chunk of the skillset needed to pull this off.

And it’s not just Google Reader. With the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, Streamy.com is probably going to become the darling “social feed reader”. And I’m sure those people are extremely smart.

Regardless, yes, the odds are tremendously against me. But it’s never been this clear to me that I should be doing this. Foolish? Probably. But I only live once. I definitely want to make what seems to be my last chance count.

So with this post, I hope to kick off a series of posts pertaining to this project. Hope to keep you updated as stuff gets done.

09.09.09

Four weeks. I can have something awesome in four weeks, right? Most definitely.

Trying To Capture That One Turnaround Moment

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This is the epitome of the uselessness of “meta”. I hope to never reach this level of useless self-awareness too often from this point on.

What I realized yesterday was that I’ve been waiting… waiting for the one moment when I would immediately jump on a project and not stop until I passed out from the lack of food or sleep.

Of course, it never came. And it never will.

The standards were set to high, and while it might have been partially admirable at the beginning, it was bound to fail.

And it wasn’t enough that I was hoping for something ridiculously impossible: I was meaning to record it for the world to see, to show the world how much better I’ve become as I awoke from my unproductive slumber.

Pfft. This blog post hopes to just satiate that insane ego, such pride…

Quick, To The Point!

This has probably been one of my largest roadblocks. The need to log, fine, that’s just who I am. I need to remember to know that I exist.

But to wait for the moment when I suddenly become awesome? Wow, such foolishness.

Be awesome instead. Awesome isn’t the destination. It’s the journey.

And with this in mind: Here goes everything. Again. And whatever is here will probably go again in the future.

Note to self: Star this post. Then refer to it regularly, add to it, and then keep pushing towards somewhere better.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again

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I tweeted this nine days ago:

I didn’t know Flash stored so much info. http://bit.ly/S6e1v And that emptying my browser cache doesn’t do anything.

Just now, there is a story on Wired on this subject:

Defenders of behavioral ads say that privacy shouldn’t be a concern since cookies really identify a browser, not a person. Moreover, they argue that users would prefer to have relevant ads. Targeted Behavioral Ads could also help save online journalism.

You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter | Wired.com.

It’s good to see that Wired is covering this story. It’s not necessarily 100% bad that Flash does this, and I really hope that the general blogosphere doesn’t make a fuss about it. The more the people on the Internet learn about the way the web works, the better. Remember the cookie paranoia of the ’90s? Let’s not live through that again…