Saw Arj Barker open for the FotC concert a few weeks back, and had to share this clip about Google:

This entry contained scripting, which has been removed for your safety. Click here to see the entry in its entirety.

It's no secret that I've been quite busy at work lately. I face a daily barrage of decisions and questions... and I finally have a solution.

The idea came upon me when I ran into this Twitter site, "Roy_from_IT":

If one were to do a regression analysis on my Skype conversations, I believe a full 95% of them would involve one of these responses: "lol", "brb meeting", "hmm", "interesting..", or "what do you think the problem is?"

Imagine if I had a Skype bot that just randomly selected one of these answers and return them?! I bet I'd still be at least 80% effective at my job. Let's imagine...

The MindTouch office is humming with activity on a busy July day:

Like usual, I'm not at my desk (maybe people assume I'm in the front room on a conference call with a client, but maybe I'm just sitting in there, talking out LOUD TO MYSELF). Damien, in a rush to get an important answer about a client project, messages me on Skype:

DamienH: Hey Roy, the blog paragraphs fix didn't seem to work. I tried to change Wordpress' behavior to nl2br, but it didn't fix it.

He wouldn't expect an answer. Damien might even be thinking, "Well, I asked him the question, he's not at my desk. I can get a burrito!" Bzzt.

RoyK: What do you think the problem is?

Damien swivels and sees an empty desk. Confusion reigns.

DamienH: Well, I guess we could try to use CSS to fix the problem with paragraph breaks. That'd be a cleaner solution that wouldn't necessitate an internal fix inside WordPress we'd have to maintain. Thanks Roy!

Or maybe a group chat begins with Corey and Brian about something important:

BrianH: Yo Roy, ***** from ***** is such a douche. He won't respond to my emails.
CoreyG: This is really going to drag down my "support tickets close" statistics. I may just close it to keep our "average days open" number low.
RoyK: lol
CoreyG: You're right, we should try to solve the problem. Let me try emailing him again. Thanks, Roy.

Or maybe Guerric is working on some fancypants feature:

GuerricS: So I've got this killer new version of Deki Push I've been hacking on at home. Want to take a look?
RoyK: Hmm...
GuerricS: You're right, it's probably not polished, and import/export will deprecate it. I won't waste your time.

So easy!

Of course, people might pick up on these if they're too short. Maybe a more contextual answer will help.

JessicaR: So, I think we need a feature to make it easier to skin.
RoyK: Hmm, interesting. I think that's a great idea, but we just have limited resources. We should focus on what we can do in the immediate future. But we should definitely mark that down as an idea we should pursue in the future.
JessicaR: Thanks!

Of course, sometimes it's good to get people to be actionable.

DamienH: I just wrote this killer animated Ajax counter. Want to see?
RoyK: You should write a blog post on it.
DamienH: That's a great idea! Here it is.

Sometimes our Russian devs need a little help: (my script would have to send one message, wait for a response, then send the second one!)

DmitryA: Hello, Roy! What is polyglot function?
RoyK: Did you search the wiki?
DmitryA: Ahh. <goes away for five minutes>
DmitryA: _______________ (doesn't really matter what goes here)
RoyK: File a bug on it.

Or maybe one of the interns needs my help:

RickyN: Got time to help me with some code stuff?
RoyK: brb, meeting

No, wait. I'd do that when I'm actually sitting at my desk.

;)

The company I work for (my real day job!) is in a competition... please help me out by supporting our company, MindTouch! I posted a couple of weeks back - that was for the nomination ... this is for the actual competition!

1. PLEASE click here to vote NOW for MindTouch in the the SourceForge Community Choice Awards
   
2. Scroll to bottom and submit your email address
3. Confirm your vote by clicking the link sent to your email(s)
   
   That’s all!

Thanks, everybody :)

To supplement my healthy appetite for Akon, I also am listening to heavy doses of sisters Meg & Dia - I've been a long-time fan. I need to try to make it out to one of their shows one of these days.

I might be in love. <3

Chicks who rock = game over for me.

. . .

For those of you who enjoyed the catchy pop music of The Click Five, I present to you ... The Higher:

This entry contained scripting, which has been removed for your safety. Click here to see the entry in its entirety.

+ Monday, July 6, 2009
Today, I turned 21. I can legally drink now. I lost my wallet and makeup bag -I'm usually not this bad at losing stuff. I'm kind of concerned now. I hope to find it before I go to China. M read my blog and told me that I shouldn't let other people ideas/judgements affect me in such a way especially since they are not necessarily qualified to do so. I should not place value, I suppose I did because this person was what I would consider a good friend. I have a tendency to say that people tend to surprise and/or disappoint you.

I wonder if Lard actually reads my blog. I kind of doubt it now especially since she forgot my birthday, but it's not a huge deal. L told me that V & her are in a relationship again. I don't support the decision but I would continue to support her.

Cleaned up more -hopefully I'll find my wallet and makeup soon @_@

Ate at cheesecake factory with my mother today. I'm hormonal and mean -I don't want to deal with anyone :/ oh PMS >_>

+ Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Brother tells me stories about SUNDS and sleep paralysis. I can't sleep on my back for a while. Mother tells me ghost stories a while ago too about the house -I become increasingly paranoid.

+ Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Lard tells me ghost stories, I'm afraid to shower for a while -especially since I have to duck down (there's a leak and supposedly I can't use the shower head for a while until the problem is fixed >_>) I wanted to call M a couple of times but felt bad if I were to.

+ Thursday, July 9, 2009
Today, my watch broke -as in it ran out of battery. I'm going to head for China in two days. I'm thinking about getting the battery changed. I remember that the place that I work for ordered custom watches from China. When they arrived they were already running. My boss informed me that she needed it to last a couple of years. I thought that the watch running would last only a year or two if lucky. She asked me if I wanted to go through 400 watches and stop them -so the battery would last longer. I didn't say anything but I said it would be inconvenient to get the battery changed too -even if it's less expensive especially after paying so much to get them in the first place. Oh well, in less than half a year, they won't be my problem no longer.

When it comes to have extreme feelings, Tabulas has to best exemplifies the chasm of emotions I have towards it. The feelings mix from despair ("Tabulas sucks, why bother?") to guilt ("I should really fix it up") to hope ("I can really sense it's on the cusp of being a great site!").

The traffic logs really tell the story:

At its peak, Tabulas was handling somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000,000 pageviews per month. It's not an amazing feat, but it was something to be proud of. Since then, traffic has been slowly dying, as I've been neglecting work on the site.

I took a peek at the SVN checkin logs for Tabulas, and they are atrocious. There will be a flurry of activity once every six months (as was the case this past weekend), but then, silence.

And sadly, most of the dev work since 2006 has been around infrastructure and code cleanup. In terms of new features and the way Tabulas is positioned, it's been stuck in a quagmire since '06.

It's tough to watch sites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter execute on strategy that slowly bleeds the community out of a project like this. Of course, part of the problem is that people simply grow up - the core community users who led to its widespread adoption don't blog as actively as they used to, and that always hurts. Tabulas never replenished with fresh members (which is what Facebook has been very good at doing, every year or two).

While I try not to be regretful of the decisions I've made, I question my decision making when it came to abandoning projects like Audiomatch and Tabulas. Looking back, had I been a little more mature in my decision making, I would have not taken the success of Tabulas so lightly; I would have hired a team, gotten some money, and taken a real crack at succeeding in that space.

So what's next? I don't know. Like always, Tabulas sits in a purgatory - I'm too proud of it to sell it, but too time-starved to do any meaningful work on it.

I do know that I immensely enjoyed hacking on Tabulas this past weekend - it was a refreshing change of scenery from dealing with real adult-like issues from work. I've mapped out a few ideas I want to pursue for Tabulas - being able to hack out a whole user directory in ~300 lines of code and in a day gave me encouragement that the code I've written for Tabulas isn't complete crap.

I mean, the work I did this weekend looks pretty good and is pretty functional:

I know I want to finish accomplishing the "dream" of Tabulas: a site which lets you share your stories, and where you can be exposed to the stories of other people.

So even if I'm exhausted from work, or I don't feel like hacking, I think I'll force myself (for this month and August) to work on Tabulas. That will be my goal.

Out of curiosity, for those of you are still using Tabulas ... why? I mean, some of you, I know, are stuck here by personal connections ... but is that all Tabulas has left going for it? (/me is geniunely curious) I know I still use it because it still beats the pants off of WordPress & LiveJournal in terms of personal publishing, but maybe there's something new that's better? (Tumblr doesn't count)

Oliver rockin' the Tabulas t-shirt.

You can finally find other Tabulas users through our new user directory!

For example, here are all updates from our Filipino users over the past month!

Your profile can be updated from the control panel's profile view. An important field I've added is the "Interests." You can use comma-separated interests to help connect you to other like-minded people.

I hope you enjoy these new features!

For those of you long-time readers, who bore the brunt of my long-winded poker entries from back in the Carolina days, will be happy to hear that Terrence qualified for the WSOP Main Event ($10,000 buy-in!) through a satellite tournament.

I was in Vegas Wed/Thurs with my parents, and was able to catch up with Terrence, Brigid (T's GF), and Peter ... I'm feeling pretty pumped for Terrence. If there's anybody I know who could do well at the WSOP, it's Terrence.

And he's decided to pick up his Tabulas poker diary to capture his experiences.

Check it out: http://terrence.tabulas.com

Good luck, Terrence!

I'll tell you one thing - talking to them about poker makes me want to train again; my game has diminished so greatly lately it's not even funny. (Un?)fortunately, my job keeps me quite busy where I couldn't realistically put in the hours to get good again. Oh well!