keizo/weblog

Reddit.com used to be a great website where you could find the best content on the internet. The way it worked was that people submitted links to a ‘new page’ and everyone voted on them. The highest rated stories would then get displayed on the reddit homepage. It worked because there weren’t that many people on the site. The average user like myself would read all the good stories, then get bored and read all the new stories. Then we would vote on the new good ones, resulting in more good content. It was simple.

The website grew and grew, until pretty soon there was too much new stuff on the ‘new page’ to keep up with all of it. People like me stopped voting. The quality of content suffered noticeably. And then it sucked.

I suggested in Nov of 2006 that they put some of the new links on the reddit homepage so people like me would continue to vote on them. That way the content wouldn’t suck. No one tried the idea. And the content continued to suck.

But today, the reddit guys have implemented a similar idea. New links are shown at the top of the reddit homepage. So maybe there’s hope that reddit could be great again. Or maybe it’s too late. I won’t be clicking on any of those links. If I did click one, it would probably suck.

from the J.K. Rowling Harvard Commencement Address

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

crap.

The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life.

shit. i don’t remember either of the two people i sat next to.

Work until midnight
Peanut butter and jelly
Good dinner tonight

Pay some student loans
Oh my god it’s a shit ton
Crap, no money left

Too much gelcoat fumes
Working at the shop all day
No words left to say

For one reason or another I just thought of my senior banquet event at rpi. During the dinner there was a sweet little slide show of pictures. All of them were of people having fun, at parties, hockey games, and random outings. Then, surprise; one of me sitting in front of my two laptops with homework spewed all over my desk. Thanks for sending that one in Stephen Huhn. That was the only picture out of hundreds that had anyone doing anything un-fun — and this at a school known to be the most wired campus in the nation and for having the least happy students. I rule.

I feel like life is passing me by.

12/13/07
today is exactly one semester since I finished college.
today I paid my first student loan payment.
today I burned my finger on a hot piece of metal. it sucked.

giving up as soon as I don’t see a perfect future

h: [my] face feeels like it’s been punched
h: but my husbnd/bf would NEVER dosuch a thing
m: haha, yeah
m: [things would never ever work out for us then]
m: [cause I have this twitch where i punch people in the face unexpectedly]

old — 10/8/07

one hawaiian, one russian, one mexican, one australian, one white, two cambodians, two japanese-haole, and 10 tahitians = the house I live in. I won’t bother mentioning religions.

This title isn’t quite specific enough. First of all, I’ve only known about Unistrut for three days. It’s a metal building system consisting of various struts, beams, and fasteners that allow quick fabrication of all sorts of things — from saw horses to supports for electrical, ventilation, or even a mezzanine. It’s a lot like an Erector Set for real stuff. Honestly, it seems like an awesome starting point for all sorts of projects.

What sucks is that no where on the internet or in any of the catalogs do they list any sort of pricing for the material. I don’t know what kind of people made this decision at Unistrut, but it sucks. Please make prices public. Having to submit a list of materials just to get a price quote is ass backwards and slows down the design process. This is especially critical for a small fast moving company where every day of productivity matters.

“For what it is worth, you were the next application after the cutoff (#21). Thanks for applying. Hope you apply again =)”… ouch. Last fall I applied for Google Summer of Code (SOC) under the Drupal (PHP) open source project. At the time I was taking bunch of courses and didn’t have a whole lot of time. I managed to write a decent proposal, but a big part of my approach was based on modules I had evaluated many months earlier — basically I didn’t complete my homework for the proposal. My fault.

The reason I applied for the Drupal project is because my website uses the software heavily and some desirable features weren’t available, so I figured I would write them myself for SOC. The $4500 was a bonus and would of allowed me to save some money. Even in not getting into the program, I could of written the program I needed, but being first loser kind of killed my motivation. Plus, PHP isn’t that fun.

So for most of June I tinkered programming Python to keep myself entertained. Finally a week or so into July after a messy Drupal upgrade I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. And four weeks later I had a semi featured Drupal clone in Python. User sessions, logins, roles/group permissions, registration, basic node functionality including creating, editing, and display, text filtering, url aliasing, node caching and other things I’m forgetting.

I’ve noticed a whole lot of ugliness in Drupal in the process, some of them mentioned here. Drupal is database query hungry. I have 15 stories listed on my front page, bang, there’s 15 queries. The total queries is probably something like 30 or 40. My rewrite is down to 6. That is one example and there are others, so I’ve been making design changes as I go, but overall the system is similar. Just better.

Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t really know what I’m doing and there’s tons more to do. Plus I haven’t looked at the code in almost 2 weeks and currently have my hands full with some other things so I can’t say when things will be ready for release. But, if you are interested in this please send me an email. kzo@kzo.net