Now I have competition from my wife

Well, not “competition” in the strictest sense, since I’m actually eager to see her in this particular space, but it appears as though my wife has decided to take up blogging. Now, I won’t be linking to her blog around these parts, as it’s a more personal site for just close friends and family. I talk about family here every now and then, but she plans on telling a lot more of the stories about our lives and our kids. So she’s being protective and not using names or associating with my own blog (where I DO tend to use names), and I can certainly respect that since, you know, it’s my family.

My wife has never been a luddite, nor has she been the bravest of technophiles. But I’m very proud of the steps she’s taken recently to embrace web 2.0 style systems. I got her hooked on Gmail first, then Google Reader, and now she’s blogging. Next thing I know, I’ll be seeing her share things on FriendFeed and she’ll be calling me to dinner via Twitter.

Yeah, probably not.

Secrets of the 5-year-old’s samurai drawings

So last night, like every Tuesday night, my oldest son and I (and the youngest one, when he was capable of sitting still for more than ten seconds) sat down to watch Nova. This time the episode was Secrets of the Samurai Sword. You can tell that an episode is particularly good when the boy begins drawing pictures of what he saw immediately following the close of the program.

From last night, we get two samurai sword images that evidently captured his attention the most.

In the first image, you see the part of the episode which talked about this father and daughter team in Japan. The father is a samurai sword master, and his daughter hopes to be a master herself one day. To test their own skill and demonstrate the awesome power of a samurai sword, they perform this death-defying act. The father wields the sword while the daughter shoots the father with an arrow. The father then (hopefully!) slices the arrow in half in mid-air. My boys are apparently quite taken with risky acts of otherworldly stupidity. I don’t know how I feel about that.

The second image is a representation of the “damage” a samurai sword can do to an object. One of the weapons experts presented in the episode actually used the phrase “the sword is designed to do maximum damage”, which resonated powerfully with my son’s video game and Pokemon-addled brain. He opted to represent this “damage” as an actual number, which is something like 9,099, which, as far as samurai swords go, is probably pretty high.

Man, do I love having kids.

Disconnecting, and it feels so good

Being offline for an entire week has really put a lot of things into perspective. Coming back to a veritable information overload online with over 1,500 unread Google Reader items, I’ve decided that a lot of the noise I listen to runs completely counter to my goals in life. So I’ve decided to make a few drastic changes to my habits.

  • I pared down my Google Reader subscriptions from 237 feeds to just 63. That might still sound like a lot, but the ones I’ve kept align well with my interests. Instead of multitudes of technology and gaming blogs, I’m keeping just a small handful of interesting gaming sites, alongside all of the writing, art, and politics blogs I followed previously.
  • Twitter and FriendFeed have been removed from my default Firefox home tabs, and from my bookmarks. This one was tough. But I’ve mentioned several times in the past that Twitter is an enormous timesink, and FriendFeed wasn’t getting any better. FriendFeed works well as a lifestreaming service, but being involved in the community wasn’t doing me any favors. The Twitter community is one I would miss; there’s a lot of great local people there that I have been really connecting with recently. Ultimately, however, they simply aren’t necessary.
  • Numerous bookmarks deleted. There’s quite a few social sites that I’ve had bookmarked that I never truly intend to visit again. Now, I don’t have to even think about it.
  • Art is taking a backseat to writing. I still love art and drawing; and to a lesser extent, photography (I think I really only like my wife’s photography), but I have to shelve the idea that continues to sit in the back of my mind that I could potentially be some sort of artist and/or cartoonist. That isn’t the life I want. I predominantly love the written word, and that needs to be my focus more than anything else. This includes both fiction and blogging, my two most accessible creative outlets.

Since drafting my declaration of creativity back in April, I haven’t actually demanded all that much creativity out of myself. I don’t know how many declarations or demands I’ll have to make of myself before I actually begin to live that life, but hopefully not too many. Otherwise, I’ll just be making a mockery of my own desires, and I don’t think any of us really wants that.

Offline for a week

I’m going to be offline all this coming week, from Sunday through about Friday. I’ll be spending some time out at a church camp all week with some high schoolers being a counselor and a speaker, and occasionally playing guitar around a campfire. Naturally, we’ll all be praying for the flood waters to quickly recede with as little fuss as possible.

Take care!

Greetings new visitors! (and there’s a lot of you!)

I captured this shot of my blog stats this evening just as it had reset for the 13th.

That first jump on the 4th was my first post about Toluu. Most of the traffic that day came from FriendFeed. The second jump was after my follow-up post on Toluu yesterday. Most of that traffic also came from FriendFeed. The subsequent continued climb upwards today was mainly to the same Toluu post (and a bit to the IowaFlood/Nerdflood post), but instead of coming from FriendFeed, a majority of my traffic today came from StumbleUpon.

I admit it, I’m no stumbler. I have absolutely no idea how it works, to be honest, but evidently the audience on that site is a force to be reckoned with.

Now, you have to allow me this fleeting moment of joy watching these numbers spike so dramatically. My blog is an odd duck in the blogosphere. I don’t fit into any specific niche, so I don’t gain any specific audience. On any given day, topics here can range from video games, to Twitter; from movies, to photos of my kids eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I have never really had any expectations of growing this site into any substantial following. It’s just a personal blog, and I hope you find it interesting. I just get a dumb, childish grin on my face when I see my traffic numbers climb like this. And it doesn’t happen very often. I don’t expect it to happen much in the future.

So, if you like what you see, please, subscribe to my feed. I try to post multiple times a week. Occasionally, I even manage to make a point.

And if you don’t like what you see, I’m not going to pressure you to hang around. My thoughts and opinions aren’t necessarily for everyone, and there’s a whole heck of a lot of blogs out there, I hear that some of them might even be slightly more interesting than mine.

Maybe.

IowaFlood and Nerdflood: two great floods that flood great together

Apparently there’s some confusion on the internets* about this new website that’s popped up called IowaFlood, and its purported relation to Nerdflood. So, time to clear the air. Here is a detailed side by side comparison of the two sites to give everyone a very clear understanding of what each site provides you, the valued reader.

Purpose

IowaFlood: created to provide Iowans up-to-the-minute news and multiple perspectives on the current midwest flooding crisis plaguing our fair state.

Nerdflood: created as a platform from which to dispense my snarky commentary and clever insight into social media, video games, and life in general. Also, kids.

Content

IowaFlood: collects photos and videos from Iowans viewing disasters, news footage, personal stories, and even Iowa flood-related Twitter posts.

Nerdflood: contains pure unadulterated text. And sometimes pictures. But no lolcats (I don’t know if that’s a plus or a minus).

Creator

IowaFlood: some Des Moines-based web developer named Andy Brudtkuhl, from 48web Consulting. Also responsible for Get a New Browser, dmtweetup, and various other ventures. He may also have created Twitter** and there’s a rumor going around that he is the second coming of Christ.***

Nerdflood: ME. I also made Minific. Kinda.

Experience

IowaFlood: has existed for only one day.

Nerdflood: has been around for over two years.

I think it’s plainly clear that these two sites serve completely different audiences. Nerdflood is for geeks that like geeky things. Also, people who are really bored and have nothing better to read. IowaFlood is for people who are interested in knowing more about the flooding crisis that is currently holding the midwest captive in its steely claws of steely doom. I think the choice is clear.

* no there isn’t
** no he didn’t
*** unconfirmed, but likely not true

Toluu has gotten even better

My new favorite RSS feed suggester, digester, and recompenser Toluu (first talked about here) just released some nifty new features. My absolute top favorite is pictured below:

Every feed in the system now shows how many people are subscribed to it, and you can click the tab to see who is subscribed to the feed. Fan-freaking-tastic.

You can’t convince me to use Toluu even more than I already do. In fact, my use of Toluu has now approached second-nature habitual levels. I come across a blog that I like, I click the Subscribe via Toluu bookmarklet, and wait a few seconds. The feed gets dumped to Toluu and then dumped to Google Reader. Just like that. I don’t even think about it anymore, it simply happens. And then I reap the benefits of looking through the Toluu friend activity stream and finding more interesting people and interesting blogs to add. Everyone else just has to put up with the nonsense I occasionally toss in myself.

Toluu is a great system that has been a resource for me to discover new content to read. I joked in FriendFeed last week that there was a big bug in Toluu that made it so that I now have too much to read. Obviously, this isn’t a bug. It’s a side effect of having subscribed to far more blogs than I’m used to reading. But I keep the stuff I like, and I will eventually pare down the stuff I don’t feel is benefiting me in any reasonable way. But in the end, I’ll have a lot more valuable content to read, absorb, process, and add to my total sum of universal knowledge, and that, my friends, is truly what the internet is about.

2008: the year of the 360 RPG?

I know that the Wii has some RPGs on the way, but it looks as though 2008 might also be the year that the Xbox 360 gets some quality RPG goodness of its own.

  • Infinite Undiscovery from Square Enix slated to hit the US at the beginning of September.
  • The Last Remnant, also a Square Enix title, coming stateside this “winter”.
  • Tales of Vesperia, a brand-new entry in the essential Tales series by Namco Bandai, will arrive in late August.

This is, of course, Microsoft’s last-ditch effort to get someone in Japan to buy their console. Blue Dragon didn’t do it, despite adequate reviews. And it appears less and less likely with each passing day that the 360 will ever see a port of Final Fantasy XIII, not that that one title alone could save the 360 from its embarrassing performance in Japan.

But I will admit this much: this slew of potentially high-quality RPGs is enough to make me turn a serious eye towards the 360. I’ve always considered the system to be a haven for nothing more than FPS and war games, neither of which I am overly interested in. These titles may force me to change my perspective. By Christmas, I might just have to hang up my friend codes in exchange for a Gamertag. Especially since I’m already not planning to pick up the next Nintendo system.

Another reason to love Twitter: the randomness of cartoonists

A good number of popular webcartoonists have Twitter accounts these days. I follow a small sampling of these excellent creative individuals, and happened to catch onto something marvelous that came absolutely out of nowhere today.

Rene Engstrom, the Swedish creator of the comic Anders Loves Maria, posted a tweet this afternoon:

Ok Twitter! I’m taking silly sketch requests! 🙂 Give me ideas I’m feeling retarded!

Well, since you asked… I went ahead and twittered back:

a magical penguin in a fight with a super-panda

Surely she won’t draw something so absurd. Will she? Apparently, she will!

Fantastic! Thank you, Rene! It’s absolutely wonderful.

More of Rene’s amazing Twitter-requested creations can be found here.