Minutiæ: 2009

Notice: I have neither posted nor updated any content on this blog since the mid 2010's. (😱) Please check out the homepage and my bio, for more recent information.

Okay! I think I've just about cemented my claim as a New Media Douchebag by virtue of the ridiculous domain name I acquired for this site:

miketigas.com
↓
mike.tig.as

I've heard that in this day and age, "your name is your personal brand." I'm glad to say that I've successfully taken it to THE EXTREME. (Note: all caps means SERIOUS BUSINESS.)

Ahem. Apparently extreme coffee intake has a direct effect on my usually-latent ego? No, that can't be it. The domain name and phone number have been in the works for months now. Oh, I'm an iPhone and MacBook Pro owner now — yes, for the first time in my life, I own an Apple product that isn't just a music player — maybe that's added a bit to my smugness.

Related to the ego front

Spokesman.com — the Web site of the Spokesman-Review and the Web site I've been working for over the past 15 months — is a finalist in the General Excellence (Medium site) category of the Online News Association's Online Journalism Awards.

For a newsroom of our size, I am thrilled by the amount of multimedia we produce each week (and it shows and looks great on our site). More than anything, the people who create all of our awesome content deserve the shout-out.

Now, moving on in somewhat-less-narcissistic fashion… (Warning: cliché, "this is what I'm up to" personal blog post coming your way.)

School outlook

I have a 9am class this semester. I'm not a morning person; hell, I normally started work at 10am all summer (with the trade-off of staying long after 6). Previous semesters have seen me falter under start times as late as 11am.

Last semester I visited a counselor a few times because I couldn't tell if I was depressed or what—for a pretty long stretch, I was entirely disinterested in school, work, and socializing. (If you interacted with me at the time, you may or may have noticed just a bit of reclusiveness. Just a bit.) And I think it basically boiled down to a lack that rewarding feeling from anything I was doing at the time. It was a matter of me being disenchanted and not being able to suck it up and go anyway. Missed a lot of class, let a whole bunch of things slip by. I done fucked up, to put it lightly.

But back to today: It's going to be good semester. Yes, even with the 9am. No, really. It's going to be different this time.

My class schedule is essentially anchored by that 9am — an inter-division iPhone development class with CS/IT and J-school students. You really can't convince me that the concept isn't right up my alley.

Similarly, my capstone class wraps up most of my school days; and that's another long-term, team-based project class. I've convinced my team to do a Django-based app that does things with Census data and various datasets from Data.gov. That is going to be fun — and a lot more interesting than most of the standard-issue class projects out there.

If anything else, I have one goal that I think (or rather, hope) will get me through: the sheer idea of graduating and actually being done with it. Mathematically, I'm going to barely get by as it is — dragging my feet through these final two semesters will definitely result in failure.

I've got a good feeling about this. I've got a lot of momentum going into week three. And hell, as a superstitious baseball fan, I believe in momentum.

Coming soon

I'm writing some brief tutorials on Git (and using it with GitHub) for my capstone team (some of them have used it, some of them haven't), chances are I'll actually get around to finishing and posting that. And hell, I might tease some things I've been working on recently. We'll see.

Now, excuse me while I put my ego away.

I feel like this should have been expected.

The same day that Google Apps came out of beta—Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk—Google announced that oh yeah, they've been building an operating system.

Now, the premise of a Google OS is not new in the least. As recently as December, rumors of a Google OS abounded when a statistics tracking firm, Net Applications, detected a significant amount of traffic out of Google HQ—with OS information hidden. Similarly, rumors of a Google Browser were fierce for years until Chrome was released last September—and Google had apparently been using it internally ("dogfooding") as it grew and developed over the course of two years.

When Google officially announces the project tomorrow (Wednesday), I'll be wary of the hype—Google doesn't do it themselves, but everybody else seems to hype their products up quite a bit. And I'm sure that misconception/misrepresentation will be rampant on Twitter and around the Web.

I'd like to point out that it's called Google Chrome OS, implying it's an extension of the Web browser. It's going to use a Linux kernel, but operate Web-based in terms of software. (Think apps like Google Docs and Gmail, but for all of your standard computing.) They swear they're making it a full-fledged OS that'll run on things from netbooks up to full desktop computers—but I find it hard to not emphasize the thin client/netbook angle, as they admit they're targeting netbooks first. (Which, too, is unsurprising since netbooks are hot but the OS market for low-end hardware is severely lacking in quality and/or user-friendliness.)

I'm sure I'll use it (like I use the work-in-progress Chrome version for Mac as my main Mac browser), but I'm still not entirely sold on the fact that this thin client thing is that great, amazing Google OS that people have been wondering about for years. Maybe I'm throwing the "thin client" buzzword around too much and maybe Google will surprise me. I felt the same apprehension toward Chrome (though the V8 Javascript engine and the multiprocessing intrigued me), but have since been won over. (More on that some other time.)

Side note: (Taking off the "newsroom Web developer" hat, putting on "online news consumer" hat...) I like the fact that the New York Times article links to Google's blog post in the lede. I love seeing news sites externally link like that. I have a Wikipedia-induced habit of middle-clicking bunches of in-text links that I think are relevant or interesting; that's just being helpful to your reader.

So I'm blogging again. First time in one hundred, eighty-seven days. Great.

In a way, it's a last-ditch effort to overcome a dry spell—it's been ages since I've written or photographed anything particularly well. I won't lie that I've been in a bit of a creative slump lately.

And in another way, it's an effort to make this a bit more credible again. It's about damn time I update my own site—what kind of new media douchebag leaves a site like this to rot? (A lazy one, that's what.)

As you can see (or not, if you're feed-reading this), this site's all dolled up with a new, made-from-scratch look. The front page should navigate quickly and integrates with a bunch of sites to keep my Web 2.0 stalkers happy. I've also moved from a WordPress installation to a Django-powered blog system that I whipped up. I've also moved servers, yadda yadda…I'll spare repeating myself and just point you design and tech nerds to the colophon.

Long story short: shiny new blog, awesome stuff under the hood, and I plan on writing more frequently than once a year.

Happy Friday the 13^th, eh?