Live from Austin!

What do you put mothballs in, if you don’t plan on using them for quite a while?

If you want to use Twitter, use it, but don’t re-post a copy of all your Twitter guano as journal entries. Your Twitter updates are pointless and uninteresting enough in their original context; if I wanted to read them, I’d be reading them there.

(Unsubscribing from two feeds today.)

I rarely pay any attention to web stats for my personal site. I think the last time I checked was 2004. At that time, I was getting about 800 page views a day.

I just checked again, and it’s now about 10× that, with a page-to-visitor ratio of about 1:2. It seems to have leaped up since I switched to WordPress, which suggests that either typo was more unreliable than I was aware of, or that WordPress is doing a better job of pinging aggregators, or quite likely both.

Anyhow, even allowing for spambots and other crawlers, that’s a lot of people. I wonder who they all are?

A while ago I realized that if I really wanted to go for popularity (or what passes for fame on the Internet), I’m going about it the wrong way anyway. Successful sites generally pick a single area of focus and stick to it, whether it’s writing about gadgets, reviewing movies, or playing spot-the-next-big-trend.

Here, it’s a bit more random. One minute it’s physics, the next it’s cute squirrel anecdotes, then we’re back to politics by way of the latest Apple software. I’m reminded of comments Berkeley Breathed made about Bloom County: he said a lot of newspapers put it on the op-ed pages because it was political, then had people writing in asking “What is this crap?” a few weeks later when it was all about penguin nose jobs.

But that’s the thing: I find most subjects interesting. I want penguin nose jobs in my political commentary, so long as it’s interesting. I want to learn something unexpected every day. And that’s the kind of person I’m writing for.

If there’s a site out there that’s like I want this site to be, it’s probably Boing Boing. Only without the Disney obsession.

Incidentally, I believe comments are now working again after I applied a software patch.

Hi, I’m mathew, and this is my web site. Jakob Nielsen believes that omitting a photo of the author is one of the top 10 mistakes in weblog usability, so who am I to argue?

I started using the Internet around 1987; I remember Jakob’s Hypercard stack, as it was one of the first cool things I downloaded. I was introduced to Unix the following year, accidentally typed rn instead of rm one day (true story), and the rest is history.

I’ve been doing my best to gather together the worthwhile content I’ve written since then. It’s an ongoing process, but the archives genuinely go back to 1988. Of course, what I consider worthwhile may look like crap to you, but it’s all categorized and searchable so hopefully you can find something of interest.

Over the years I’ve done all kinds of work, most of it involving computers in some way—telephone technical support, data recovery, system administration, a bit of sales and marketing, application development, hardware maintenance, networking, web design, and so on. I’ve written code in well over a dozen different programming languages. I’m something of a generalist, a term I borrow from Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext. His ideas inspired my choice of career—I built a primitive network hypertext system around 1985, wrote a browser in 1989, and wrote my first web page back in the days of HTML 1.0. I was rather startled when the rest of the world suddenly took an interest.

I currently live in Austin, Texas. Since being opinionated on the web hasn’t led to fame and riches, I work for IBM as a web architect.

Outside of computers, I’m interested in electronic music, photography, politics, design, video, and small fluffy animals. I also find physics and mathematics very interesting, but because my knowledge is broad rather than deep I tend to get lost soon after integrals get involved.

I feel like my first actual journal entry should offer some blazing insight, some dazzling new take on the nature of reality. Obviously from this point on it’s going to be the same old crap as usual, but couldn’t I at least come up with something amazing to start with?

Well, no, apparently not.

It’s rather like opening a new paper journal. You look at the clean, crisp page, and think that this time you want things to be different—you want the layout to be neat, the thoughts to be well-formed, the writing witty and erudite. And then after a few weeks, you give up and scribble down a joke which seems painfully unfunny two days later.