You can find other useful links on my My About.me page, including a link to my Facebook page.

Quick disclosure: I discovered about.me via the BzzAgent program, where I had the opportunity to receive some free Business Cards from Moo.com. I opted not to take them up on it at present, preferring to save them a little longer until I have my page looking real sharp, but you can get the same free deal. I have to let you know that I’m required to be honest about how I feel about the About.me system as part of the BzzAgent Terms of Engagement, but I think it’s really neat! It’s a good way to compile if you’re like me and have a metric ton of links you want people to see. Just go to http://about.me to check it out – it’s free, and hey, if nothing else, free business cards.

Image required as part of the BzzAgent reporting protocol, sorry

It’s a good username because it’s very memorable. Most people laugh, or at least smile, the first time I tell them what it is.

Awhile back, a Redditor with the username breeskeys did an r/Favors thread offering to draw things for people. I commented asking for some simple demented pants, not really expecting a response since there were already a million comments requesting things by the time I found the thread, but she came through with some pretty awesome drawings. The original thread is here, and some of them are quite funny.

So here’s my drawing, with special thanks to breeskeys – these really made me smile. Especially the f7u12 brand lolface overalls.

While I rode the elevator up to my floor, I looked out at the lobby. It was filled with people in all sorts of beautiful costumes, in groups of 3 and 4, or in large parties of 10 or more. Everyone spoke to each other with animated arm movements, people posed for and took pictures with and of each other, and everyone seemed to be having a great time getting their geek on.

“I’m looking at a con in Germany,” I thought, “but I could really be anywhere in the world, even my own town, and I’d be looking at essentially the same thing. This is how enormous and inclusive our culture is.”

I walked down the hallway and into my room, feeling lucky and proud to be part of this.

– From “Fedcon day two” in Wil Wheaton’s Blog. The entire post is something to read, but I really liked that synopsis of what it’s like being a part of geek culture.

So when I came to log-in to the site, I started by relying on my browsing history to take me to the login page (a link to which does not appear anywhere on the actual site). Nothing was there. I tried a search on the site; nothing. Google was similarly useless to me in finding the login page; I had to dredge through my ACTUAL memory to figure out what the address was. I accomplished that within just a few seconds and arrived here to post about it.

When I excluded the log-in form from my site, I did it as a very conscious choice. I did not wish for anyone other than me to be able to log in to the site. Perhaps that might be discouraging return commenters, but my personal preference is not to have responsibility for even as much information as a standard username and password belonging to the people who comment here. The news has been constantly talking about the PSN breach that occurred recently; I feel that it would be in best conscience to just not have that information on my site. I hope the confirmation process for comments isn’t discouraging people from joining in the discussion.

Now, to make things easier for myself I could include a link to the login somewhere on the page, or I could have a login box placed in a sidebar somewhere for me and me alone. I choose not to employ either of these methods because the inconvenience of remembering where to log in to my WordPress site is far less than it would have to be for it to be worth inconveniencing 99% of the people who use the site.

So I suppose I shall have to rely upon bookmarks from now on. There are worse things that could happen.

In other news, I recently fixed that annoying “extra space between paragraphs” issue with the styling on the site, and everything looks a good deal cleaner now.

The Experience

Working entirely with my smart phone for a week was an interesting experience. There were many things that were frustrating, not the least of which were the myriad of ridiculous typographical errors that had made their way into my swype dictionary. I’d used my phone to access reddit on april fool’s day, and a couple of well-intentioned “gifts” from friends and coworkers meant I couldn’t use the letters e or x. I thought up some rather clever ways around those restrictions, but I wrecked the dictionary in the process. Even now, almost a month later, I’m still removing words every other day or so.

swype is also imperfect at figuring out which word I want when there are similar input paths. I frequently had to stop and reenter words, slowing me down considerably. Additionally, I found that my recall on the smart phone is not nearly what it is when I’m reading in other media, which meant that I had to resort to taking notes while I was reading for the first time in my life. In that respect, it actually forced me to develop a new skill as a student.

While I did enjoy the ability to participate in class from just about anywhere at any time, i found that each activity I completed took me much longer than it otherwise might have. This blog post is a good example: it’s taken me as long to write less than 200 words, one paragraph of which was copy-pasted, as some of my thousand-plus word posts I’ve done. I feel like designing for m-learning probably requires a much smaller task granularity if it’s to be done effectively.

I will say that I’m glad I tried this, but I definitely wouldn’t want to try it again. How’s that for a privilege check?

As I mentioned, I’ve written the entirety of this blog post on my smartphone. While I’ve made every effort to correct misspellings when I’ve caught them, I’m sure a few have escaped. Please be gentle with me!