TomMannino.com

Well, I think my huge external drive just bit the dust.  It won’t spin up or get recognized.   There are (expensive) ways to save the data but at the moment a lot/most of it is just sentimental.  Just when I got my leg up in other areas of life, I get pushed back again.

Still a bit numb, still a bit dizzy.

I haven’t internetted much recently, other then some videos and whatnot, at the risk of being a bit of an oversharer.  Things have been a bit of a mess and I’m doing my best to keep it together.  It’s been chaotic, but not all bad by any means.  Some awesome things on the horizon so I can’t let this stuff get me down too far.

These are the apps that change the world.  And these are the people who make my day:

YouTube – Rick Astley vs Nine Inch Nails – The Hand That Gives You Up (BRAT Mashup).

This game looks fantastic.  It’s mindlessly simple but it’s all about the style and animation.  I feel like I could/would do a bit more with the music stuff, but the breakdancing minigame at the end is a nice piece of punctuation.  OR SHOULD I SAY PUNCTUASIAN.

OH MAN.

PLUS IT LITERALLY HAS MY NAME ON IT.

via YouTube – [WiiWare] Tomenasanner Wii – First Look.

Comic Con is the biggest convention ever ever.  It’s one thing to go there but it’s another thing entirely to see a segment about it on TV.  We heard Jimmy was running around dressed as a strange character but it’s awesome to finally see what he put together, hah.

I have to wonder how much of this was planned out and how much was just random running into people.

I’ve been doing a bit of soul searching recently re: being and/or wanting to be a “computer programmer” vs. an “artist.” This article caught my eye because I’m always wondering how qualified I am to be an ActionScript developer, according to other people

The interesting thing is, as a multimedia developer of any kind, you really frankly do need to at least ‘know of’ the capabilities of everything on this list.  The smaller the team, the more you will be expected to be able to do most/all of this stuff, especially as time goes by.

This is also why Flash is such an interesting animal, nowadays.  I think a lot of my abilities as a web producer come entirely from having to know ‘this list.’  Everything from estimating time to impliment features, the practicality of proposed features, working with artists, working with web developers and database people.

Lastly, this list applys completely to being a Flash/AS Developer; it speaks nothing of game creation.  That’s an entirely seperate list, probably an order of magnitute more involved, especially considering each and every type of game requires a different skillset.  Not only do you have to know how to use the tools to make the game, you need to know how to program the parts that your game requires; AI, logic, physics, hit testing, state engines, all that good stuff.

Going down this list is a little inspirational; stuff like this doesn’t really get represented well on a resume, it comes up when you’re in the trenches and a random question comes up, especially when working with data going back and forth to a server, or even database schemas.

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/07/flash_actionscr.html

So, more haxoring about social-networky stuff.  I’m impressed with how well all of this stuff works together with minimal tweaking.  All of this synergy is pretty exciting to me, it’s a bit of a flickering light at the end of a dark-ish tunnel full of burrows of random internet socialization.  Here’s the crazy insanity that is currently possible/happening.

• My blogs are: TomMannino.com and ScatteredGenius.com (both WordPress) as well as a Livejournal.
• TomMannino.com is my personal/professional blog, and ScatteredGenius.com is my linkpost/random internet blog. For whatever reason, a large percentage of a general circle of friends uses Livejournal in whatever capacity.
• Any posts to either WordPress blog almost-invisibly cross-post to Livejournal automatically, with a tiny “Original Post” link at the bottom of each post.
• As of now, any tweets whatsoever automatically cross-post to my Facebook status via the Twitter Facebook app.
• Previously, my tweetorizing would automatically ‘cross-post’ once a day to my Livejournal using something called LoudTwitter, however it appears that this service is dead for good.  An Internet Friend has supplied me with some code I can set up myself using Ruby on Rails should I bring myself to want to try to get it to work, but probably won’t happen.
• Any scheduled posts to either Wordpress blog automatically cross-post to livejournal, cross-post to twitter, and thusly cross-post to my facebook status.

That’s a lot of cross-posting.  Someone who knows me personally and is well-connected to me online as far as social networking goes will see quite a bit of redundancy.  Example:

I embed a cat video on ScatteredGenius.com, which then also gets embedded on Livejournal.com; a tweet summary and link gets twitterated, which also gets cross-posted to my facebook status. That’s 4 cat videos for the price of one.

So, Due to the fact that I’m concerned that if the noise ratio of stuff is too high, you won’t pay attention to me anymore, I will preface the Tweet-side of things with a word like ‘Blog:’ or ‘Link:’ or ‘Vid:’ or ‘Image:’ something to that tune, to color it a bit, if/when I remember.

To get all this working, the only tweaking that I’ve had to do ‘under the hood’ to get to this point was edit some code in the Livejournal crossposter, simply removing some of the automatic formatting it was doing when it was posting.  By default, it adds a black-rectangle-outline to some pre-determined text to every single one of your posts and it was an eyesore.

As I’ve done with every time I’ve plugged more of my internet into other parts of my internet, I speak this ultimatum: I will not be changing my internetting habits, so if you think my content is spammy/stupid/not something you want to see, unsubscribe in whatever way/shape/form you need to, I will not be offended.  I have good friends who do not read my internets, I won’t take it personally.

I am way more excited about this then I should be.  Jeesh, what’s next… update my ZUGPOINT PICTURE after 6 years?!?

I need to test if/when I set a publish time/date for a post in wordpress, if it does all of the delicious crossposting to livejournal and/or twitter.

My guess is that it does not.

I will set this to post in 5 minutes and see what happens.

To tweet or not to tweet, is that the question? I don’t even know.

Too tired to think from ComicCon so I did some social-networky-majigging a bit tonight, and am still doing so. Some outstanding issues:

• My TomMannino.com template I don’t think supports the newish Wordpress Tag system, I picked it before they had seperated the two.
• My ScatteredGenius.com template has a new version that does support the Tag system, however if I update it I will have to redo all my ProjectWonderful banner stuffs, which is a tiny pain, and I am procrastinating.
• My ScatteredGenius.com blog has a bajillion categories, most of which can be tags.  However, it’s all decisions-already-made, as far as how all of that stuff has been filed.  They have a utility that can turn tags into categories, and categories into tags, however finding some new kind of filing system moving forward is going to be a pain and requires time and thinking.  I need to do it eventually.

Also this is a test to see if/what gets tweeterated if I don’t fill anything out on the post page.  Here goes!

I got a new plugin for Wordpress that allows me to cross-post a tweet to twitter whenever I post to my wordpress. I am testing said plugin AS WE SPEAK.

Currently my posts from either of my blogs, (scatteredgenius.com and tommannino.com/blog) both crosspost to livejournal. The hope would be that I could post to as few places as possible and then they get projected to as many places as possible, with the least amount of redundancy and annoyance to you guys.

I have been ‘blogging’ less because I have been twittering most of my mind garbage, however I do still feel the need to speak in more-then-140-character chunks. I’ve also got lots of random internet to share, want to share it on twitter but also want to post it on my blog(s) but don’t want to post twice. This may have solved that dilemma.

I think this should be a happy medium.