Kilo

Well, this is wild: this is officially the 1,000th blog post on Timmy's House of Sprinkles! This obscure corner of the Internet has been chugging along for (gulp) a little over thirteen years now!

I started the blog immediately after moving to California, and you will not be shocked to learn that I had no particular plan or goal for it, then or now. It's kind of fascinating to dive back into the archives and see how stuff has changed. Those early posts were much more slice-of-life-y, recapping outings with friends and family or reacting to cultural differences on the West Coast. Over time posts grew gradually longer, then a little shorter, but still too long. I've gone through a lot of phases along the years: guides to personal finance, a developer's log for my video-game modding, and detailed backpacking travelogues. There are perennial topics I return to, like politics, but I've now accepted that this blog's bread and butter are my aimless but heartfelt reviews of books and video games.

Thirteen years feels really old for a personal web site. It seems like most people abandon their online outposts after a few years, or proactively nuke them. There's good reason for that! All of us are constantly changing, none of us are the same people we were thirteen years ago, and there's an accelerating trend of holding people accountable for the sins of their past selves (see: James Gunn). I know that I frequently cringe when I dive back into the aughts and read my old posts: I sound so pompous, so conceited, so sure that I'm right. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know, and I think the more humble tone of recent years is apt. But I'm also sure that I'll be just as embarrassed by this particular post in thirteen years as I am today about those first ones.

When I first started the blog I thought it'd be cool if it ran for a year. Will it live to see 2,000 posts? Almost certainly not! Even if I wanted to continue it, Google seems determined to kill off all of the services that I enjoy: after axing Reader and Picasa, I imagine that Blogger's days are numbered, and I'm no more likely to bother moving this blog to a new platform than I've been to rehost my hundreds of old photo albums. Still, it's admirably served my need to natter away about stuff that interests me. Occasionally it interests someone else, more often it disappears into the void, but I feel much better for having said it. It's my little patch of grass on the Internet, and I'm grateful to have it.

400

Hiya,

While I talk a lot about myself here, I tend not to talk much about the blog proper.  That said, I did want to take the opportunity of my 400th post to thank all my occasional and regular readers out there.  Thanks!  When I first started this blog, it wasn't really with the expectation that anyone would read it or find it interesting - I basically took a habit of journaling, and started typing and uploading them instead of just writing them down.

It's been nearly four years since I started, and it's already been pretty remarkable to see what the blog has become.  I flip back to the very earliest posts and am instantly awash in nostalgia, remembering how excited I felt upon first arriving in California, how limitless the possibilities felt.  I read other posts and am surprised by how far away the memories seem, or how recent, and occasionally stumble across something that I wouldn't remember at all if not for the electronic evidence.

One of the weirdest and most interesting aspects of the blog is noticing its transformation from an explicitly private to an explicitly public medium.  I first announced the blog in my instant messenger profile, including the warning, "Shhh - don't tell anyone!"  I eventually released that restriction, and also opened up the blog to Google's crawler.  Since then, although my regular readers continue to be friends, family, and co-workers, I've received a steady trickle of visitors from Google who have stumbled across my blog looking for something.

I have to think that, in general, these people are disappointed.  Some are obviously searching for useful information - like "Why is Quicken so slow?" - that my blog can't help them with.  Occasionally, though, they might have some interest in, say, a three-page-long description of appropriate strategies to use when fighting the Nazis on the coast of North Africa.  Hey, it's possible!

In commemoration of this quasi-anniversary, I thought it would be fun to share my personal "#1 List".  These are all queries that, at one time or another, returned a Timmy's House of Sprinkles post as the #1 Google search result.  Most have since fallen off the first page, but a surprising quantity (and surprising diversity) remain.

human sucker
house of sprinkles
fraa suur
manhunter sierra remake
timmy house
paranoia deja vu out to get me song
anime themed sprinkles
adjectives for narrators orientation daniel orozco
anathem printing error
ender and bean's relationship
Firefly Bebop
is the use of earth in anathem a typo?
mammoth camp age of ice civ iv
giant icon sprinkles
three adjectives that describe the narrator of Daniel Orozco’s Orientation
how to rid of graggles
build house for sprinkles
chief thief in qfgV
"al fontina" revere
being gangster isn't cool
jules verne anathem breathe air
everybody coming to get me song
paranoia paranoia everyone's coming to get you song
EMMAN BELDO
anathem down the wick
grand sheep
LISTENING terrifying stories
anathem ala arbitrary
you'll laugh you'll cry you'll wonder what they were thinking
how does christopher kimball stay skinny
grab that cash with both hands and make a stash, new car, caviar, four star daydream
house divide by zero
i'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
kill vivec early in morrowind
can sprinkles kill?
stabbytown
power mines games cave convox
Where is seller take back on debt stack
epona mulcarn
jimmy peregrino
high fidelity first class
godfather " seizing a warehouse"
test cook
Divide by zero house
keep your hands off my stack new car caviar
qfg1 vga maximizing lockpick

Thank you again for your interest, and above all, your patience.  Here's to a fun future!

C Power

A quick housekeeping note:  (Heh, heh... "Housekeeping"... get it?)

I've recently spun off a new blog, "Chris Contemplates California Condo Capture", which can be abbreviated C^5 and pronounced "C to the fifth".  It is intended to serve as a sort of public series of musings on my real estate journey.

There's an obvious and very fair question to ask: given that Timmy's House of Sprinkles is terminally unfocused anyways, why not just add yet another set of tags to the mix?  The reason is that I suspect that the blog may actually end up being slightly useful, to an admittedly tiny number of people.  As I've discovered for myself, while there is a ton of general real estate information and advice out there, it's extremely difficult to find independent sources of info on the local level.  Given that I'll be spending about a year total within this space, I hope to emerge from it with a small amount of authority on the very narrow space I'm looking at: mid-level condominiums in the San Francisco Bay Area around the end of the aughts.  Or, to put it another way: I would love to find a blog out there that chronicled someone's attempts to acquire what I'm looking for, and I hope that it will help at least one other person do the same.

All that said, there is almost no chance that the one person in question is a reader of Timmy's House of Sprinkles, so it makes no sense to combine the two.  This way normal readers can avoid yet another silly tangent, and future Googlers won't need to sift through breathless recountings of epic fantasy turn-based strategy battles in order to find out who the decent mortgage lenders in the area are.

You're welcome!

Century

If I can be forgiven a brief indulgence: this is my 100th post here on Blogspot. When I first started this experiment back in August, I seriously wondered if I'd ever make it into two digits. Speaking from a personal perspective, having this blog has been a satisfying experience. I feel like I'm meeting my original goals of capturing my thoughts and memories at moments of time, and already am having fun turning the clock back a few months to see what I was thinking about before. Nothing lasts forever, but I'm hoping to keep this thing going for as long as it's fun to do.

Anyways, thanks to everyone who comes by occasionally to visit. I love the small ways technology can bring us closer together.

The blog is expanding to meet the expanding needs of the blog

Little self-congratulatory note: this is my 50th post in Timmy's House of Sprinkles! Yeah, I know, the last 10 or so shouldn't count, but Blogger considers them real posts anyways. To celebrate, I will eat leftover pizza and play Civ 4.

Pay no attention to the man behind the HTML

Minor miscellany.

First, thanks to Andrew for pointing out a typo in a previous post. I actually am kind of anal about this stuff, so I'll try and fix them when I see them. Part of the problem is, in case you haven't been able to tell yet, I do absolutely no editing on any of these. I'll type them up, usually over a couple of sessions, then run a quick spell check (which has limited usefulness!) and post. I'll generally go through and re-read my posts sometime when I'm bored a few weeks later, and will tweak a few minor things. These posts currently are just an outlet for my mind to spew whatever it's been thinking about, and occasionally to capture what I did at a particular time so I can remember years from now what it was like to be 25 and new to Northern California. They aren't great writing or anything close to it. Still, I'd like to pretend I have at least some standards, and correcting typos will be one of them.

So, don't think Andrew is insane. He's just pointing out a spelling mistake I have since corrected.

What else... oh, this probably impacts nobody, but I found a way to stop comment spam. Go to Settings, make sure you're in the Basic tab, and then set "Add your Blog to our listings?" to "No." The downside is that it decreases the chance of people randomly stumbling on your blog; since I'm deliberately trying to make my blog hard to access, that isn't a problem for me. Since I made that change I haven't had to delete any comment spam, as opposed to roughly one comment for every new post.

Three posts in one day is VERY unusual. I already had the ideas for the first two down and just threw them together over breaks at work today. I obviously don't have any sort of schedule, but I seem to be settling into roughly a once- or twice-weekly rhythm. I'm headed out in about 30 minutes to visit Google's campus for a talk on mobile search, so maybe that will be fodder for a future post. (Or maybe it'll be my reaction to "Steamboy" and how it reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's graduation speech to MIT. Stay tuned!)

Housekeeping

First, I see we have a new reader! Congratulations, Andrew. I now know of four, count 'em, four people who have ever laid eyes on this sliver of cyberspace.

I just updated the template for this blog. While going through some posts late last night I finally realized that the color scheme and small text made it hard to read. Maybe it's just me, but I'm hoping that a dark-on-light scheme is easier when reading voluminous amounts of text. Feedback will be politely acknowledged.

I also realized that I had forgotten the main reason I started writing about Civ in the first place. I've contacted some of you already about this, but do let me know if you're interested in joining a Civ league. Even if the singleplayer game doesn't meet my expectations, I have reason to be optimistic about the multiplayer; this time, they designed the multiplayer game first and the single player second, and the development team has spent two years testing multiplayer in its various incarnations. I'll need to fiddle with it myself to get a feel for what will work, but right now I'm thinking a mix of secure listings for quickie games (interested people will be vetted by me and given a password that allows them to access AIM logins or whatever for other people who are up for 1-hour quick games) and a semi-regular schedule for larger PITBOSS games (long-lived persistent games), for example every Thursday from 6-8 PST, though obviously we'd vote on the exact time. Anyways, just shooting out thoughts here. Expect future communications once the game is in my grubby little hands.

Knives Out

This has been hinted at in some of my previous posts, but I'll feel better once I make it explicit.

I change my mind. Not constantly, but somewhat regularly. Things I like today I dislike tomorrow, and vice versa. My political ideology has undergone a twelve-year Odyssey from traditional conservative through rabid libertarian to my current peacenik/statist liberal position. While I am utterly secure today in the correctness of my belief, it would be foolish for me to imagine that this is the last stop along my intellectual evolution.

One of my three all-time favorite quotes is this gem from Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little philosophers, statesmen, and divines." I think there's an attendent statement by him of Thoreau along the lines of, "Whatever you believe today, believe it with all your force, and promote it in the public sphere with vigor. And should you believe the opposite tomorrow, be no less robust in your new belief." I was leery of this thought when I first encountered it in eleventh-grade English, but I've become convinced that it is right.

In large part, current political events have driven me to that conclusion. The many mires currently swallowing up America (massive debt, foreign wars, endless ideological battles) have, at their heart, a stubborn refusal to learn and adapt. I personally believe that, if Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz had known four years ago what the costs of invading Iraq would be, they would have held off. Now, though, nobody involved in the decision is willing to publicly acknowledge the very real mistakes and problems that occurred. They keep on digging the hole in the hopes that it will somehow lead them out.

As an aside, I dearly hope that the American people will have learned after the last election that it's more important to adapt your position in light of new evidence than it is to be consistent. That still makes me angry, so I'll move on.

Where was I? Oh, yes, this blog. This will serve as your formal notice that I will unapologetically change my opinions as my mood shifts. Sometimes this will happen over a short period of time; in the long haul, I fully expect to start writing critiques of years-old posts to expose what was wrong with them. I'd prefer to issue new posts instead of trying to regularly update old ones to synch with my philosophy-of-the-day.

The immediate impetus for this post is that I was looking through my "top fives" list of video games and found some choices I strongly disagreed with. For example, while I do really enjoy Final Fantasy X, I find it hard to believe that it made it onto a Top 5 list. It seems a little soon to re-do the list, and even if I did it would just change again next week.

Same thing with my profile. I arbitrarily chose 5 movies and books, and did not list some of my favorites. I'll probably push it out to 10 so I get more of them in.

<BODY> Rocking

So here is the inevitable "Why does this page exist?" page. As some of you well know, I have long resisted the pull to start a blog. The reasons for this are manifold. I'd prefer to first answer the question, why do you communicate at all?

Ever since I left Minnesota at age 16, it has been a rewarding struggle to stay in touch with friends. I left behind a small group of close companions, and even though I easily go for years without seeing them I want to keep in touch with what's happening in their lives, and keep them informed about the changes in my own. Phone calls seemed expensive, and I've never really enjoyed that medium anyways. Fortunately, email was becoming cheaply available to suburbanites like us, and I began trading massive missives with them.

As years passed, I left increasing numbers of friends, and the number of communication tools in my arsenal grew. Instant messaging proved effective, giving me the conversational feel of a phone call without the awkwardness. Email, though, remained my most treasured medium. It afforded me the time to construct my words and think of what I wanted to say. As the number of people I emailed grew, however, I noticed an odd behavior of mine. Whenever something profound happened to me, I would describe it in great detail to the very next person I emailed. Nobody else would even know it had occurred. I hate copy-pasting, and I hate repeating myself, so your position in the queue defined the email you would get, not your interests or our relationship.

These weren't necessarily just random thoughts, either. Some people would be unaware of my changes in physical location for months on end; even though we communicated in the interim, I'd already moved by the time I wrote my next email, so they never heard of it until much later.

The obvious solution, of course, was to start a blog. That way I could combine the foreplanning advantages of email with a multicast capability, a one-to-many broadcast of my personal thoughts. A blog isn't inherently private like an email, so I felt none of the guilt I associate with "mass emails" or the CTL-C CTL-V philosophy of composition.

At that time, blogs were getting a lot of buzz, so I naturally resisted it. When it comes to technology, I'm driven by the same genes that make hard-core music fans scoff at Radiohead, saying they're so overrated and overshadow more deserving topics. So my half-hearted alternative was starting my own web site, www.cirion.us. My previous website was a repository for my downloadable programs and sort of a manifesto of my particular philosophies. The new incarnation was meant as a more personal beast, specifically designed to let others keep abreast of my activities in Kansas City.

Like so many of my projects, after a brief spurt of enthusiasm, it fell by the wayside. My posts were... actually, they were a great deal like these: long and discursive, although generally built around a particular event. Because of the time I was in Kansas City, they were almost uniformly political: meeting Al Franken, going to a John Kerry rally, etc. I also had a phototour of my apartment and the like.

Returning to the original question: why do I have a blog? The reason I'm starting one this month is because I'm motivated by the major changes in my life, the greatest since leaving home for college. The reason I'm starting one this week is because www.cirion.us is temporarily out of service; although I have Internet access here, I'm currently behind a NAT and unable to run the webserver. Starting a blog is easier and cheaper than finding third-party hosting. The reason I started one last night was because I was unable to sleep, excited about my furniture arriving today and overstimulated by an ill-advised dose of pre-bedtime caffeine. I have also seen friends and family with blogs, people I know and respect, which makes me feel less like I'm chasing a buzz than that I'm joining a proven community.

A reasonable person would ask, “What makes you think your blog will continue when your web page went for over a year without any updates?” Nothing, really. Frankly I see this experiment ending in one of two ways. In the first, which I term the "Heat Death," an initial flurry of activity proves unsustainable, and this blog becomes one more carcass in the blogosphere, with no activity and no updates. The second outcome is the "Cold Death," where I continue to spout out long and fairly inane posts with great frequency, with the result that nobody bothers to visit because the pearls, if any, are utterly surrounded by muck.

There may be a third alternative, a "Big Crunch" which leads to focused blogging on a particular point, but physicists have yet to confirm this possibility.

That about wraps up the "why" question that prompted this post. Rather than create another one, I'll also address the "Why Blogspot?" question. My friends that I know about are either on blogspot, livejournal or bebo. Bebo has some interesting networking going for it, but I hate opting in to view content and am guessing some of you do as well. Livejournal seems fine, but Blogspot has the Google imprimatur, and now that the tide of public opinion is just starting to shift against them I finally feel like I can openly and proudly embrace this company and its ambitions, in much the same way that I became a devoted R.E.M. fan after "New Adventures in Hi-Fi" and a Terry Gilliam fan after "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." That said, I reserve the right to yank all the content off of this blog if and when cirion.us is running again.

I hope that this day finds you well. Personally, I am delighted to have my furniture here, in particular my bed. I hope to set up my TV first, and start unpacking with the 49ers game in the background. Peace out!