Adam Kazwell is...somewhat concerned

The only thing we have

The only thing we have to fear...is a Blogger update

After reading some of these comments from Mandarin design, it looks like the new version of Blogger is one big time bomb, once your blog gets "upgraded" to the new service (aka Dano), it gets screwed up. I can almost hear the ticking...

Selling out? What's this? An

Selling out?

What's this? An ad for AdamKazwell.com? Say it ain't so!

Sorry boys and girls, it is so. Due to increased pressure from corporate headquaters, we had no choice but to try and reach out to a larger audience - mostly those interested in unexpected string cheese. We will keep you posted on the results of our exhaustive mass marketing efforts.

(Editor's note): Adam Kazwell is somewhat concerned that someone has created a Google AdWord for me without me knowing about it....Hmm, who could it be?

I have achieved mediocraty! Based

I have achieved mediocraty!

Based on my calculations this blog has become just about average. Which is both good and bad. Good because for a while it was well below average. No readership, no interactivity, no features, updated infrequently, etc...But I'm getting there. I'm pleased with the improvements in design, I've got the option to post and receive comments, a few people have linked to me, and I'm gonna try to post more often (but only when I have something important to say). Now for the bad. It's bad because average in the blog world doesn't really make you any better than the worst bloggers or that much worse than above average bloggers. Things really only get interesting when you're in the top, I'd say, 95-99% of bloggers, due mostly to the Power Law. And here's where it gets even worse. Here's what I consider a list of the 95-99% bloggers. Even the people at the bottom of the list have what seem to be pretty established blogs and the list is 500 blogs long, and...

I'd rather not write about the rest of obstacles to face before obtaining blogdom (am I the first one to use that word?) so instead I'll write about what's encouraging.
1. The net changes quickly, so who knows what those 500 bloggers will be doing 6 months from now (or how many new ones will have started...damn, thought this was suppossed to be encouraging - Well, I'll have a headstart on anyone who's just starting)
2. There are not that many bloggers out there - relative to the number of websites that exist.
3. The more this blog grows, the easier it will be to make it better. More links to add, more comments to post, etc.

Stuff that might hold me back:
- I'm not the best writer, and I still don't have a good feel on what to write and not write about
-somewhat lacking the technical expertise. I've been outta the web game for a while and I don't yet have a handle on stuff like RSS, XML, CSS, FOAF (don't even remember what that stands for), and other web services. But I'd like to learn 'em, just don't know if I'll committ to it.

Damn, long post. Good night.

Look at all the pretty

Look at all the pretty pictures

For a while this site was pretty basic. Nothing but a few tables and some text. Then I added some color and an image in a post here or there. Yesterday I debuted (looks funny typed out) a new masthead and today I finally figured out how to add a background with CSS. So. Whaddya think? Good, bad, hypnotic? Don't email me though, add comments, since I actually have that feature available now.

Now it's permanent Hey, got

Now it's permanent

Hey, got permalinks up and running on kazwell.com, finally. What's a permalink you ask? A permalink allows you to get back to a post from the past in one click. No searching by keyword, etc. Just make a link to the time of each post (ex: 9:26pm) and you're good to go. Examples of some posts you might want to link to:

Doing something unexpected
15 mins of fame in the blogosphere
Newly Digital entry

Doing something unexpected Not me,

Doing something unexpected

Not me, someone else (but maybe someone like me). During lunch today, I overheard that a co-worker was quitting her job and moving to Peru. Wow, I thought. That's so cool, but so unlike that person. I would have never expected them to do something like that. Sure, her job was...how do I say this...not the most glamorous, but neither is anyone else's really. I mean, working in the (insert your personal favorite) industry is about as unglamorous as it gets. But you never really expect anyone to make such a dramatic change of direction. Which got me to thinking. Is it a good decision to quit your crappy day job and move to Peru in pursuit of a better life? On the surface, you would think the answer would be yes. Who doesn't want a better life, and why should we stop ourselves from pursuing it. But then again...what's it really going to get us? Happiness? Enlightenment? A greater sense of who we are or what we should be doing? Or just a long vacation?

A big part of me is all for romanticizing the hell out of this and I WANT to believe that said person, upon her arrival in Peru, will experience nothing but pure joy that will last throughout her entire trip and continue if and when she ever returns to the mainland. But...the other part of me is like: what a stupid idea. All that's gonna happen is she's gonna get to Peru, teach English for a few months, hate the food, miss friends, family, and the Gap, and return home about 6-12 months after this all got started. And she'll come back to no job, no apartment, etc...Shouldda just toughed it out, got your MBA instead, and you wouldn't have missed a beat in the Great Corporate March.

But screw that, who wants to be a lemming and spend their whole life climbing the corporate ladder? Well, there are some, but still. The fact is I don't know what I would do. I always thought of myself as a fairly flexible person, willing to try new things and be spontaneous, but I just can't see myself doing something like this. At least not yet.

Luckily this girl hasn't left for Peru yet so I'm gonna try and catch her before she leaves and ask her a whole buncha questions (Why? Why now? Why Peru....) which hopefully I'll post a little later.

The end of one way

The end of one way communication!

Hey, guess what? Now you can add comments on this blog! That means you can actually say stuff back to me and have it online instantly. Maybe someday I'll be able to start a thread like this one...

Falling behind Man, I can't

Falling behind

Man, I can't take all this information overload. I just added a bunch of new links, all of which I WANT to read, but alas, haven't had the time to. Does this mean that my recommended links are gonna turn to shit (wait - they're not already?) Who knows...could hyper-passivity be the future of information consumption?

Signed,
Your trusty little information filter.

Eating like an elephant, pooping

Eating like an elephant, pooping like a bird

I know Kawasaki would have wanted it otherwise, but tough. I've read through a ton of these, and all you're gonna get outta me is one measly entry...but I'll try and make it a big one (this is where you picture a bird squatting with its eyes tightly closed). Here's my entry for Newly Digital (kind of a stream of consciousness, so I apologize for any typos, etc):

(in almost chronological order)
My first memories of using a computer were at home in the basement, playing a videogame called Lemonade Stand. The game was on a 5 inch floppy disk (I think), we had a color monitor - with pretty terrible graphics, and I don't remember using a mouse to play it. I think I was less than 10 years old (also remember using LOGO, and some other graphics program) What a great game - responsible for introducing me to capitalism and computing at the same time! I remember the first time I saw a joystick and a Flight Simulator program (at Phil's) and I was totally blown away the first time I saw a monitor with 256-bit graphics at some computer show (a flower actually looked like a real flower!).

My first programming experience came on Thanksgiving day sometime in the 80's when I was between 5-8 yrs old. (I think it was post-Bears superbowl, aka 1984). My dad gave me a magazine with a few pages of code. He told me that if I entered it exactly as it was shown, then the computer would display a crude 16-color picture of a turkey. Needless to say I wasn't too excited to do an hour's worth of data entry to get a crappy looking picture of a bird. But I tried anyway, and had almost no success. I interpreted his command to "enter it exactly as shown" as meaning that I couldn't even make errors typing it in (because somehow using the delete key would add extra, invisible, code and therefore render the program broken). This hightened concern for error slowed my data entry down considerably (and it was already pretty damn slow because at the time I hardly had a clue as to the layout of a keyboard) and my first experience with computers' non-user friendliness came shortly after I started the turkey project.

I had a good half a page of code typed in and I wanted to see the fruits of my labor. What did I see on my computer screen when I hit enter...a partially drawn turkey? No - not even a single pixel was displayed, instead I got a "syntax" error. I had no freakin' clue what syntax meant and so I took it as my cue to start from scratch. I tried a few more times (aka for an enternity), with each new attempt resulting in another new syntax error (I still cringe at the word to this day). Eventually I got a few colored pixels to display, but nothing even close to resembling a turkey.

After that little exercise in torture, I decided to stay away from programming for a bit. Some time passed and I remember a friend getting a Commodore 64 (like your own personal video game arcade), using DOS for the first time (why is the disk drive called the a: drive, shouldn't it be called the d: drive?), seeing my uncle's Apple ][ (a computer that was portable, had sweet graphics, awesome sound, and great games like Glider, Beyond Dark Castle, etc), and finally getting a new Packard Bell computer with a 480MB harddrive.

more early computer videogames - Stickybear, Mathblaster, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, Karateka
ti-82 BASIC programming
first AOL experience
first web browsing experience
first modem experience, to call people, not ISP's
BBS-es Lunatic Phringe
first website

my favorite versions of Newly Digital:
Kalsey's version
Torrez's version
Choate's version
Verbosity's version

Newly Digital (aka How I

Newly Digital (aka How I learned to love the ROM)

Before you waste too much time reading about my first digital experiences, why don't you go check out the original, along with entries from other blogging heavyweights.