I, Shane › Shane Adams’ personal weblog

Besides The Catcher in the Rye, my all-time favorite book is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The main character (played by John Cusack in the movie version) is obsessed with making lists.

I love making lists. In fact, one thing that I like to do when interviewing people I will potentially work with is I ask them their top five movies of all-time. Say what you will, it’s my version of a personality test and I think that your top five movies say a lot about who you are as a person.

My love for making lists is what led me and my brother to name our company topfivedesign.

So when my friend Allen came to me with his idea for a site - a place where people could list their favorite of anything.

“I always seemed to be looking for recommendations from people on products and places and wanted a site where I could easily find something like ‘Favorite brand of refrigerator’.”

I’ve been beta-testing Topulist for the past several months. It’s a straight-forward website that’s easy to use and very addicting. Think of it as a social networking version of Consumer Reports, only it’s not limited by anything. You can list your favorite Marvel Comics character, your favorite game for the Wii, your favorite hybrid car or even your favorite McDonalds Dollar Menu item.

You can create your own Topulist and Allen’s ninja Rails skills make sure that it’s not already up there.

It’s a cool site and you should totally go check it out.

I had a MySpace account for all of about 3 days. I signed up because my cousins in California had them, my brother has one, and they all said it was the hip thing to do. (Nevermind the whole stigma about it it being a haven for sexual predators…)

Anyway, I thought I would try it out, just to see what it was like.

I didn’t like it. I just felt like everything it offers, I already had (a place to share pictures - flickr, a place to share thoughts - this site). The only thing that I don’t have already is the whole “social” aspect of it. There are over 50 million users on MySpace, all linked through “friendships” and schools and groups and other connections.

What always bothered me about it was how ugly every site that I saw was. Not only that, but even ones that used these so-called MySpace templates STILL looked crappy. So I promptly deleted my account.
Today, Mike Davidson, the CEO of Newsvine, put forth a MySpace effort that is clean, respectable and wicked worn.

For the first time, I reconsidered my decision to delete my MySpace page, download his CSS hack, tweak it up and go back, but ultimately, MySpace isn’t really my scene. I found 1 or 2 people on there that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but to be honest it wasn’t worth the effort.

Maybe after their new security advisor gets things into order, I’ll go back…but for now, I’m dedicated to this site (and topFIVEdesign, of course).

*placing hand over heart*

I am a geek.

Now I don’t know if I was born a geek or if I grew gradually into geekdom, but I am 100% geekalicious now. I love computers and technology and I get excited about stupid things like Apple’s latest product release and Yahoo!’s purchase of Flickr (although I was somewhat skeptical about the latter…so far Yahoo! hasn’t screwed anything up).

The phrase “Web 2.0″ gets thrown around the blogodome a lot these days. Let’s assume for a sec that you are familiar with what Web 2.0 is (a collection of web sites and web applications designed to cater to consumer needs and wants in a browser environment rather than a desktop-based one), or at least that you are familiar with one or two Web 2.0 applications (Wordpress, the CMS that this site is built with, is one, as are the aforementioned Flickr, Yahoo!, and other stalwarts such as Blogger, Google, MySpace, etc.).

About 2 months ago, some news came to the forefront that Google, the “Microsoft of Web 2.0″, was purchasing a company called Writely, Whose Web 2.0 product is a web-based word processor, essentially Microsoft Word for the web.

There was some geekish fanfare (a story was dugg, it probably was SlashDotted), but it was mostly ignored. Now, with the announcement of the beta Google Calendar program, it appears that Google may be going after the evil Redmond, WA giant Microsoft after all. You see, much of the reason that everyone uses Microsoft is that their productivity products (Microsoft Office, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc.) have completely saturated the market and most people are comfortable with them. But people are getting comfortable with the web now and most people feel differently about Google than they do about Microsoft (mostly because it is FREE). Google’s calendar service and mail service are extremely usable and TOTALLY INDEPENDENT of the computer…they exist in cyberspace (oooooo…spooky…).

I really like it. Particularly since I use a bunch of different computers (typing this one on my wife’s Mac Powerbook laptop, work on a dual AMD Windows machine, and my main computer is an iMac G5). As much as I like to write, I think that a product like Writely is going to be wildly popular.

Anyway, I think that once that Google releases Writely into the wild with the full power of the Google brand behind it, it is going to do really well. Seriously…this Web 2.0 thing is really cool.

P.S. Sorry if this is disjointed…I’m a little scatterbrained.

I’m in a weird design funk at work.

I feel like my ideas are stale and everything that I do looks derivative. My wife, bless her, has given me some inspiration this morning that I am going to try and realize…we shall see what happens.

Anyone know what to do to get out of a funk?

I have three four new blogs to announce. Two of them I helped set up and in the other one, I’m mentioned in the first post (WORD!).

Last weekend, Alli and I traveled to St. Louis to visit our good friends Julie & Bret Mahoney and Rich & Sarah Allen. Now, what last names do not indicate is that Julie and Sarah are sisters. They are what I like to call THE SISTERS STEELE.

The Sisters Steele now have blogs.

Sarah, the compassionate environmentalist (who got married on the same day as us):
Living Compassionately

Julie, the independent, elder sister who loves poetry and Dog the Bounty Hunter:
Insatiable Articulation

Both have a couple posts up now, so go check them out…they’re good people.

The third blog is Scott’s. Scott is a guy that I have gotten to know better in the past year through the great family that he’s marrying into. There’s Brad, June, Travis, Rachel, Chelsea, and now Scott. I’m excited for him to blog because he is a funny guy and one that I am certain that I’ll enjoy learning more about.

So, here’s Scott’s blog, also known as either Scott182 or Sammy182.

UPDATE: I also need to make sure and include JenB on here: Have you seen her other hat?

I really enjoy reading the blogs of my friends, not just because they are my friends, but because they are fun people as well.

For the past several weeks, Scott Adams (the artist of the comic, Dilbert, no relation) has been hosting a sort-of contest looking for a new artist for the comic strip, Unfit. Unfit is an extremely funny comic written by Mike Belkin that doesn’t exactly have huge readership. Adams maintains that the artwork of the comic is holding it back somewhat.

I forwarded this information on to my brother who works with a guy who is an illustrator and also knows another guy who is a terrific artist. The guy my brother works with submitted his artwork and it was selected for the top 15. I was a real big fan of his version of the comic. I thought that it was clean and readable and the characters were very likable.

He didn’t win (if that’s what you want to call it…the selection was actually made by Belkin with input from his newspaper syndicate).

The results were posted today. This artwork isn’t final, but the artwork looks like this:

To me, it looks an awful lot like the old Blondie characters, with a little bit of Archie thrown in. It was a very popular submission, but for me, I just didn’t think that it was the right choice. I guess I was wrong.

If you’re wondering what I think should have won (and I’m a little biased, I know, but still…it was really good):

Lance’s was ranked #3 after the first vote and I really thought he had a decent shot. I liked his comic because it was clean and I thought that it captured the characters well. However, I would have liked to have seen a couple more strips, particularly one with Mike’s wife Stacey, who is probably one of the harder characters to draw in the comic. Her and the chicken. (Can you see why I read this comic?)

Anyway, I think that it was a pretty cool process. What I liked the most about it was how open and honest Scott Adams was about the whole process. I just wanted to say good job to Lance, too. I thought that his comics were successful and they certainly were deserving of recognition.

And work screeched to a halt…

The internet is broken.

At least it is here at work. Since all of our work sits on a network drive (for backup purposes) and our e-mail system, which sits on the mother-of-all-network-suckages, Lotus Notes, is inaccessible. There are things that I could be doing, but not much.

Isn’t it funny how dependent we have become on this minor thing called the Internet? There are those out there who feel our dependence on technology may eventually be our downfall (hello, Terminator!), but I still think it’s a good thing.

Which is why, now that our network is back up, I’ll get back to the things I was working on. Have a nifty day.

I have to say, I used to think that my friend Kevin was crazy. I never understood the whole “other browser” idea until about 2 months ago. I’ve always been an IE guy (*GASP*) and I’ve been exposed to Safari through my recent home conversion to a Mac, but I never really got on board with all the other browsers. Couple reasons:

1. There are too many choices. How is one to differentiate?
2. IE is built in and isn’t completely horrible. Why hassle with switching?
3. I don’t like ads, but I also don’t want to pay for my browser (see: Opera).
4. Did I mention that I’m lazy? If not, I’m lazy.
5. I have having to move bookmarks, cookies, etc.

However, my friend Kevin (of graphicpush.com fame) introduced me to a little browser called Firefox recently. He had spoken of it before, but when I saw that little number after the release (I believe it was 0.87 at the time), I immediately turned it off. While I like being an early adopter of new technology and stuff…I like to at least know that it works.

Well, Mozilla’s new preview release of Firefox 1.0…it works. And, it’s totally sweet. Not only is it fast and does it have tabbed browsing (which is awesome…totally new to me…like I said…IE guy), but it also has a built in RSS Feed parser so you can subscribe to sites that have an RSS feed and read them without actually going to the site, which is, by definition, awesome. You can browse the headlines of your favorite blogs, news sites, etc. and pick and choose the actual stories you want to read (not that you would skim on this site, considering it is totally sweet).

Not only that, but it will also import all of your existing IE data, including your bookmarks and all of your cookies and stuff, which is great, overcoming the above listed #4 and #5.

That being said…if you are in an office environment like me, IE has engorged itself so much into so many things that it becomes really difficult to permanently make the switch. But I’m trying…