I’ve learned a lot from my coworkers recently. In the spirit of inappropriate sharing that blogging seems to bring upon us all, I thought I’d share what I’d learned:

Lesson #1: I Am A Mad Man

I had a bad day today, so I was kvetching to my coworker…

Amazingly, this comment didn’t make me do my angry dance – I just laughed. Thankfully, laughter isn’t a true emotion…

Lesson #2: I Like Chili Duck

I was looking through an IM archive recently, trying to find something for work. Anyway, as I scanned my Trillian archive, I notticed that reading these IMs with Mystery CoWorker #2 (henceforth MCW2) kind of tells a story…

It’s a story about my relationship with the Chili Duck special at Pam’s Restaurant. Yes, it’s a weird topic to be a story, but I’m blogging about this anyway and you can’t stop me.

I like that last one the best, as MCW2 just assumes that he has firmly established my new addiction to chili duck. Curse you, MCW2!

Lesson #3: Showering Is Attractive

Everyone
at Xanga HQ has recently started getting a LOT of spam. After you
delete the same spam a billion times, you involuntarily memorize it.
Anyway, this got me wondering about some of the amazing claims that
these products make.

One of my coworkers (Mystery Coworker #3, henceforth MCW3) is a reformed pre-med student, so I asked him for his expert opinion.

In a shocking twist to this spam saga, I have to say that I am now eager to get spams about Ultra Allure Pheromones and SpermaMax. They are so funny! I’d also really like to meet the tortured Romanian writer who writes these little poetic homages to attracting women using sweat and herbs… If anybody knows him, please introduce me!

I’ve learned a lot working at Xanga. In fact, I’ve learned some things that I would have never believed unless I worked at Xanga.

Continuing the long tradition of top-three lists that I started in my last post, here’s a list of the top three most surprising things I’ve learned at Xanga:

• People Stalk Themselves! What does this mean? Well, sometimes, Xangans will write us and say “OMG, why don’t you stop EvilGuy from stalking and harassing NiceGirl?!?”

• Xangods? Would you have guessed that the people who run Xanga would be referred to as Xangods? That one still raises my eyebrows.

• Perception is Reality? Xangans seem to believe firmly in two completely opposite possibilities:

• “Xanga is a huge corporation!”. In this worldview, doing thing like inventing elaborate codes to hide the ads on your Xanga page are totally acceptable. Indeed, it’s a victory against Corporate America!
• “Xanga is some dude’s part-time hobby:” These people think that Xanga is an after-school project of some precocious middle school student with a DSL modem.

I’ll end by asking you a question:

• What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned while using Xanga?

1. I hate to brag, but Janet‘s new Blog Editor is just amazing. I guess I don’t hate to brag that much, huh.
The fact that there is an Undo button is unreal. I also like the integration with the Photo Manager. I thought the last editor was pretty good, but this is 50 times better!

2. Also, people seem to think that searching millions of blog posts is easy, but it’s not. In any case, Monsur‘s search feature is insanely powerful. It’s updated daily, and has stuff in it that even Google doesn’t have in its index.

3. Our uptime has really been solid for a while (knock on wood)! Props to Dan and Jon.

Well, I’m heading home now, so I’ll have to finish up this list later… In the meantime, I’ll end with this question:

• What feature do you want Xanga to add so badly, you’d even leave a comment on this blog post to request it?

I used to think I was a decent person, but video games have taught me that I am a bad bad man.

When I win, I am insufferable. I may act nonchalant about winning, but I know it’s a zero sum world, and me winning means that you’ve lost. More important, I beat you.

Before you ask, yes, I know I’m competitive, and yes indeed, I’m even competitive about being competitive. So although I am sad to be the world’s worst winner, I am also proud  that I am the world’s worst winner. And you’re not.

I’m also the world’s sorest loser. I don’t even like playing new games if I can’t reasonably expect to win. A lot of people at Xanga HQ like to play Mario Kart. I’d like to play too, but they’re all really good, and there’s just no way I can win. My solution: never play Mario Kart. Yes, I know it’s immature and childish, but I’m playing this other video game over here, you see, and it’s really fun, you should play too! Just as long as we play the maps that I’m good at…

Have you ever been bored, and played Tic Tac Toe against yourself? I do that sometimes, and I am so competitive that I never let “myself” win. Yes, I realize that I am both sides in this grudge match, but I can’t let either of my alter egos lose. So whenever I play Tic Tac Toe against myself, I always battle myself to a draw. One time, I lost to myself, and I was really upset with myself.

I realize that this blog post makes me sound insane, and I’d like to rebut myself, even though that makes me sound even more insane. First, I know I have these problems, and I try to compensate for them. I don’t normally gloat publicly when I win (except inside my heart-of-hearts where I throw a party). Second, when I do lose, even though my soul has been shattered, I don’t cry until I’m gasping for air. Granted, this is only because I am simply constitutionally incapable of tears unless I’m watching movies about father figures (I don’t understand it either). More to my credit, I have never killed anybody after losing a video game. I am proud enough of this accomplishment that I’d put it on my resume, if we lived in a post-apocalyptic society that had had somehow managed to get video games up and running again. I suppose this society would also need laser printers, resume paper factories and HR departments that don’t throw away resumes.

I apologize for my turn into negative town in my last post, when I was lamenting about my lack of comments. I’m not blogging on Xanga just to get comments…

In unrelated news, I have a few announcements:

• I’m gonna stop blogging. Later!
• Actually, I’m going to LiveJournal. The people there are more emo like me…
• Never mind, I’m going to MySpace, it’s the new fad (Xanga is doomed)
• OK, I’m just gonna go all-protected on Xanga. I don’t want my coworkers to be able to find my blog… Leave me a comment if you want me to add you!

I looked it up, and it turns out that I started working at Xanga on March 14, 2003. So it’ll be at least one more month before I hit three years of officially working at Xanga.

As long as we’re discussing Xanga milestones, I just looked it up and I created this Bob account on 1/31/2000, which means that I’ve been on Xanga for over six years. Wow, I even wrote a Review on that day. This was before Xanga was a “weblog community”, which apparently happened on November 5, 2000.

I feel obscurely proud that I am user #11 on Xanga, even though I did nothing to deserve this honor except have a twin brother who cofounded Xanga. I guess good genes do count for something.

BTW, I realize that it’s unrealistic to expect loads of comments after not blogging for 802 consecutive days, but it does sadden me that the Xanga, The Weblog Community™ has given me nine comments in two days. I realize that I’m not perfect, but who are we kidding, neither are you. As the kids say, propz me back.

I’m almost at my third anniversary at Xanga, and ironically, since I started working here, I’ve hardly blogged at all. I suppose I don’t take to blogging naturally, and also I feel like I should only blog about profound things. I’ve also been working a lot, and I just never get around to blogging.

Well, it’s not profound, but in today’s blog, I’ll note for the record that I was writing a email just now and I spelled “phenomenon” properly. I always hit “n” and “m” randomly, and hope for the best, but this time, the Gods of Chance smiled on me. I think this is the first time in my life I’ve ever spelled “phenomenon” right the first time, at least since Microsoft Word added its automatic spell-checking feature.

Continuing my streak of non-profundity, I’ll post a picture of me last week, when I shaved my goatee into a moustache.

The moustache lasted two days, and was purely an experiment in absurdity. The moustache marked an end to Full Beard December which somehow ended up bleeding into late January. I’d post a picture of my beard, but I think Joel has those pics on his computer.

Joel, sorry I had to crop you out of the moustache photo above, but in that picture, you make me feel like I’m four feet tall.

If I could, I would communicate entirely using quotes from movies.

I am currently trying to work the following quotes into casual conversation:

• That’s a negative, ghostrider, the pattern is full. [source]
• Rule #76: No excuses. Play like a champion! [source]
• We lost a lot of good men out there… [source]

I haven’t had much success yet, but I shall double my efforts!

P.S. This is my first post to Xanga in 802 days. Go me!

IMPROVED IMAGES

Exciting news: Monsur just improved the way Xanga handles images you upload to your Premium site!

Here’s what we improved:

• BETTER SUPPORT FOR PROGRESSIVE JPEGS. We started noticing some of our users were having problems uploading JPEGs.
  
  It turns out that digicams and camphones were using a format called “progressive JPEGs”.  Ever see those  pictures that start real fuzzy, and then gradually “fade in” until the entire image arrives on the page? Those are called “progressive JPEGs” and they’re really a different animal than regular JPEG images despite sharing the same file .JPG extension.
  
  The good news: Xanga fully supports progressive JPEGs!  Your readers with slow modems will appreciate that progressive JPEGs load much faster than regular JPEGs…
  
  
  
• SHARPER PICTURES. When we made a ton of changes after launching a new version of xTools last month, we accidentally started compressing small JPEG pics. We apologize for our sin…
  
  Xangans who noticed will be happy that we’ve fixed this: Xanga doesn’t compress any image 100 kilobytes or smaller.

Some Xangans have asked: why does Xanga compress images at all? Well, let’s say you take a pic using a Canon PowerShot S50, and save it as a “Super-Fine JPEG”.  The image file will be around 180 kilobytes on average – and will take about 40 seconds for visitors to download on a modem.

We try to balance download times with image quality, so in most cases, you can click on a xanga pic and see it in its full uncompressed glory (details here).

We’re working on adding more photo features over the next few months – including adding more storage space, making rotating profile pics easier to use, and decreasing the amount of compression we apply to pics over 100 kilobytes. Stay tuned!

To hold that concentration for a long period of time, he lived, as did several of his peers, the thirty-hour day. It was conducive to intense hacking, since you had an extended block of waking hours to get going on a program, and, once you were really rolling, little annoyances like sleep need not bother you. The idea was to burn away for thirty hours, reach total exhaustion, then go home and collapse for twelve hours. An alternative would be to collapse right there in the lab. A minor drawback of this sort of schedule was that it put you at odds with the routines which everyone else in the world used to do things like keep appointments, eat, and go to classes.

- Hackers by Steven Levy