Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

As a 2010 gift to myself I purchased a one month subscription at last.fm. My original intent was to see the historical information presented in their “Playground” and get a sense of my listening habit over the last seven years I have been with last.fm.

I paid my $3USD one-time fee for a months access and immediately downloaded my “Tag Tube”.

It looked neat on the surface, but I was a little disappointed to see what it only went back as far as April 2008. Still, there are ebbs and flows with my listening habits and this map does a good job of representing that. See the last twenty months of my last.fm tags in Underground Tube format here.

There is not much to glean from this, but it looks like the tagging system is a little off because Matthew Good appears under “Alternative Rock” and “Canadian”. Both are accurate tags but I feel that if they had went with one over the other then MG would have had a more consistent presence in my Tubes.

Otherwise the information is pretty accurate. The White Stripes usually dominated my listening in any given month, but there were occasional binges with soundtrack scores (as “My Aught Nine Numerical Review” showed). I will investigate the other features of being a Last.fm subscriber, and since listening to their radio does not interest me, I will see if this was a worth while purchase. If not, then I may consider buying again in another 12 months to see how my Tube Tags look.

I feel like I missed a great opportunity to recap 2009, or even the decade that was. The final weeks of December flew by at an accelerated rate I didn’t think about a blog entry to commemorate the occasion. Therefore I am going to take a recent page from Jeff’s blog and do a statistical year in review.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. google analytics
2. wct
3. weather Edmonton
4. wcf
5. canada post tracking
6. ack attack
7. sean gursky
8. whois seagurs.com
9. virgin festival 2009 calgary
10. petro points

I have two Gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal but my work account does not have Web History enabled so everything that did go through my query appeared above. My busiest month for searching was in January with 489 queries recorded, and my least active month was in July with 117.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.imdb.com
3. www.seagurs.com
4. www.worldcurlingtour.com
5. www.php.net
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.google.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. www.youtube.com
10. www.tv.com

I guess these results tell me I was obsessed with the status of seagurs.com (when it was in Redemption Period with 1&1 and waiting to take ownership back) and could never be bothered with bookmarking the Analytics site, or even learning how to spell it correctly. No idea how Virgin Festival made it into my top ten, especially since I did not even consider attending, but it stands as a testament to the year that was.

Top 10 Artists
1. Bear McCreary (2,587 plays)
2. The White Stripes (1,434 plays)
3. U2 (1,387 plays)
4. Matthew Good (877 plays)
5. Philip Glass (777 plays)
6. Bad Religion (726 plays)
7. The Beatles (684 plays)
8. Coldplay (680 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (668 plays)
10. Michael Giacchino (520 plays)

No surprise by this, but maybe the sheer volume that Bear McCreary beat everyone else in the last twelve months is worth mentioning. Not counting the occasional song on Battlestar Galactica that contains lyrics, four of my top ten artists were instrumental and three of those were purely from soundtracks.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis One (124 plays)
2. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Five (123 plays)
3. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Two (111 plays)
4. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Three (104 plays)
5. Regina Spektor – Man of a Thousand Faces (97 plays)
5. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Four (97 plays)
7. Bear McCreary – All Along The Watchtower (77 plays)
8. Bear McCreary – Heeding the Call (74 plays)
9. Bear McCreary – Sonatica (72 plays)
10. Bear McCreary – Passacaglia (65 plays)

Pianos and Bear charge the way. I really enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, it’s a beautiful song but I didn’t realize that I had listened to it over 3.5 times a week (“Far” was released in June, halfway through the year).

I boarded eight different flights in 2009, flying to London, Marseille, Calgary and Las Vegas. Those eights flights spanned the same number of weeks. Roughly thirty hours of flight time equated to covering a distance of 22,242 kilometres. I drove my VW Jetta TDI 11,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicles 16 times and filed a single police report.

In 2009 I wrote 81 blog posts and I sent roughly 350 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 110 from my @hotmail.com address. I made fifteen orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one from amazon.co.uk and three with monoprice.com.

My rough estimates lead me to believe that I took nearly 7,500 photos with six different cameras. 17% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,300 actuations.

We shall see what 2010 holds, and if my past numbers will continue into the New Year or not. 364 days remain…

Over the last few months I have noticed that the speediness of WordPress and Gallery2 (especially Gallery2) has become an issue. I have had to handicap the features on Gallery2 by enable caching, removing the random image and view counts all in an effort to ensure a quick page load time.

To combat this I am going to switch my hosting plan within GoDaddy. Unfortunately it will not be an easy and smooth transition. I will have to cancel my current hosting account, wait 24 hours for seangursky.com to disassociate and then it will be free to set up with the new hosting plan.

After my hosting failure in March I want to make sure I have everything in place before flipping the switch, and all told this process should take a few days. It would be great if it was all sorted out before the weekend, but we’ll see how these things go.

Life goes on and sometimes the blog gets left behind.

The Christmas break for TV shows has started to kick in. Some shows (FlashForward, V) may not return until after the Olympics, others will begin again in January, but this quiet is the calm before the storm. It will give me a chance to re-watch season five of Lost and prepare for the final season in February.

Details about the sixth season are very accessible. Casting spoilers can appear in an interview for TV Guide or in a not-Lost related article. With just over fifty days to go it is easy to cave and read the smallest detail, but I want to go into February with as much unknown as possible.

To pass the time a little easier and get excited for the upcoming season I have spent a lot of time watching fan made Lost trailers. In Preparation for Season 6 is some of the best fan work I have seen on any trailer. Keeping in ABC fashion (where no new footage is shown in previews) these videos do a great job of building up certain elements of the show.

Blue Skies Over Bad Lands
Sadly the giant black hole that appeared over Norway turned out to be nothing more than the Russians testing a missile out at water. The photos from this entertained the alien geek in all of us and fueled the what if conversation a little bit more.

Tube Steak Challenge
A long overdue update wouldn’t be without an increase to the Tube Steak Challenge. Thanks to my nieces second birthday I was able to add three more to the drive to fifty-two.

When my torrents started to act up a few days ago I thought nothing of it. I chalked it up to the tracker being problematic, Shaw being stubborn, a weird seed to peer ratio or something else I would investigate later. I never thought it meant that my RAID 5 system had failed. When I went into Disk Management and saw my RAID drive not recognized my face turned a ghastly expression and Jenna said she “never wanted to see that look on me again”.

Wingman was crying for me and for over a day I neglected the signs. In fact it had been crying for so long that two drives were marked as failed. In a RAID 5 system it can survive if a single drive fails, but two or more is when things get serious and I had a critical issue on hand.

My 1and1 data loss in March is still an open wound and the thought of losing everything was too much to handle. When I say everything I mean it. I could survive if my Videos folder disappeared. I could slowly rebuild it over time, cut back on what I wanted to watch. However losing the photos would be an injury I could never recover from. I may not look at our Jasper photos from 2004, or reminesce about the giant pizza Dad and I made one day, but I always could, and to have that taken away would have been huge.

The thought of losing everything started to takes its toll as the RAID was being examined at work. How would I recover? What would I do differently? It was like being faced with a life changing conversation at the doctors office after being told what the dark spot on your x-ray meant.

This was a road I did not want to go down but I prepared for the worst and contemplated what would be my poison as I intended on drowning my sorrows in the evening if the results weren’t good.

Our company IT man, Nigel, had been investigating the RAID and seeing what (if anything) he could recover. After a few hours had passed I heard an exclamation of victory and I was told Wingman would be okay. One hard drive was lost in the process and I would be wise to add a fifth drive to the array to allow for proper redundancy. Fortunately the next task of locating an old model hard drive was easy and for $140 (plus the lunch I owe Nigel) Wingman will be okay and with no data loss.

The Sunday before all of this started Jenna and I were relaxing at home and she was watching an episode of “Sex and the City”. It happened to be My Motherboard, My Self in which Carrie Bradshaw has her Macintosh laptop die and loses all of her files. Everyone she spoke with asks her what she uses to backup and equates backing up to something everyone does that no one talks about.

Even with a backup solution you can still come face to face with losing everything and having nothing.

The MIT Media Lab released something called Personas Friday. I saw this on TechCrunch, and immediately thought of Wordle, except this takes you as a source of the words.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

I was curious how Personas saw my identity. Since I have a “Sean Gerski” doppelganger and have recently been wondering about my online identify I thought this was a good test. Obviously “online” was the front runner, I am surprised that “Illegal” was as large as it was, however I have no idea what that is referring.

I see that “Politics” and “Religion” are the same size too; you can draw whatever social commentary between that you would like. I took the words from Personas and turned it into a Wordle here.

In March my Project 365 photos, custom images and blog posts were eaten by 1and1. It took several weeks to go through the grieving process. I still find the missing images on my three years of Project 365 a sore spot, but eventually I came to terms that my blog posts would be gone but I would pick up the pieces and start again.

There was the possibility that the site could be recovered, even in part, but I did not want to get my hopes up that it would play out. Thankfuly, with the assistance of a few co-workers (Keith and Brent) they got to work on recovering posts through Yahoo’s web cache.

What followed was work that spanned several months as basic HTML pages were parsed with PHP and formatted into an XML document that WordPress could easily import. I understand the words but the process baffles me. It started with using Yahoo’s API to save the pages and then put them through the ringer to come out shiny and clean on the other end.

I am not sure how many posts I had over the years, I thought it number over 500, however, the magic that Keith and Brent worked was able to salvage over 180 going as far back as my first post in October 2005.

I have relied on my blog archive to tell me what I was doing this time last year or to remember a specific concert review. It wasn’t until those posts were gone that I realized how much this site meant to me, and that is why I will continue to update it.

Import WordPress

1. Importing post Velvet Mafia…
2. Importing post Studying Hard…
3. Importing post B-a-n-a-n-a-s…
…
182. Importing post My Right Keys…
183. Importing post My Not So Perfect Storm…
184. Importing post My Music Radio…

All done. Have fun!

This was a beautiful sight to behold. A huge thank you goes out to Keith and Brent for their effort on this, because without them Pioneer on the Internet would still be a shadow of its former self.

Small World
The Internet got a little bit smaller for me on Monday when Sean Gerski made a tweet about finding me online. The spelling on the last name is a little different, but phonetically we share the exact same name. Needless to say I awoke Tuesday morning to quite the surprise in my Inbox!

We are now e-friends and will be plotting to take over the world as only similar in name people often do.

Tube Steak Challenge
Last Friday my Tube Steak Challenge took another leap forward.

The Ice Dragons celebrated our summer hockey season with a wrap party at Gord’s where beer and food was provided from the team pot of our subs. Even though my method for remembering the number of dogs I consumed with the caps of beer bottles didn’t work out as planned I reached double digits before the end of the month.

I will be joining Gord and Tyler on a hike in the wilderness later this week up to Landslide Lake and there are hot dogs on the menu so I hope to return from the trip and have a a few more tubed steaks under my belt.

What is in a name? When it comes to marketing a brand or an identity the consensus is to come up with something and stick with it. Over the last few months I have been struggling with my online identity, but it has recently come to a head. Ask someone what my Last.fm profile name is, chances are three suggestions will come back. That is not how you stay brand consistent.

In 2005 I registered seagurs.com and used that as my online profile, however the use of the name was very limited. Besides the website it was only used as my Gamertag on Xbox360 and, most recently, on the Playstation PSN network. Could I really be identified as ‘seagurs’ elsewhere? Would it be a more appropriate and identifiable online identity than I realized?

For almost every other site or account I would go with ‘gursky’. It is an obvious nickname, usually unused when I register it on other sites. When Facebook launched vanity URL’s for user profile pages I began to wonder how I should be identified online. Would I go with ‘seagurs’, ‘gursky’ or something else? In the end I decided to go for something generic, but accurate name and claimed ‘seangursky‘.

The purpose of this post, and the reason behind this whole identity crisis, began when I was looking to create my custom URL on Flickr. Instead of being identified by numbers and letters I could use a name. I have been a member of Flickr for as long as I had a domain name but never knew they released custom URL’s. I was late to the gold rush but I had the intentions of registering ‘gursky‘. However, someone with a screen name not of gursky beat me to it.

What was I to do? This is Facebook all over again, do I go with ‘seagurs’ or ‘seangursky’ or something else? Ultimately I went with ‘seangursky‘ and began to wonder if I made the right choice.

I can change my Flickr screen name to reflect my custom URL, but that feels like I am giving up on an identity battle, however it is confusing to have a screen name different from the custom URL. Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm all have usernames that cannot be changed; but only last.fm is without my given name and just stands as ‘gursky’.

Only a few sites will allow me to change my name (like Twitter), but I guess the question is this: If the site allows it, should I move my identity over to ‘seangursky’? Or should there be a conscience split where social networking sites have one name but the rest don’t? Is it easy to define what is a social networking site and what isn’t?

I am at a crossroad. No matter which direction I go there will be old left overs (Xbox 360 and PSN under ‘seagurs’ and Facebook, Flickr and Last.fm under variations of my name) but which path is the right one to take?

I do not have an attachment to ‘seagurs’. It is a convenient combination of my first and last name, but is that enough to making it more prominent? Is the full name necessary? I have come to grips that I will never be the only ‘gursky’ online so perhaps this is how I can separate myself from them?

I try to avoid posting the ‘flavor of the week’ videos but this one really stood out to me.

On November 9, 2007 Christoph Rehage set off to walk across China. While on his journey he photographed his hair and beard growth over the year (which is documented here). He put in over 4,500KM solely on foot and put together a fantastic video of his hair growth over that time.

There are numerous ‘photo a day’ videos but this one really stood out to me because of how creative the pictures were, the soundtrack he used and how unruly he looked after a year.

I can’t help but feel a sense of deep respect for what Christoph accomplished with this video. The walk he did alone is worth being commended for but the artistic result is amazing. I have photographed a month of growing a playoff beard and have nearly three years of doing ‘photo a day’ and I can only hope to capture something as remarkable as that with these challenges.

Watch the video here, you won’t regret it.