stumbled upon the TweetStats website. pretty interesting tool to graphically visualize your twitter behavior and trends. here are my graphs that it came up with:

my general twitter timeline

so it looks like my tweets have generally been increasing over the past two years.. which makes sense considering twitter kinda blew up along the way.. there was literally almost no one on it when i first started back in Jan08.


my tweet density (time of day i usually tweet)

my twitter-ness seems to be pretty freaking dead between the hours of 4am-9am. blowing up by noon on most days. i tend to tweet later in the night on sundays and tuesdays, and earlier in the night on other all other days.


aggregate daily and hourly tweets

i seem to be pretty equal in the days that i use twitter, but for some reason Tuesday has the least of the week. hourly, i tend to be most active early afternoon. usually tweeting about what i just ate for lunch, haha.


@ replies, and retweets

self-explanatory. i'm guessing my top @ replies are the people i have most conversations with on twitter.


twitter interfaces

this one actually surprised me. echofon/tweetie makes sense in being a bit low considering i just got my iPhone two months ago, but i would have expected i used text more than i did web.

try your hand at TweetStats! Note: you will have to temporarily make your tweets public (not protected) in order for it to get all your information. but you can re-private-ize them after.

so with the hit summer blockbuster Transformers 2 that just came out still in hype.. i'll continue my NERD fest. and i'm not embarrassed to do so. after the first film came out, my sister went out on a limb and bought a very expensive Bumblebee figure, one that actually transforms, lights up, talks, plays music, and moves animatronically. it's actually a pretty cool collectors item and stands in robot form over a foot tall.

check out the figure in car form. it's surprisingly detailed:


the car in mid-transformation. bumblebee lookin ROUGH LIFE:


and fully transformed.:


on the subject, check out this TIMBALAND produced track by Elijah Kelley using the Transformers Movie Theme: CLICK HERE

so nearing the end of Leo's party at paulo's house, Rommel (@88rj888), Jay (@JaEyJaEy) and I went to the 7-11 by my house to satisfy our random SLURPEE craving. all i wanted was blue (BLUE DRANK!). but to my surprise, 7-11 is promoting the upcoming film Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. and as a promo for the movie, they are selling collectible slurpee cups and straws featuring your favorite autobots and decepticons. since they didn't have my favorite of the lesser popular Ironhide, i went with my other fave, Bumblebee (yeah i know everyone loves him, but i dont automatically hate something just cuz it's popular.. that's lame).

anyway, here is the cup/straw:

the straw with bumblebee just chillin'


the straw even has the traditional Slurpee spoon!

warning. this is a very nerdy entry.

... and super warning. this is a very long entry.

google chrome has a feature that when you make a new browsing tab, it shows your top 9 most visited websites. i've used the program for quite a while now, so whatever it put as my "top 9" i guess is as accurate and true as it can be. gives me kind of a reality check as to what my online habits and routines are.

9. byronface.com [ link ]
haha shameless plug? no.. full of myself? hm.. maybe.. haha; but in actuality. i guess this made it onto my most visited because i'm always checking to see if i have any new blog comments, or any new followers, or maybe i just want to watch my header images change whenever i refresh the page. also, whenever i post a new blog entry, for some reason i go to my website to see how it actually turned out. byronface.com was and is my first personal website. it's actually pretty fun to keep one. the networld needs more personal webspaces. so many times people say they have a 'website' when they're really just referring to their facebook or myspace page.

8. gmail [ link ]
oh gmail how you've changed the world of email. i remember back in its olden days. everyone freaked out about how you get a whole gigabyte's worth of e-mail storage. even i was amazed. i thought, "who needs a whole gig of email storage??" but i just had to have an account anyway. it was THE new thing. at the time of its release, gmail was an invite only service. early adopters of the service only had 6 gmail invites to give out. i believe i got mine from marvin (@sketch678 on twitter). i think around a year after its debut, on april fool's day, they announced that they'd be expanding email storage to 2 gigs. everyone thought it was a nasty april fool's joke, but it was real. and to this day gmail storage has expanded (slowly) to over 7GBs. it's fast web interface and it's IMAP support (for my Outlook) has made my life in email much easier.

7. flickr [ link ]
yet another website that i adopted early from a referral from marvin. he sent me an invitation to use it back when i still had all my photos stored at Sony's ImageStation (which is now dead, Sony pulled the plug on the service). when ImageStation decided to shut down, i can't say i was very happy.. all the time i took uploading photos is wasted. but then i took up the offer that marvin sent me quite a bit before IS shut down. tried it out. and fell in love with flickr's approach at imagery+community. the interface was also very straightfoward, simple, and very Web 2.0. after uploading a bunch of my pictures, i noticed how limited flickr is with a free account. it is VERY limited. almost to the point that it is practically unusable for the average picture-happy user. so i went ahead and bought a year account for $25. and it is well worth it. anyone on flickr can tell you that buying a PRO account is the only way to go.

6. YouTube [ link ]
i don't even remember the first time i saw a youtube video. that must mean my first experience with it wasn't great. i probably thought, "great.. another video website like ebaumsworld" where it would just be a collection of people doing stupid things, scare videos, people getting pwn3d, etc. but it has developed into quite the video community. people now have video blogs, video tagging games, video responses. i thought it was nothing less than AMAZING when they first introduced the High Quality mode on videos. that was magical. but then i was really taken aback when they introduced the HD videos. quite an evolution that website has seen.

5. twitter [ link ]
oh man, marvin has referred me to a lot of my most visited website/services. and here's another one. i'm not gonna lie. when marvin first sent me the invite to twitter, i was like WTF IS THIS? it's so lame and NO ONE's gonna ever use this regularly. but i kept my account anyway. i was only following a few people and only a few people were following me. but oh man. this thing blew up like a hydrogen bomb that was thrown down a tunnel to blow up a huge electromagnetic energy force (ref. Lost). everyone started getting one. and in no time i was following a bunch. and a bunch were following me. i turn on a good handful of people to my text notifications. and many the same for me. so when i update while out, i see a handful of people grab their phones and check.. Gossip Girl status. haha. but in reality, i've found twitter to be such a help as far as keeping updated (in real time, mind you) with what my friends are doing. also helps when i need a quick bit of info - "just ask everyone on twitter!"

4. barkada modern [ link ]
this needs no explanation except for the fact that i'm always checking up on this site for the shoutbox. pretty much a chatroom on the bmod site. but i have to moderate it as well. there is a curse filter, but sometimes people leak out information that the general public just shouldn't know.. i.e., "OMG I'M SO DRUNK I LOVE YOO GUYZZ OmgGFgggg" kind of shouts.

3. bitsoup [ link ]
bitsoup is my torrent heaven. if you dont know what a torrent is. yeah. i dont feel like explaining it. but its a p2p sharing network. this is where i get 99.999% of all my music, tv shows, movies, games, and software from nowadays. and now that i have FiOS, i've turned into a seedbox. it's pretty awesome because tv shows that air in the east coast are made available to download before it even airs here on the west coast. bitsoup has a 100,000 user limit. so at times registration will be closed. new users are only accepted when bitsoup makes their monthly inactive user purge. the better the upload/download ratio a user has, the less the user has to wait to start downloading new torrents.

2. MySpace [ link ]
blah myspace. i'm not gonna lie. i used the heck out of this thing. but... recently i've found myself using it a lot less. only logging on to post bulletins, or a quick check up on friends. i dont leave anyone comments anymore. and my inactivity has shown as i dont receive many comments anymore either. boggles my mind how much i still go on myspace even though i don't really participate much.



and my most visited website is.....
1. facebook [ link ]
facebook!!! this actually comes to no surprise. i'm always on this site. funny how it happened though. about three years ago, Jenny made me a facebook account because i refused to give in to the hype. but it didn't work out and i just signed on once just to deactivate the account. little did i know that deactivating a facebook account does NOT delete it! so about an entire year later, i was talking to Charmane at work, and we brought up facebook. i told her that i'd still never make an account. then i was bored that same night and made an account. BUT! i was surprised to find out, that when i attempted to make my 'new' account, i had simply reactivated my old one. shortly after i (re)joined, facebook went through a facelift. everyone was complaining and crying about it, but i was happy because i hadn't really used the old interface at all. and just recently they made another interface change. again, everyone griped about it, but i accepted it nicely. while others say it was confusing, i found it more organized. i've loved every update facebook has gone through. and it's so much better than myspace.



so judging from that top 9, i'm quite the online social networker. blogs, twitter, online social networks.

what SHOULD be in that top 9?? um. monster.com, careerbuilder.com, craigslist.org, etc. haha.

speaking of the job search, i have a story to share regarding a job search related experience i had yesterday. but till then. goodnight!

this is a NERD entry. dont read if you dont care.

i have officially switched my default web browser from firefox to google's very own chrome.

i've had it installed on my computer for a while now, but the lack of extension support (which is the heart of firefox's awesomeness) kept turning me away. but then i took a look at what extensions i really use in firefox. and the only one i really couldn't give up having was AdBlock Plus (does REALLY well at blocking ads). the other bunch of extensions i used were more interface related, to make the firefox interface minimal.

all chrome needed for me was some way to block ads and i was set. tried a proxy program using Privoxy. but this kept blocking things that weren't even ads, and left an ugly empty space where the ads were supposed to be. i then came across Adsweep. works almost as well as adblock plus for firefox, and is run alongside chrome as a user script. awesome. im set!

although considering chrome is still in development as a public beta, it is lacking in some features that i learn to live with. i dont like how i cant download a file and open it right away from its temporary download location. instead, the file has to be saved somewhere, then opened from there.

copy+paste is all weird with chrome. when copying and pasting simple text from a website into an HTML source, it adds a bunch of useless code.

example. copying the text "Hello, World!" and then pasting it into an HTML enabled doc/program would return this:

<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-family: Verdana; font-size: 11px; line-height: 14px; text-align: justify; ">Hello, World!</span></span>

notice all that useless code with the actual copied text barely even visible near the end of the code?

i have to work around this by pasting it into Notepad (which doesn't recognize any of the excess code), then recopying it.

another thing that lacks in chrome's development is the simple integration of smooth scrolling. i find myself getting lost sometimes scrolling down a webpage unless i can see the text/content scrolling smoothly with my mouse's scrollwheel.

but despite these very small (but nagging) drawbacks, the minimalistic interface and speed of the browser is enough to sell me. it is THE fastest browser i've ever used. opens instantaneously right when i click its icon. webpages download lightning fast (as long as my time warner cable is performing as it should, which hasn't been much lately, stupid TWC..). i'd compare its speed to that of mac's safari.

screenie:

try out Google Chrome here!

my 2009 has been going along pretty well so far.. but just like anything else, life had to find a balance in the positivity and throw something negative at me. when someone really close to me decides to betray, it really takes a toll on my emotional standpoint and forever changes the way i find myself trusting others. and the question forever stands: how can someone turn their backs to the people closest to them? and what drives them to take both destructive to others and self-destructive action?

* * *anyways, as if i couldn't get any nerdier, i've fallen into a nostalgic chapter. with the recent movie trilogy and future wolverine movie coming out, i've found myself engaging interest in Marvel once again, much like i had growing up. broke out the old (but complete!) collection of my collector cards. haha geeky and childish, yes.. but whatever. anyone my age or close to it MUST remember the old school x-men cartoon on the fox network. i'm sorry, but that show was all kinds of awesome. and upon further research i found out that x-men is the 2nd most requested animated tv show that is still unreleased on dvd, following shortly behind MTV's Daria. with a demand that high, im sure some money could be made if they released it. supposedly, in 2008, the series was being planned for release in the UK, but because of some drama with the media companies, the release (if any) is unknown.

but in this day and age of technology, some geek out there compiled all 76 episodes of the 5-year run series and made it available for download. so 12gigs and a couple days later, i've collected all the episodes, and will be enjoying my free time re-experiencing the series. yeah i know there was another attempt at an animated x-men series "x-men: evolution" but that gained almost no ratings and simply doesn't live up to the first one. yeah, the animation is thousands of times better, but the old series just had better plot-lines that stayed true to the comic. re-live the intro to the original cartoon and tell me that wasn't groundbreaking for its time: X-Men: The Animated Series Intro. /end nerd rant.

* * *yesterday was a day full of japanese eating for me. started my day with joe's sushi for lunch. all-you-can-eat awesome quality sushi woot! we're pretty much regulars there so we were getting a lot of free stuff. they just love us over there! everyone, including the non-21's got free sake bombs with the chef. food-wise, we got a hefty bunch of sushi that would feed well over 8 people BEFORE any of the actual sushi we ordered came out. a few sake bombs and a full stomach after, we head out and part ways. i go home and take a sake+food induced nap.

i then wake up and get ready to head out to cesar and jackie's birthday celebration at a japanese bbq restaurant in victoria gardens, gyu-kaku. i've been to gyu-kaku before; at the huntington beach location, and i was eager for the harami steak. we ordered a LOT of meat, mostly harami.. and it was just as good as i remember. and the fact that you cook it yourself to your own personal taste makes it a much better experience. the dinner itself was a nice reunion for a bunch of us as well. headed back to cesar and andrew's for a few more drinks and discussion. barkada ski trip 2009, watch out. haha!

oh yeah, i saw this n00b on the freeway:


kbye.