Friday, July 11, 2003
Reach Out And Touch Someone
I had two people quote my own website back to me yesterday. They mentioned
the same paragraphs no less!
The first person was Jonathan, the A/V guy from Media Services that set up my work laptop for
my presentation yesterday at the UCSD sysadmin conference. He recognized me, asked if I spoke last year and said, "aren't you the guy that swore in college he'd never program again and now you do?" I laughed and said yes, that was me, don't hold it against me.
The second person was my mom! That's right, my own mother. I guess she's checked out how my site looks before but not read all of the writing, which makes sense, because I'm sure I only asked her for feedback on the visual layout and usability aspects back when it launched last year. We were eating dinner at my parent's favorite Chinese restaurant and out of the blue, she said she had checked it out and enjoyed reading about me, how I felt about programming growing up, how I got into what I do now. Seeing a mother get to know her child more, that was instantly gratifying. And it wasn't from this blog, where I would have thought she'd find more personal things to relate to. Well, to be fair, that's my fault. I don't have a direct link from my main portfolio site to here and so she never remembers the URL. That's a whole other debate, if I should link my personal and business websites together one day.
It makes me want to write more! I've toyed with the idea of integrating a blog into my portfolio site, making it a bit more alive and less of a static resume/business card kind of thing. Perhaps the front page for news or general techie thoughts, one of the inside pages to list current projects, that kind of thing. Now that I'm a beta tester for the new standards-compliant blogging tool
TypePad, I think I'll do just that, it'll be a fun project for this weekend.