The Important Information

Here you will find information about my work and involvement in the community. You may also find some blog posts about topics ranging from software to comics. I hope you find what you’re looking for and feel free to contact me about anything.

• Email: chris.missal [at] gmail.com
• Twitter: @ChrisMissal

Good Personal Description

I just typed the following about myself. I thought it was put fairly well:

I consider myself an odd introvert. While I’m uncomfortable meeting new people that are outside my comfort zone, I will sometimes give presentations to 30-50 strangers for over an hour and feel comfortable for the most part. It just has to be my interest or specialty.

I figured it was a good enough partial description of my personality to share. :)

In Iowa? Love JavaScript?

Over the weekend during some Iowa Code Camp festivities, there was some talk about starting a JavaScript group in the area. With some help from Nathan Smith, we have gotten the ball rolling! Things are still incredibly new right now, but let us know through whatever channel you’re comfortable if you have something to ask or suggest.

Visit Iowa JavaScript for more information or leave a comment below!

Speaking at Iowa Code Camp

I’m speaking at Iowa Code Camp April 30th on unit testing for those who haven’t unit tested before. I will post my code and my slides some time next week, but if you’re in the area and you haven’t ever written a unit test (I know you’re out there!), come to my presentation with a quiver of questions.

It’s at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, IA, Iowa Hall Room D at 10:30am.

Number 10,000!

I’m a big fan of statistics and numbers that are nice and round for human consumption. I just reached my 10,000th tweet on Twitter and thought I’d celebrate by writing up a blog post.

Stats are More Fun When Made Up

I bought a domain a long time ago with the hopes of creating an application to host some fun and made up stats. For too long I’ve been using this site as a playground to learn new things. The problem with that is that I’m never actually done. I decided to do something super simple using AppHarbor and now MadeUpStats.com is now finally live and showing some garbage fun statistics. I decided to not over-engineer this site and just get it live. Feel free to leave me a comment for features I should add. If you have a stat you want added, for now, just let me know via Twitter or Facebook and I’ll add your bogus stat.

My Month Long Challenges

I just finished my third month long challenge. They’re not really that challenging, but it’s something for me to bust my cycle and try something with an end in site.

November

Have you ever heard of no-shave November? I tried this and succeeded. It was uncomfortable at times, but it allowed me to set my mind to something and make sure I stick to it. No matter how trivial and unimportant it might be.

December

In December, I decided to bring my lunch to work or eat at work every day. Usually I go out for lunch and spend more money than I really need. This was mostly a way to get myself to not spend so much each week on lunches. Since then I’ve been better about not going out for lunch as much.

January

I didn’t really plan on doing anything for January, but after about 4-5 days, I realized I hadn’t yet been on Facebook. I determined that I’d use some non-Facebook activity as my January challenge. I just checked today (Feb 1st) and realized that I didn’t really miss much. A couple friend requests and a message from my lil sister was all.

I was (somewhat narcissistically)  hoping that I’d open up Facebook and see that I had hundreds of requests and all sorts of missed invites and opportunities. That wasn’t the case. It kind of backs up my hypothesis that nothing really happens on Facebook.

February

Starting today I’m going to make sure I read at least 30 minutes every day. I enjoy reading but never really “find the time” to do so. I put “find the time” in quotes because there’s plenty of time in the day. I just make excuses. Hopefully my success with these tiny challenges will get me reading again.

The best part of this is that these only go on for one month. They’re easier than resolutions that encompass a whole year and they’re not really that tough to do. Also, since I get to pick these things, they’re fun and I can make my own rules. So going back to the January Challenge… If you felt like I was ignoring you on Facebook over the last month, I’m sorry. I was just messing around with another challenge. :)

Common Computer Time-Savers

As a geek and a software developer, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer and there are things I do that I take for granted. I’d like to compile a list of things that speed things up, make things easier, or are just helpful. We can all share this list with our friends and family members that might not know them. Here’s a few that pop into my mind right away:

• When entering a username and password, you should be able to just press ‘Enter’ after you type your password. There’s no need to go back to the mouse, move it to the button and click it. Once you get used to this, you’ll use it all the time. When you run into  a page that has you enter information that doesn’t “go” when Enter is pressed, you’ll start to get annoyed. (2009-10-18)
• If you are browsing the web in a browser that isn’t very old, you should be able to just type a search in the address bar at the top. This will save you the loading of Google your favorite search engine. Some browsers still might have the search bar attached near the address bar, but these seem to be going away with newer versions. (2009-10-18)
• Google searches that appear inside a lightly shaded box, or in a sidebar are listed as “Sponsored links”. These are paid for by individuals or companies to promote their link to the top. The page that it takes you to might not be the most relevant, it’s just the one that won the bidding war. (2009-10-18)

Leave a comment with your own tips and I’ll add it to the list!

Why is your Site Not Getting Faster?

Your site’s performance should always be improving. Period. Hardware and internet connections are continually getting better and faster, so why are some web sites not getting faster?

I think it’s because people aren’t too concerned with their site’s speed, but they should be! Maybe they’re writing bad code on top of existing code and slowly ruining their project… I’ve seen it happen before.

Am I just crazy or do people not measure and/or care about performance?

Number One on Google

So this site is finally number one on Google searches for “chris missal”. I wasn’t actively trying to get the number one spot with this domain, but I was kind of surprised that it took as long as it did. All my other sites are still ranking very high, which is good. So now when I forget which web sites I run and maintain, I can just do a search to find the most important one at the top. ;)

Also, my book reading is going alright, but not great. I’m halfway through another tech book that I’ll be reviewing here when I’m finished and the other week I completed my first fiction book in about 12 years.