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

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. :)

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

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

tl;dr – Just read the bullet points…

Having 10,000 of anything is quite a big achievement for something in my opinion. It’s a much larger number than you can keep in your mind at any given time. I’m not trying to boast about this number, there are Twitter users with many times more (30,000+) tweets than myself. I just wanted to put a few things in perspective for fun.

I joined twitter on 08/08/08 and have been tweeting over 10 times per day, or once every two and a half hours since then. Some days, weeks, months, more than others, but that’s how averages work. To put that into perspective:

In the Twitterverse:

• I have tweeted more in April 2011 than any other month.
• My leasted tweeted full month was January 2011, I had only 97.
• I tweet more on Wednesdays than any other day of the week.
• The hour of 10pm contains my most tweets with over 700, the 4am hour is the least with 4 tweets.
• I have followed 529 total people and had 704 total follow me.
• If I tweet once per day since I was born, I’d be 428 days younger than I am now. (+10 internets for the first one to figure out the day I was born)

In the real world:

• I could have spent each tweet on about one species of bird per tweet and have just gotten to them all now.
• My car has approximately 9.99 miles lifetime for each time I’ve tweeted.
• Since I began tweeting, 1529 military personal have been killed in Afganistan (that’s just troops), and another 326 have been killed in Iraq.
• We have discovered 7 extrasolar planets, confirmed.
• There have been about 16 deaths due to oil power accidents.
• There have been approximately 80 deaths due to coal power accidents.
• There have been 0 deaths due to nuclear power accidents.
• Known plane crashes: 128

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. :)

• 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!

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?

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.