Narcissistic Vanity

SysMango.com is the personal website of Butch Lebo.

The picture to the left here is a picture of me, taken almost daily, for my own amusement and as decoration of this exercise in being uninteresting.

Please feel free to contact me via this form, or by commenting on any of the posts.

This text is really a placeholder while I think of something better. Because I'm not really sure what I want to put here. Do you have a suggestion?

The gears in my mind . . .

Sam makes a robot

Submitted by Butch on Thu, 2010-02-04 22:21
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This year, after talking to some other kids at his school, Sam wanted to join a Destination Imagination team. The team he joined was working on robotics. Sam wanted to get a little more experience with building things, so we followed Make Magazine's instructions for building a vibrobot out of the motor from a toothbrush and an Altoids tin.

The video ends with Natalie saying "that sounds bad." Right after that, I turned off the recording on my phone and right as I disconnected the battery, the weight that the motor was driving popped off and bounced across the floor. I wish I had kept the video running and had Sam turn off the bot. I could have caught it.

Went to get some coffee

Submitted by Butch on Tue, 2010-02-02 13:53
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Bean There

It snowed

Submitted by Butch on Sun, 2010-01-31 23:27
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I more or less ended last year by spending some some time back up north in Bristol. It was a solo trip, which at the time seemed to be a shame, due mostly to the twenty inches of snow that the boys weren't able to play in because they were 300 miles south.

Friday night the Universe made up for that.

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Forums, again

Submitted by Butch on Sun, 2010-01-24 02:46
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This is going to be a discussion that might bump up against the limits of acceptable meta as far as blogging is concerned. I am not all that interested in being yet another blog about blogging or site design. This is mostly because my world really doesn't have much to do with blogging or site design beyond having a blog and having designed the site. And Meta Is Murder.
This post is about forums. Specifically, this post is about web forums and the communities that I've found around them over the last several years.
If you love forums, or even just like forums, even if just a little bit, may I suggest not reading this? Just because I don't like them doesn't mean you should do something that will probably just make you angry.
I will try to keep the meta to a minimum. The forum bashing, that I'll make no promises about.

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Notes on a Redesign

Submitted by Butch on Wed, 2010-01-20 22:02
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Screenshot

Hopefully this is the last post on the way that the website now looks. But this is not really about the redesign of the website than it is about how I tried to do the redesign. I tried to run the redesign using Google Wave.

If you don't know what Wave is, I don't think that you are really missing anything. Wave is a "preview" at a much earlier stage than Gmail was when it was first released (in preview/beta/whatever). With Gmail, everyone already knew what e-mail was. While some of us think we know what Wave is, I don't know that anyone actually realizes everything that Wave is eventually going to be when it grows up (if ever). [I spoke about my initial feelings on Google wave in an earlier post.]

The redesign started as some notes scrawled in a notebook, including some pretty poorly done drawings.

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New look for SysMango.com

Submitted by Butch on Wed, 2010-01-20 09:20
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Before

From SysMango.com

After

From SysMango.com
I'm racing to get this in before I have to start working for the day. Today I released an updated theme for SysMango.com. Looking at the theme, I can say that it's not done, not 100% done. It is good enough to put it up and see how it deals with the real version of this website. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post. I know there are probably issues that I haven't seen yet, because I'm using Firefox and Google Chrome. I'm fairly certain that Internet Explorer will look awful. Sorry about that. Can't really make myself care about browsers that seem to refuse to follow standards. There are still changes to come, but this was the big change.

What is up with Facebook?

Submitted by Butch on Thu, 2010-01-14 00:05
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The new thing happening on Facebook is their pushing their "automatic Friend Finder." And honestly, I find that their method is overly aggressive and borders on offensive.
I know that a lot of services have a feature where an address book, instant messaging roster and other services' roster and search for people who are also using the service in question, but please don't lie to people saying I found most of my friends this way. And yet, Natalie gets a banner stating that I used the service they're pushing (to mind my non-Facebook contact data) to find "many of my friends." Me? ORLY? I don't think so.
As I've said before, I do not normally add people, even people I think I know well enough to add, until I get a request from the person. It's really the only way I won't feel guilty about the amount of quality of the noise I sometimes tend to post.

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The Real How Social Media Changed My Life -OR- How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

Submitted by Butch on Tue, 2010-01-12 23:26
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I titled the last post , and honestly, I talked about the spaghetti monster map, not about Social Media. So, the title wasn't honest. And the content was clearly on the side of snoring-at-the-keyboard boring.

Really, social media has not changed my life. Not that much, if at all. I still sit in loft here at the house working everyday. I am sitting here alone. I am answering questions via phone, work's instant messging system and e-mail. I do usually have an app or two running on one of the machines that monitors some of the social networking sites where there are people I actually might follow, and Linux apps exist to present the activity/update/life stream.
And watching, normally just out of the corner of my eye is pretty much all I do. I don't interact. I don't participate in any of that Social Network's games. And I most certainly don't let those games or apps or whatever have posting rights to my activity stream. That way leads madness.
Yes, I'm boring.

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How Social Media Changed My Life

Submitted by Butch on Tue, 2010-01-12 00:28
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OR How I discovered how incredibly uninteresting I really am.

When I first started with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace, I really didn't expect anythign meaningful to come of it. I could see the possibilities that hte technologies presented, but I could also see the issues that bubbled beneath the surface.

My experimentation with MySpace didn't last all that long. In the time since I abbandonded the MySpace account (Sept 2007) to now, my attention has been paid to other services. Almost the same day, I created a Twitter account. About a month later I created an account on Facebook, about the day Facebook opened up the service to anyone and everyone.

Three years seems like a really long time to be using these services. And at times, each and every one of them loses whatever appeal they may have had.

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