Ryan Leland

My new blog installation is now at http://ryanleland.com

So this morning I was lucky enough to attend an advanced screening of Star Trek. I know this film has been a little controversial in the Trek community, and to be honest, I can see why. As an example, there was a product brand placement during one scene where a Beastie Boys song was playing. If that’s not enough, well… this movie is pretty trendy. Star Trek goes out of its way to be accessible and entertaining for todays movie goer. But before I go too far bringing up the negatives I’d like to say that I left the theater today with a huge grin on my face, and couldn’t stop thinking about the movie all day. Actually I don’t really think the negatives are worth bringing up.

I spent some time thinking about the original series today, and how it was also pretty trendy at the time, and how it also made sci-fi accessible to the masses. If you don’t think the mini skirts, fishnets, and knee high boots played a role in that series success, you need to give your head a shake. Star Trek TNG had a different approach to sci-fi, and re-defined the Sci-fi genre, and took a higher intellectual road than the original. TNG didn’t bother taking any notes from the popular Battlestar Galactica, or Star Wars movies that had come after the original Star Trek series. It was true to the Star Trek universe in many ways, but built on the cult following of the Trekkie community.

I’m by no means an expert on the Star Trek universe, but I’m pretty sure the people who are going to hate the Star Trek movie have already decided to hate it. There are things you have to sacrifice to have a high budget film these days, and I really enjoyed many of the benefits. The casting for this film was amazing. The CG was amazing. There was just so much to love for me despite some obvious flaws. I’m pretty sure I saw a history changing movie today, and it’s going to bring a whole new generation of Star Trek fans.

I think it’s safe to say the Star Trek franchise will live long, and prosper.

It’s been 5 days now since I launched you-vs-me, and already we have 50+ users, and nearing 20,000 page views. I am excited, but also realize I have more work to do than ever to continue improving the user experience as traffic gradually increases. I am now in the process of moving static content to a CDN, and will be doing a massive upgrade to my hosting to buy some time while I work on the code itself.

5 days of you-vs-me traffic

It’s been a lot of work, but the private beta is now live. Seems there is some usability issues, and small bugs, but nothing that can’t be taken care of easily. Things seem to be going okay!

Here are some stats from the first 20 hours:

43 topics posted

164 180 votes

108 123 comments

13 topics favourited

700+ 1400+ page views

To psuedo quote the flight of the chonchords… I don’t just talk about finishing websites; I talk about it a lot. I have been working on a silly website for a year now, and thinking about it for close to 4 years. It’s not even the best site idea I’ve had, and far from the easiest to build.

The fact that I’m nearly finished brings to light a lot of concerns. Like, what if nobody cares, and I’ve wasted a year of my life? How will I stay motivated to market it, and keep making it better over the next 6 months to see if it actually has a chance? Just getting the site finished has been brutal. There have been times I thought it was lame, and wanted to move on, but the fear of getting this far, and not finishing would have haunted me for life. I have a lot of respect for people who do more than talk about starting projects.

I haven’t really talked about you-vs-me much to people. It’s not really an easy thing to explain in 5 minutes why I’ve spent a year on it, or what exactly it does. I just say the name of the site, and peoples eyes glaze over. You make a topic like Battlestar Galactica vs Star Wars, and you vote on it… right? *sigh* Well, I’ve actually made some interesting developments with regards to how all of that works. The purpose is of course to network users (that’s the easy part to explain). It’s not really the most obvious feature of the site, but that’s really where all of it started. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how this site will be compelling for users. It turns out that what people don’t vote for is just as interesting in terms of calculating compatibility. And the topics people don’t participate in are nearly as important as the topics they do take part in for the purpose of determining what their interests are.

Wait a sec… don’t people voting on topics determine their interests? Not if you are trying to calculate compatibility with other people. Consider this: if I had two topics… Apple vs Orange, and Apple vs Microsoft, and I had two people that both voted for Apple in the seperate topics? The system could calculate that these two people have a +1 standing based on the input, but it would be wrong. And this is where the whole system starts taking shape. All of the sudden I realized if I could solve problems like this, that I would have something very special on my hands. These are the types of issues I had not considered 6 months ago, when I thought I was close to done. That was when I was building a website. The last 3 months is when I have been creating something.

This is why this site is so downright frightening to me. There are challenges, despite the simplicity of the concept, that really keep me going. I’m pretty sure this will be the best project I’ve ever finished, which is the only guarantee I have. Despite the technical challenges, the biggest challenge will still be getting people to use the site. Yikes. So while I am close to finished, In reality… I’m just beginning.

There seems to be a bug in my WordPress install that is preventing me from approving comments, and also giving people white screens when trying to add comments. I’m going to try and fix this ASAP. Sorry to anyone who has added a comment. They are there. I just can’t approve them

I’ve had a lot of fun with jQuery.animate(), but I ran into something that I thought would be a fun first plug-in to write. Something that would animate a number from one value to another with the ability to specify the step size, and speed.

It’s as simple as using any jQuery plug-in. Just include the file (after jQuery), and call it. You can also override any of the standard options. Hope it’s useful to *somebody*, and let me know if there is anything that could be added or improved on. Enjoy.


<script type="text/javascript"><!--
$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#numberContainer").animateNum();
    $("#numberContainer2").animateNum({start: 10, end: 500, step: 2, speed: 30});
});
// --></script>

Container 2: <span id="numberContainer2">10</span>


Download: jquery.animateNum.js 0.1

Romo Lampkin is awesome. This is one of the few characters on BSG that in my opinion could/should have a spinoff series. This guy, from what we’ve seen of him, is a lawyer with an attitude. Take Dr. House, put him in space, make him awesome, and you have Romo. I’m not saying he’s my favourite character, and not even the best actor, but he’s a character I hope we see more of before the series is over. Romo would could kick some House ass, and I hope the writers give him more screen time so he can prove it.

Romo Lampkin is a badass lawyer.