My Avatar
I never had an Avatar
before. At least not one that I thought represented me very well. So today, while waiting for hundreds of megabytes of data to transfer from one place on the Internet to another, I made an Avatar.
It represents me pretty well, I think. First off - it has my faithful colleague, Yoshi. Since I work out of my home office, Yoshi is always at my side - often sleeping with his head on the legs to my chair (he’s gotten VERY good at detecting when I may be getting up, and he moves out of the way extremely quickly!)
I am wearing a suit, which shows I can be serious and “do business”. But it also has the whimsical - the pirate hat, indicating my desire to live my life just a little bit differently than most; the cigarette in the mouth, and the beer in the hand also will be familiar to people that know me.
The glasses are a constant with me - I don’t go outside without sunglasses - ever. I am easily blinded by bright lights. Sun on snow is a killer (one of the many reasons I choose to live in South Texas!)
The contrasting flooring and background symbolize to me the complex and confusing patterns of life that we all deal with - some better than others. Controlled chaos.
Anyway, now I have an Avatar. I created it on Wee-Mee.com, and I don’t link to them directly because after spending some time creating my avatar, the site refused to save it. It just said, “I can’t save it”. No clue why. Frustrating - because the actual Wee-Mee would have been animated. Would have cost me three bucks. But because their service was broken I just did a screen shot of my Avatar instead. Saved three bucks, but lost the animation.
I love these creative web sites, but they just HAVE to work - especially when it comes to saving my work. That’s why I trust little to “online applications”.
*** Random Post ***
April 25th, 2007 at 15:18
That’s a spitting image!
Here’s a link to mine: link
April 25th, 2007 at 15:20
Paul - good one (if it had less hair, it would look just like you ;))
Rob
April 25th, 2007 at 18:01
Easy - I write my posts in Microsoft’s Live Writer - which caches a copy on my drive. The content is created offline, and uploaded to my blog.I back my blog up locally.
Online services that let me store/backup my data locally (or ANYWHERE) don’t concern me. Most don’t allow that though - at least not during the creation process. That’s fine if they can handle things like my Internet connection going down, or my machine rebooting, or their servers crashing - if you auto-save what I am creating, I’ll have a lot more trust in you. If you let me copy my data back to my computer, I’ll have a lot more trust in you.
But if you let me take my data with me when I leave you? Then I’ll really trust you.
April 25th, 2007 at 20:12
@second comment of Rob’s: Nailed it. The reason why I stopped using ToonDoo even though the app was good: All my work was dropped when my internet connection was lost, and it’s a friggin flash app.
And, just to plug: WLW rocks!
April 25th, 2007 at 20:29
Yuvi - Wee-Mee is a Flash app as well, and you make q good point…
Since it’s a Flash app, and basically a binary, why don’t they let me download it and run it locally - saving to the server only AFTER I was ready to “save”?
And yes, WLW rocks - but DAMN they need to come out with some updates!
Rob