Travis Bradshaw

Jesse has really become comfortable with Texan life in the last...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 15:45:21 -0600

Jesse has really become comfortable with Texan life in the last ten months. That time, and half a dozen beers, was all it took to vault up onto this robot horse statue. (Taken with Instagram at Downtown Plano Station (DART Rail))

Ozona Grill & Bar (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:11:07 -0600

Ozona Grill & Bar (Taken with instagram)

The first “B” hits the “B”-wall project...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:33:37 -0600

The first “B” hits the “B”-wall project with this renovated industrial sign letter. Lindsay scored the sign on eBay long ago and I pieced together the innards with parts from IKEA. (Taken with Instagram at AMLI at Breckinridge Point)

They’re back! The best fruits! Wooooo! (Taken with...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:30:26 -0600

They’re back! The best fruits! Wooooo! (Taken with Instagram at Central Market)

Me and the new guy in the office. (Taken with Instagram at ID...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:40:09 -0600

Me and the new guy in the office. (Taken with Instagram at ID Software)

Our “B” wall project moves a little closer to...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:39:24 -0600

Our “B” wall project moves a little closer to complete. (3/7 steps done) (Taken with instagram)

Hey, why not? We’ll see if it’s any good. (Taken...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:42:02 -0600

Hey, why not? We’ll see if it’s any good. (Taken with Instagram at Kroger)

Ha! Had no idea that the monthly special was heart shaped....

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:12:50 -0600

Ha! Had no idea that the monthly special was heart shaped. Aren’t we just sweetheart bros. (Taken with Instagram at 32 Degrees)

Girl Scout cookies. So good! (Taken with instagram)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:06:33 -0600

Girl Scout cookies. So good! (Taken with instagram)

At work, making progress on some new masterservers. (Taken with...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:41:04 -0600

At work, making progress on some new masterservers. (Taken with Instagram at ID Software)

The Brothers Printz in DFW (Taken with Instagram at The Ginger...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:57:16 -0600

The Brothers Printz in DFW (Taken with Instagram at The Ginger Man)

Facebook social graph is messy; needs community moderation features

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:19:35 -0600

I noticed an interesting trend in my Facebook feed over the last couple days, coworkers have been adding id Software to their employment history… well, readding, since all of these coworkers already had id Software listed as an element of their Facebook profile.

I found out the source today, when I received a request for verification that a coworker works with me here at id. They do, so I approved the request and even added additional metadata to specify the duration. Much to my surprise, this added a new (redundant) entry to my Facebook profile and immediately blasted out to my entire friends list that this had been added.

A strange redundancy, so I investigated a little bit more. It turns out that there are three id Software’s on Facebook:

The original id Software on Facebook is this one, the general “Interest” page for the company. No doubt this page was dynamically generated during the Facebook’s efforts to expand the social graph with the “nouns” on the inert side of many graph edges.
However, since then, the launch of Pages as a feature to provide a more robust mechanism for companies, products, and other abstract entities to participate on Facebook occurred and the definitive page on Facebook for id Software is this page, managed by the marketing team.
More recently, it appears that the efforts to quantify the “coworker” relationships in the social graph have resulted in the third instance of id Software on Facebook: this page. This quantifies id Software as a “company”, but provides no customization options to, for instance, change the briefcase into the company logo.

Really, all this duplication is silly. While on the small scale, it’s possible to quantify relationships between groups of coworkers, it’s simultaneously completely impossible to do any big picture analysis like “employees of id Software”.

Most importantly, it’s really annoying when these kinds of sloppy data practices turn into news articles on my friends pages. It’s one thing to need to reformat the employment section of my profile, just to keep things neat and tidy and modernized. It’s another thing for my tidy efforts to spam friends with redundant information.

The solution is simple, I think. They just need a way for the Facebook community to nominate pages for merge. I should be able to message to Facebook support that id Software, the interest; id Software, the company; and id Software, Games/Toys are the exact same place and have them all merged into the most feature-ful setup: the page managed by the marketing team. That merger should also clean up everyone’s profile pages automatically, just reconciling the relationships all on the new/same object.

Really, this sort of conclusion should be obvious. If you want to build a “social graph” that includes basically every likable item on Earth, you’re going to need to plan on some upkeep/overhead to keep it nice, and base those efforts on successful efforts to do the same thing already online. (Like Wikipedia.)

So many switches! (Taken with Instagram at ID Software)

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:26:08 -0600

So many switches! (Taken with Instagram at ID Software)

I brought this mousepad in from home to use at work. (Taken with...

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:17:18 -0600

I brought this mousepad in from home to use at work. (Taken with Instagram at ID Software)

I carved Mount Rushmore into a watermelon for Lindsay’s...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 19:46:12 -0600

I carved Mount Rushmore into a watermelon for Lindsay’s fruit dish for our 4th of July party tomorrow. (Taken with instagram)

Our suite. Pretty swanky. (Taken with Instagram at Le Méridien)

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 15:06:35 -0600

Our suite. Pretty swanky. (Taken with Instagram at Le Méridien)

Lunch. (Taken with Instagram at Freebirds World Burrito)

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:21:09 -0600

Lunch. (Taken with Instagram at Freebirds World Burrito)

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in...

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:59:01 -0600

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance, showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space.

Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the primary title of his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.^[1]

In the book, Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

We found out the driver’s door doesn’t seal. Rather...

Sun, 22 May 2011 09:47:13 -0600

We found out the driver’s door doesn’t seal. Rather than deal with 20 hours of “it sounded like a freight train”, we thought a different statement was in order. Rawr! (Taken with Instagram at Wal-Mart - Champaign)

Operation: jony Rocks! Day two - Theme song: Here I go again by...

Sun, 22 May 2011 05:53:46 -0600

Operation: jony Rocks! Day two - Theme song: Here I go again by Whitesnake. (Taken with instagram)