This morning I launched Bipolar Lives, a blog that discusses the broad issues and personal challenges of living with Bipolar Syndrome.

Readers of this blog will know that I was diagnosed with Bipolar I in 2006. It’s a condition I am very open about and that is a challenge (and an opportunity) that I live with. Medication, therapy, and a loving and very understanding family help me make through each day.

Bipolar Lives will present research, ramblings, personal experiences, and other things of interest to people with Bipolar.

Come over if you want to learn a little about how we see the normal people.

If you have been trying to send me stuff at my personal email address, it seems that Namesecure.com has decided to take it’s sweet time setting up my new email services.

Right now, if you try and send mail, the MX record reports that there is an NXDOMAIN.

I am not happy.

Technorati Tags: Namesecure, Namesecure.com, MX, mail

I have been playing with my personal site, Pierzchala.com, and finally set the re-design loose last night. The last time I touched the layout was 2002 (I think), and it was all done in tables. The new design uses CSS, and makes controlling the layout so easy.

And, thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the header logo rotates for each visit. For someone who wants to improve performance, this is a simple attempt at vanity. Enjoy the home-brew headers.

Tags: re-design, pierzchala.com, pierzchala, logo, matt mullenweg

My side project, GrabPERF, is looking for a few good measurement locations.

Right now, there are only five measurement locations, two of which are in my basement, on my personal Internet connection. I am hoping, through this pledge drive, to find a number of additional locations. Areas desperately needed include:

• East Coast, USA
• West Coast, USA
• Midwest, USA
• UK
• Asia-Pac
• Southeast Asia
• Australia / New Zealand

Yeah, I know. I am asking for the world. Can’t hurt to try though.

Basic requirements are a Linux box with a static IP address. Additional requirements are documented here.

You can express your interest in hosting a measurement site by filling in the GrabPERF Contact Form or contacting me directly.

Thank you for your continuing support.

Tags: GrabPERF, measurement locations, Web performance

James Governor of RedMonk covers the serious fine Nationwide just got in the UK. [HERE and original post HERE]

This post immediately left me with the feeling (and it’s an oogie feeling) that the country in which I reside is completely borked when it comes to data security.

Private companies would get slammed by leaking private information in every country, except the US.

And if a financial institution compromised or lost personal information, they would face real fines, except in the US.

These must be gross generalizations. So prove me wrong.

I try and avoid the “me-too” factor that has dominated the land of blogs for most of the time I have been involved in it. Simply aping one persons comments with a slight variation, or personal interpretation doesn’t add much to the initial thrill of finding the original germ of an idea.

Kathy Sierra, someone who has been quoted and analyzed multiple times in this blog, has hit another double to the wall. She talks about the value of serendipity, randomness, in exposing us to new ideas and concepts, ones that we would not have run across in our siloed, standardized lives.

Yesterday was a great example of this for me. Something I read a post on Notebookism that spoke of outsider art or Art Brut. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and spiralled into a 90-minute voyage of discovery into this genre of expression, fueled not by training and ideology, but by a raw, unchecked need to express the world in an artistic way.

I would have never gone down this path unless I had read the Notebookism post, and would have been hard-pressed to find structured explanations (whatever you may think of them) of the topics without Wikipedia.

As I explore myself, and examine the foundations that support my cracked mental structure, I find that I appreciate the random explorations far more than a formal education process. I don’t learn the way that we have been taught.

I prefer to discover.

And when you get right down to the basics of Kathy’s post, that’s what she is saying. People are far more enthusiastic, receptive, and amazed when they discover something for themselves.

It may be an old idea to you. I may not interest you. But when a person gets that gleam in their eye, that rush in their mind, when they get the “WOW!“, then they are committed.

Personally, I am finding that I am having a lot more WOW! moments lately. The combination of therapy, and my medications, has forced me to look at the world that I live in, and the world that I have created, substantially different than I have for the last 15 years.

I am re-discovering the joy and awe of discovery. There is so much out there that gets left behind when your mind is absorbed, consumed, by a single devouring purpose. I am awakening from that period, and finding that my mental indigestion requires the soothing relief of the new and unexpected.

Everyone should have a personal logo.

Here’s mine.

Technorati Tags: personal, logo, personal+logo

Dear Skype:

I love the software. I am using it more for personal and work calls.

But I need to know when I have a voicemail. Now, not 24 hours from now.

I know you know about the problem. But it’s been over a month. I assume the voicemail notification wasn’t a problem before. So you know how to fix the problem, right?

Are you working on it?

Is anyone out there?

Technorati Tags: Skype, voicemail, Skype+voicemail

Well, the irony of this is painful.

I went with 1&1 as the hosting location for my personal domains, including WebPerformance.org.

One of the things that I preach there is the use of compression.

Guess what? 1&1 doesn’t use Web compression on their servers.

Ugh.

So, after 6 years of controlling and managing my own Web server, I have handed responsibility over to 1 & 1. I wish I could say that there was a really good reason why I’ve done this, but frankly, it’s because I don’t need a lot of oooommmmph for my personal domains (they run happily on a low-end Pentium II Celeron), and the price was right.

GrabPERF is still happily hosted by the folks at Technorati, while Wordpress.com controls my blog.

In some ways, I am glad that someone else has these headaches now.