@john_teeter lol, I'm not that clever in reply to john_teeter #

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In the last few years this site has gone from being Tales from the Darkside to Tales from the Garside to Chronicology (the life and times of Brian Garside) to its most recent incarnation, Radical Hive – From the Hive Mind of Brian Garside.

The thing is…Radical Hive was never meant to be my blog. It was originally meant to be much more, a collective, a hive, a group, or even a tribe. It was never meant to be just mine.

That’s why for the last few months I have been building up GarsideWeb, and this site will now be brian.garsideweb.com.

I’ll be closing the doors and turning off the lights here in the next few days, putting up a splash page, and calling it a day.

I expect that Radical Hive will return in about 4 months, but it will be very different.

Join me on my website, and let the good times roll!

@john_teeter I was putting you in the hipster camp BTW Because of your love of indy musak, ironic plaid shorts, and flip flops. in reply to john_teeter #

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Custom vs Speed

During my day job I’m confronted on an hourly basis with requests for small improvements that people want to make to the website in order to be more personal. Add “My Account Rep”, only show them content they own, put their name on the page, remember what they last searched, show them the most popular research for the products they own, show them the top rated research in what they own, show non-members a view of what it would look like if they were members, but don’t hide the stuff they don’t have access to, I don’t know, maybe a switch of some sort that you can click to give them the “whole view” (seriously…I don’t even know how in the world to write a spec for that).

There’s a problem with all of these though. Our old site was an example of what happens when you allow unfettered, continual customization, and don’t consider the overall impact that each one of those chips in the scalability wall makes.

The above illustration is a good example of the customization vs speed argument, imagine the teeter toter works like this. When you put something on one side, it lifts the other side up, causing the other side to get more and more out of control.  Everyone at some point in their life has been the one on the top part of the teeter totter, it’s not a lot of fun because the person on the heavy end has all of the control, they decide when you go up, or when you go down. They decide when they’ll just jump off the teeter totter and leave you to slam down hard on your butt and probably fall off.

Out of the gate I’ll tell you that speed’s got it’s work cut out for it. It’s trickier to do than customization. I can customize the crap out of a website in hours, but tweaking the speed requires deep plumbing and hard work.

Every time you add a feature to the customization side of the scale, the speed side gets lighter, and it becomes harder for speed to balance the teeter totter. Eventually you get to a point where poor speed is thrashing and flailing at the top of the teeter totter trying to gain his balance…and he simply can’t.

Well why can Google do it then?

Google’s not much different. Take a look at an iGoogle page with loads of gadgets on it, and watch how slow it loads, compare that to the straight Google home page…also keep in mind that Google has locked up about 90% of North America’s smartest software engineers…and if they can’t figure this out, what chance do us mere mortals have?

The appearance of customization is better than true customization.

I believe in putting as much of the customization components on the client side as possible. Cookies are a great way to do this, keep their display name, and some basic customization options in their cookie. Users who refuse cookies on their machines simply don’t get customization.  Sorry, but that’s the realities of the internet in 2009. On the server side, you need some pre-assembled components, preferably in XML, HTML, or plain ole text files which use the file system rather than the database.  It’s MUCH easier to scale a file system up than it is a database into a cluster.

Too much customization is a bad thing

No matter how much apparent customization you do, eventually you reach a point where you’re still making database calls for pieces. There’s no hard and fast rule for how many database calls are too many…but you know when you hit it.  Your site’s slow.

You also hit a strange point where you’ve essentially created an infinite number of slightly different sites. While this is appropriate for a site like Google, it’s not great for a site which is trying to convey a single directed message.

Customization vs editorial control

There’s a certain level of editorial control that I expect when I go to a website. I’m figuring that there are people who get paid six figure salaries to show me what’s important, to make certain editorial decisions, and decide that this is their best stuff. Yeah it’s cool when I can add a filter to that content to let me see stuff that I’m most interested in, but when I go to the Globe and Mail’s website or Wired.com, I want to see what their editorial has determined is most important…because even though I’m not all that interested in Bio Tech, maybe today’s biotechnology story is relevant to me in a way I’m not even aware of.

In the end, customization is a good thing, but too much can put blinders on content, and put excessive strain on systems.

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A veritable flood of fans in front of our booth

August 28th to 30th was the annual Fan Expo Canada (yeah…almost two weeks ago!), and once again All New Comics was there. Initial reports have the attendance pegged at 59,000 people, and I’ve gotta say…it sure looked like about that many people to me.

I got there Friday afternoon (after being busy Friday morning with the framers who were starting our basement renovation), where Pete and Gus had everything set up really nicely.  I checked into my hotel room before heading over to the convention center, having scored an amazing deal at the Royal York hotel.

Yeah...that's a freaking Light Cycle, full sized

The first day was steady, but not overwhelmingly busy. I had a chance to do a brief tour of the show floor, and grab a couple of cool pictures, but I didn’t do a lot of shopping (other than buying volumes 1-3 of The Goon on Liam’s recommendation), and didn’t have a chance to hit artist’s alley. On my way back to my hotel I stopped at Canyon Creek and had the seared Tuna salad. There was something “off” about the tuna, and I paid for it until early Sunday morning.

Superman takes an important call

Saturday was insane. I’ve never seen the show so busy. At one point it took me 30 minutes to get from our booth, to the washroom, and back. The amazing thing was that people were still buying! Around 4:30 things started to slow down a bit, so I went out looking for food, and saw the line-up outside was STILL taking 45 minutes to get in. Apparently at the peak the line went out of the South hall, up 3 sets of stairs, down the side street, up Front street, and over to Spadina! Absolutely insane.

The 501st Legion

I got some shots of my favourite dudes…the 501st Legion, who are just these unbelievable cosplayers with spectacular Star Wars outfits.  There’s about a hundred of them (maybe more), with tons of Stormtroopers, a good number of Royal Guards, a bunch of Jedi, and a few droids.

The 501st gathered together

We did really well on Saturday, and I managed to get out at one point and saw this absolutely gorgeous animation “How To” book. I talked to the guy who wrote it, Mark McDonnell, and ended up buying a copy for myself. This along with Steven Silver’s “Art of Silver”, and Alberto Luis’ “Confessions of a Process Junkie” are three of my favourite art books I own right now.

After the show Peter and I took Gus, Caroline, Erin, and Erin’s beau Brody out for dinner. Canyon Creek was booked up, so we walked down to Houston’s, which wasn’t bad (but was no Canyon Creek 2 bone pork chop!).

Luke and Wedge in front of a TIE fighter

Sunday morning I met Liam for brunch at the Marche, and we headed into the show a little early. I found a terrific Captain America stuffed dude for Maks, a Dumbo ceiling flyer for Kaylin, and a couple of comics (she’s in love with the Muppets right now, so I bought her a Muppets comic and an Incredibles comic). We did a big “Buy 3, get one free” TPB sale to lighten our load, and absolutely cleaned up. We went through 2 full long boxes of TPB’s on Sunday, and I had a blast doing loads of math (although admittedly I screwed up when one guy got an amazing deal on 3 hard covers that ended up going for just dollars above our cost…damn).

JSA Issue 22, Page 14

I finally got out to artist’s alley on Sunday afternoon and picked up a page from Dale and Louise Eaglesham (JSA 22 page 14, which is the final shot of Kingdom Come Superman in the regular DCU).

We met a couple of our customers too, which is always great because with an online only store, we never get face-to-face time with our customers. Kudos to Simon, Jason, and James for popping by.

All in, the show was better for us than last, and while we were busier with the booth than years past, I never felt totally overwhelmed thanks to the great help that we had. We’ve got these things down to a science now (okay, mostly Pete has these things down to a science), and I’m able to pretty much do my favourite thing…which is schmooze with people, talk about comics, and get folks interested in new things.

Next year will apparently be back in the North Hall. The good news about North is that it’s MUCH more accessible from the street level (although the new tunnel from Front to the South really opens up your walking options).

Work Spaces (by Pottery Barn)

Char and I are working on finishing our basement.  We’re going to make two big rooms, and a bunch of storage down there.  The main room will be a fairly large TV/kids room which is where I plan on building my whole hog home theatre with in wall and in-ceiling speakers.  The other part of the basement will be a home office all tricked out with the latest in office fancyness.

My needs are pretty basic, desk, chair, some storage, but I’ve got a few specific things things that would make an office awesome for me.

• A large drawing surface
• A place for a scanner, printer, and the home server
• A comfy chair for reading
• Good task lighting for drawing, reading, or computer work
• In-ceiling speakers from the main stereo (connected to the iTunes library)
• Loads of shelves, storage, and filing spaces
• Hard surfaced flooring (for rolling around on a chair)
• Wired internet hookups

What else would make a great office? Any suggestions from those out there who already have great home offices?

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Fan Expo Canada

Work is done, and I’m heading home. Tomorrow morning I’m going to set the framing guys up with what we want them to do…and then I’m off to Toronto for 3 fun filled days and nights at Fan Expo Canada, hanging with my nerdly brothers and sisters.

Check out the All New Comics Twitter account for frequent updates. I’m going to try to post pictures from my iPhone all weekend if I can, and of course I’ll update the fun here over the weekend.

Combine the two factors and I found it really hard to get to the gym, and my motivation to eat better was pretty poor.

All in all though, in that year I’ve managed to stay roughly where I was a year ago…so that’s probably good news.

However last week I challenged my co-worker CJ who’s recently been motivated to lose weight, to a “belly off competition”. While we haven’t figured out what the penalties or rewards will be, right now it’s all about measurements and goal settings.

To that end we launched “The Belly Off Weblog“, to track our progress. We did our initial measurements, and we’re under way.

Let the skinniest man win!