The other harder part was to always tell the truth. I did have a major setback in feeling confident about the experiment when, due to a combination of multiple factors, my marriage ended. While it hurt immensely, I eventually decided to resume work on the experiment. I hinted at the experiment in the weeks before it started and discussed it with a couple of my close friends before deciding that come hell or high water on Dec 21st, 2009 I would begin. My twitter account was now ground zero for a whole new type of experiment (years and years ago I lived as a homeless person in Portland, Oregon for 6 weeks because I wanted to see what the actual effects on my own personality would be).

A few people including Pete Grillo, Steven Mcdade and Thomas Brenneke came perilously close to making me ‘out’ the experiment throughout 2010. My one rule to maintain telling the truth while taking an extremist tack was the same as used by Project Alpha: If asked why I was required to tell the person asking. Thanks to a few of you for keeping it secret by the way!

Unsurprisingly the end of the year conclusions came out fairly staid:

• People under the age of 25 are vastly more likely to positively respond to reactionary statements.
• People identifying as monotheists are more likely to unfollow when their ideologies are questioned or insulted than polytheists or atheists.
• People who use their faces as avatars are less likely to deviate from a moderate tone in their tweet stream.
• The amount of unengaged accounts went up at approximately the same ratio as my daily number of tweets. While many of these accounts aren’t necessarily spam it does indicate that neophyte users frequently just follow anyone in the stream who says things that they relate to. Nothing out of the ordinary there really.
• The number of spam accounts did spike rather heavily (up 23% the first week no less) as I began using more hashtags and keyworded phrases.
• One fact I’m quite proud of is that my fellow Portlanders were the group least likely to unfollow me based on my statements. When I looked at the data closer the numbers of “loyal” followers were split fairly evenly between liberal and conservative users. Which led me to conclude that Portland is more about speaking up than it is about partisanship. Not everyone in Portland may agree but they won’t necessarily unfollow you for it.
• At the 6 month mark I ramped up to following a large number of adult performers, strippers and cam girls throughout the world, again surprisingly Portland accounts took offense at a much lower rate than other cities.
• At the 9 month mark I began cycling on a 48 hours rude and 24 hours polite rate which resulted in very little differences to the statistics over time but did cause some upheaval during the switch from one state to the other.

The few really interesting realizations occurred in the way many of my long term friends and some quiet acquaintances changed the way they saw me over that year. Especially interesting was the group of people who publicly said one thing but privately said another. It speaks volumes about how even though we’re told to tell the truth as children, between the age of being a child and being a fully fledged grownup we lose those abilities to always be honest.
Of my personal favorite responses and results were:

• An active social media using tech executive from California regularly sent me a DM whenever I took certain topics to task thanking me for “saying what he would get fired for”.
• A VP of Marketing from a NYC based company sent me an email that read in part “Some of what you say is obviously calculated to get a response but nicely doesn’t come off as blind trolling. It would be nice if honesty of the level you approach was something marketers could capitalize on”.
• A former student from my drumline teaching days called me to ask if I was really that angry at the world and if there was anything they could do to help.

After going through the data and realizing that a lot of what our parents taught us is true, that how you speak affects how well you’re listened to I realize that the greatest lesson wasn’t the specifics of the data. My experiment was never about collating the many into a grand unified theory of sociology, it was about how the circle of friends and acquaintances I have change and adapt over time. Everyday our personalities go through varying degrees of flux. It’s a natural part of being human, what we must all learn to do is be honest to ourselves and to everyone else without remorse. It’s not a real decision if you’re not invested in it.

While I’ve got much of the data aggregated now I’m not able to share the full report at this time. When you blindly involve people in an experiment you don’t have a right to arbitrarily decide how to use their public identity. I’ll try to figure out a way to sanitize it enough to not force many people to have their information shared as part of this. I should add that I also am under an NDA which prevents me from releasing anymore data at this time. I will say thanks to the very cool company that liked the idea and paid me for the researchas well as provided me excellent resources for getting the missing data restored as much as possible. Thanks guys!

I feel enriched and also deeply humbled by the gamut of emotional responses to my words, my deeds and especially the number of new friends I made during the experiment.
To those of you who helped voluntarily or as subjects I say thank you very much.

Anyhow the last bit of 2008 had some very odd ups and downs. Let’s start with the upside though:

• Launched the website for my newest endeavor: Slate Technologies woo. Looks great and was designed by the team over at Duel Designs who do such excellent work that they’re now part of the Slate Technologies team (which is very cool and will help us launch quite a few spectacular projects coming very very soon).
• Started putting more effort into No Filter Fridays, which for those of you who are fans there is now a twitter account called succinctly enough nofilterfriday. Up next on that plate is a weekly podcast with video and some other coolness

On the downside at the end of 2008 was some family drama. Sucks that it had to happen but nice to finally know what type of people some of my relatives are.

Into 2009 we have even more great news!

• I got to have a whole week with my awesome wife Zoe while the boys were off visiting Grandma. It was like a 2nd honeymoon of awesomeness!
• Slate Technologies took just a short 3 months to outgrow Cubespace so we’re moving on down the road to a much bigger place which is good since our team has now grown from 2 of us all the way to 7 of us! Holy crap!?
• We managed to set up a couple of strategic partnerships with a couple of different local startups
• A launch page has been setup for the WordPress Dreamteam site.

Aside from trying to launch multiple products, setup new sites, migrate friend’s websites to better hosting I also found my time even further in demand due to the obligations of being both a “charter member” of the Portland WordPress user group (I’m not entirely sure what a “charter member” does only that it sounds somewhat cool with just a dash of pretentious) as well as being one of the Legion of Tech‘s new board members.

In just the last week I’ve managed to juggle a whopping 5 different projects all while attempting to deal with an impacted abcessed wisdom tooth. Finally managed to get into a dentist today and got a prescription for antibiotics & Tylenol 3. Biggest upshot of the dentist appointment was getting to see just how badly impacted my wisdom tooth is. Ow!

I am setting aside some time to post more often (Friday’s between 2 and 3 I will get a post up no matter what) as well as get back to posting less about work and more about the family and I.

Anyhow there’s a nice tasty little update on what the hell I’ve been doing with my time and if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go enjoy some of the painfree time I’m getting to experience after a week of agony :D

1. If you had one tweet to summarize yourself what would it be?

“Redheaded, polyamorous, badass, tattooed, intellectual freak of nature. Wife, mother, friend, lover, complicated, musical, passionate.”

2. You won a pretty prestigious scholarship recently. What was it and how has it affected you?

I was awarded the Ford Family Foundation ReStart scholarship.  It is an amazing scholarship given to individuals over 25 who have limited college experience and are looking to educate themselves after devoting their adult life to raising a family or serving the community.

Being awarded the ReStart scholarship has been amazing for me.  I have been able to aggressively pursue the education I want at the institution I want without fear of having to pick up a full time job to help my family survive.  The scholarship is significant enough that I will also be able to graduate with less than $20,000 in student loans, which is amazing in this day and age.

3. I see you have a blog, what inspired it?

I began my blog in November of 2004, one month after I started reviewing adult toys for Freddy and Eddy; someone mentioned that a blog would be a reasonable step for me, since I love to write.  I had been a regular contributor on different forum systems and offered advice there, so it made perfect sense to begin a blog and start sharing the twists and turns of my life.  The self discovery and amazing journey has been a side benefit, but a pretty significant one.

4. You seem proud of your celtic heritage, what made you embrace it?

I think, honestly, I’ve been pretty well reminded of my heritage since I was young.  My grandparents brought home kilts for all of us after a trip to Europe when I was around 6 or so; my sister has hers framed in a shadow box and I plan to do the same.  Both of my parents are very interested in genealogy and have helped me study my family’s roots, which in turn got me interested in researching these people that I came from.  Beyond the bloodline, I have always felt a very real connection to Celtic spirituality and think that it is an important part of how I see myself.

5. Do you consider yourself a “sex blogger”

I sure do.  While I blog about things other than sex, my primary focus still tends to revolve around sensuality and eroticism.  I feel more at home in the “sex blogger” community than any other blogging “caste”, so to speak.

6. Since you’ve become a parent, how has that changed your sex life?

Well, that depends.  I think that my sex life has actually been more affected by my being a student than by being a parent, but both of those roles do directly affect my sexuality.  As a parent, I have responsibilities to care for my children and I expend a lot of energy doing so.  As a student, I have responsibilities to focus on my studies and do what it takes to get the most out of my schooling.  There difference between the two is that I can get help with parenting duties (can and, for the most part anymore, do get help) whereas I can’t ask someone else to do my studying for me and expect to learn anything.  Similarly, I don’t think that being a mom has adversely affected my ability to be a kinky, perverted sex goddess long term – in the beginning it took some reconciling my different roles.

7. You posted weeks ago on your blog that you “came out” about being poly to your speech class. Were you nervous?

Are you kidding?  I was pacing and ready to vomit going into that class, but I felt that if I was to be truly honest about who I am and what is important to me I had to find the courage to tell the truth about my family.

8. How did your classmates react?

Honestly, I was a little disappointed in the LACK of reaction.  No one asked any questions about polyamory afterwards, and only two of my classmates have said anything since then.  Both were positive and nonjudgmental about it, so I can’t complain there.

9. What inspires you about each of the following: parenting, education, technology, sexuality

I think, with parenting, what inspires me the most is the community of people I know and love.  My husbands and wife, my friends with children, other bloggers with children, Ian and Alicia Denchasy (of freddyandeddy.com), and realistically the entire support structure of friends and family I have surrounded myself with.  We all have different personalities and I see a great many wonderful things in each person that I can try to instill in my children.

10. What’s the most important object on the planet to you?

Object?  Oooooh, that’s hard.  I would say a computer, but that’s not entirely realistic.  I think the most important OBJECT on the planet to me is my cello.

11. Why is it so important?

All through my life, I have been a very subdued person.  Music is the only thing that brings out the passionate side of me, the personality that is always hidden behind these walls and defenses.  My cello has the strongest effect on me, and without that, without the opportunity to express my true personality, I am nothing.

12. Worst thing you’ve ever done to someone?

Heh… I had to think about this one for a LONG time.  I think the worst thing I’ve done to someone is put a rainbow sticker on a severely homophobic person’s car.

13. Did they deserve it?

Oh, she definitely deserved it.  Trust me.

14. How would you change the world to make it better?

I would magically make people tolerant to alternative lifestyles.

15. Favorite 5 bloggers?

Oh crap… this is a hard one. Besides you? The five that I’ve been following religiously the longest are:

• Twisted Monk
• Shay
• Ell
• Goose and Gander
• Bondage Blog

I have SO many more that I follow now, though, and have made a ridiculous number of blogfriends in the last several months that it’s ridiculously hard to answer that question without feeling like I’m missing a bunch of people.

If you’d like to learn more about Angela you can find her here:

@CelticFrog
SwelteringCelt.com (this is not very work safe so surf with caution)

Which brings me to a little experiment I’m trying out. Every Friday between 3pm and 5pm I will be engaging in #nofilterfriday. This means I’ll say whatever pops into my head and most importantly will honestly answer any questions that I’m asked. This will be difficult and I will honestly say there are very few subjects that I won’t respond well to (too private of info about my wife and kids for example).

I’ve already had a few questions asked in the original test #nofilterfriday.

sewmyheadon: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what pisses you off most about the iPhone?

@chrisorourke: @sewmyheadon The fact that a progressive forward thinking company like Apple did a deal with ATT. Apple could’ve been the first successful..
MVNO. Imagine paying your phone bill with itunes? Simple. Everything apple tied together. Really surprised they didn’t do it.

verso: @chrisorourke #nofilterfriday what is the thing from High School you look back on that still FULLY embarrasses you?

chrisorourke: @verso 1992: huge screwup during the ballad at the U of O marching band show during prelims. I played loud perc notes during flute solo.

Not too much to report at the moment on that but expect:

Drumcorps talk (Did you know that the last time a democrat won the election that the Phantom Regiment won DCI? 1996 and 2008. Very cool).

Drinking (yay!) (he’s not hefe he’s my bitter)

Doctor Who (Nooo David Tennant can’t quit the show Nooooo!)

and even that thing that just happe (holy crap Obama is our next President!!)

Plus maybe a semi secret surprise announcement from yours truly. (I let it out in a few tweets over on twitter)

Alrighty tune in tonight at 10pm on http://strangelovelive.com to hear my thoughts and conversations with the awesome hosts. It’ll be stupendifying!

For those of you checking this out for the links I promised during the presentation, let me know if you found any other great plugins I may have missed or if you have any questions about how to configure these plugins and I’ll see if I can help :D

After the slides are the links to all of the plugins.

The top 13 plugins featured in my presentation

• Disqus
• Twitter Tools
• WP-OpenID
• Clean Archives Reloaded
• WP 2.5 Gallery Lightbox
• WP Super Cache
• WP-Contact Form
• Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
• iPhone Webclip Manager
• WP-DB Manager
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade
• Sociable

There you have. Keep checking back for my ongoing series of posts on the best new plugins and ways to better your blog as well as other hints, tips and tricks to help make your blog stand out.

*UPDATE*

Here’s the much requested “honorable mention” plugins list:

• WP Calais Autotagger
• WP Calais Archive Tagger
• Fluency Admin Dashboard theme (will be deprecated with the release of WordPress 2.7)
• iWphone (theme for iphones)
• Treasurelicious (widget)

Thanks to Dale Chumbley for recording this. While I shudder a bit at some of the bad jokes I made to ease my own palpable tension it’s nice to see that it came out ok.

Before I get to the video I want to thank everyone of the presenters, the attendees and Aaron Hockley for giving me one of the greatest experiences with the Portland Tech community. Reading the responses on twitter to my presentation as well as the experts panel really made my day. Additionally getting to finally meet Viper007Bond who’s written some great plugins (some of which should be core, but more on that at a later date) & Marshall Kirkpatrick as well as a few other people was awesome.

Without further ado here’s the video (I’d recommend headphones for this).

Direct Link to the video

Also keep checking the WordcampPDX site for information on the next wordcamp here as well as a possible November 10th upgrade party to version 2.7!