It's strange doing a job interview when you have a blog, and your blog is on your resume.

Actually, it's weird having a blog in general when people outside the magic computer internet world know about it. A few years ago when I bought my car, I didn't know at the time but my dad (who was with me) told the sales agent about my website and when we came back the next day to finalize the paperwork she mentioned that she'd read most of it.

It does weird things to a relationship with a stranger. Suddenly you know that they know things about you that other people who know you don't know.

At an interview, though, it gets a little hairy. Someone says they took a look at some of my blog entries and my active consciousness of the world clicks off and I mentally scramble backwards in time to try to remember what sort of unseemly things I've posted here. How long ago was it that I eluded to my embarrassing female troubles? It was long ago enough that they probably didn't click back that far, right? What about my overly-long, self-involved pieces? Hopefully they would have skipped those due to length, right? TLDR? Real world people do that, right?

By the time I've come to realize that you'd have to read for a few hours to come to the conclusion that I'm a depressed asocial overbearing whacko, the conversation has gone somewhere else and I'm left alone in my little island of worry while everybody else is asking about where I see myself in 10 years or what my biggest weakness is.

My biggest weakness is that I have a blog I wish people didn't read but get upset over when people don't.

Then I go home and post about this worry and realize that those people will probably read it and have some kind of self-aware fit of panic and the entire nature of the universe will get all wobbly for everybody involved.

It also changes how and what I post here. If I'm sending out resumes I get afraid to post anything in fear of offending someone or misaligning myself. Sometimes I feel like I need to post something so I crank out some vague essay having nothing to do with anything.

I have to consider what the first entry will be. I could have recently written the world's best entry, but it'd be moot if it was directly beneath a description of this really great pie I just ate. It keeps me from writing about things I normally would, like how my grandpa died on Saturday, because I worry about how people will react to it.

I start to feel like a politician, who has to be able to account for everything he's said or done and make sure anything new he says to one group doesn't offend anyone in another, because someone's always listening.

For a fleeting moment I consider that if someone's going to hire me, they'll be getting the real me and not the phony job interview version of myself, and that maybe I shouldn't worry so much about it. Then I realize that's stupid, and go back to worrying.

Three years of the old layout, and I cannot tell you how sick I was of it.

I made it so I could learn CSS. At the time I had no idea what I was doing. I copied other sites shamelessly. It had huge flaws, and things meant to be temporary (like the "logo" in the corner) ended up being permanent.

So over the past few days I've been working on a re-do. I didn't like that what was supposed to be my "portfolio" website had ended up as my worst-looking and worst-functioning. This redesign represents me at a point where I have a pretty decent idea of what I'm doing.

The biggest difference is the layout, of course, but I'm also working on some back-end tune-ups, and I might just give up and re-write the whole thing instead of continuing to patch over and over something I originally wrote when I was 15.

Like always, I tried to stay incremental with the design. Part of me would like to start over from scratch with a new design style, but a larger part of me likes the idea of continually improving on a design until it's an overwrought and tired mess. I liked the randomly-appearing header images up top, so I kept them and made them larger to make it easier to find images that fit. Last time there were 11 images that would appear at random, now there are over 40. They're all photos from Chicago, and they're all taken by me.

I'm also in the middle of replacing the photo gallery with the system I made for GameBump. I could bore you with all the impressive advantages, but I haven't got the time. Maybe you should just try it out yourself:

Launch Gallery: Chicago 2005

(35 images)

I'm not done with it yet. I still need to work on some text formatting and stylize certain elements (like the add-comment form). So... pardon our dust.

After something like a million years, that book I wrote is finally done and for sale.

You can find all pertinent information like links to purchase and to download the book for free at the book's new official homepage:

AaronDunlap.com/MB

If you're one of the people who read Mind + Body as I was writing it, you may be interested to know that I completely re-wrote the first two chapters and the whole book has gone through an overall face-lift of corrected grammar and improved sentence flow.

Also, you people who read my book for free have essentially stolen from me, so if you'd like to restore balance to the universe you should probably buy 8 or 9 copies. It's in the Bible somewhere.

Either way, now is the time to bang on your friends and neighbors' doors to tell them to check it out.

Talking points for strangers might be that the book is a Bourne Identity for the digital age, including social engineering and technical espionage. Also, they can download and read the book for free.

(Thus begins a series where I point out the easter egg-like hidden references in Mind + Body to people or things that either inspired me or somehow made the book possible.)

I try to make it no secret that I never could have written Mind + Body, or anything longer than two pages double-spaced, if it weren't for the enormous success of my 9v USB charger kit thing. I made enough money from it and the company that I could take enough time off of real work and focus entirely on that. When the orders calmed down, I found myself with enough free time that I could actually hunker down and write the book I've been wanting to since I was twelve.

I can't take any credit for the success of the charger kits. I did very little to market them, they kind of took on a life of their own through word of mouth, blogs, social networking sites, and a few major magazines.

The first big break, the one that started it all, was on Digg.com.

It was from Digg that I got my first order, and from there it was discovered and featured on BoingBoing, where it was discovered and featured in Popular Science magazine. Digg was the first pebble in the pond that rippled out and changed my life forever, so I thought it only fair to give them a nod in the novel.

On page 184:

An hour later I was back in my hotel room, constantly checking my email and reading the news headlines at Digg.com.