An unfortunately stereotype I’ve started to make while reviewing weblogs is that a good number of blogs hosted by Blog*spot aren’t really ones that can stand out from a crowd or draw in more new visitors on a daily basis. I was so glad Gizmo’s (Non)sense didn’t wind up in that category. Without so many stories involving his pants somehow getting torn or mysteriously removed, I was entertained the entire time I read.
As I always do with a site using Blogger, I clicked on the author’s profile. Pete, who refers to himself as _gizmo, is a 27 year old IT professional living and working in Dublin, Ireland. Reading a blog by someone my age halfway around the world sounded like it was right up my alley.
Oh, Pete’s a geek. I mean that in the sincerest way possible, but it was just blatantly obvious from the start. Being a closet-geek, I was able to easily proceed from one of his entries to the next. He writes about new technology and their pros and cons, links to specific programs Pete finds useful, and even his experience attending the launch of new software.
To off-balance his geekiness, Pete recounts numerous stories of how he’s so prone to absolute embarrassing disasters. As I read these posts, I could empathize with the level of embarrassment he would have had to felt as he’s running out of an office building with nothing put a t-shirt wrapped around his waste to hide the fact that his pants have completely been ripped off. On the other hand, I could also do nothing but laugh hysterically at the thought of Pete and his boss half racing and half hobbling out of a server room with blood dripping from both of their backsides.
I hate ending a review on an uncouth note, but that’s what happens when Blogger templates are used. For some reason that I couldn’t figure out, the content of the sidebar doesn’t actually start showing up on the sidebar until the posts that fill the main portion of the site are complete. For readers, it makes it hard to locate things like the archive links or the author’s Blogger profile. It only distracts from the site when readers need to access the archives. Other than that, the colors are fine and don’t wreak havoc on my eyes like some of the templates I’ve seen.
While I hope Pete won’t run into a problem of locking lips with an Irish Army General again, I would certainly visit this site again to indulge in some of this author’s self-depreciating humor. After all, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? Well… in this case, you can always laugh at Pete.