Monthly Archives: March 2006

Note to self

When flying to Canada, BRING YOUR PASSPORT. Update: I wrote the preceding from my Blackberry at the ticket counter. After I found out about the passport, I rushed to the departure area and got the world’s best cab driver. His English was atrocious, but he understood what was going on. There was thankfully no traffic on 280 to SFO to my house and he did it in about 15 minutes. Ran in, grabbed the passport, ran back out. Lost a minute while he tried to ask me if I had “all three things”: passport, tickets, and ID. He says a lot of people run in to get a passport and leave the tickets on the table. He took 101 back to SFO, which had a bit of traffic. Big tip. No line at ticket counter, the flight was delayed. The lady was so kind, she switched me to the last window seat on the flight to Las Vegas and I got an upgrade to first class from Vegas to Toronto. (Maybe I’ll get some sleep.) No line at the security counter so I breezed through. Had time to grab a reuben at the deli. Sometimes I think I lead a charmed life.

In Toronto

I’m getting ready to hop the redeye to the lovely city of Toronto for the iSummit conference where I’ll be speaking about social media (whatever that is). Thursday night there’ll be a GTA blogger meetup which sounds like it’ll be a blast — I had no idea there were so many bloggers and WordPress users in Toronto. If you’ll be in Toronto any time before Saturday please drop me an email or try to come to the meetup Thursday night, I’d love to meet more folks out there.

Hours and Work

There’s no correlation between hours worked and work done. I think this is why traditional corporate structures are starting to crack at the seams, and the distributed model companies like Automattic, MySQL, SocialText, and many others use will start to gain real legs and acceptance. The best example of this was at a place I used to work: after lunch everything seemed to shut down. Several people obviously got very sleepy after lunch and would spend 2-4 hours of the afternoon on auto-pilot. (This was me sometimes too.) It would have been infinitely better for them to take a one hour nap and get back to productive work than spend 3 hours in an obviously hampered state. Happy, healthy, well-rested people work orders of magnitude better.

Invalid Atom

“Next time someone tells you Atom 0.3 is invalid because the validator says so, point them to this page. The validator is full of it, because it doesn’t reflect reality.” If Robert had comments, I would say “I never suggested Bloglines was “best-effort software development” (though I do love it and use it myself) but merely that it has an overwhelming market share. We’ve been tracking feed stats on WordPress.com and Bloglines and Newsgator online both dominate. The Web Standards project never casts stones from an ivory tower, they’ve always advocated practical standards for pratical benefits. Ben’s comment was akin to someone saying that the site sucked because it used XHTML 1.0 instead of 1.1, or if the validator decided to instantly “deprecate” all sites using HTML 3.2, 4.0, and XHTML 1.0 when 1.1 came out.”

New Blackberry

I talked Ryan into getting the new Blackberry 8700c, and he shares his thoughts. I got mine last week and I can honestly say it’s the (second) best phone I’ve ever used, and the best PDA. This is coming from the guy who founded the Houston PalmOS Users Group. Great screen, battery life, SMS and email support, and very intuitive UI. I also have a Blackberry 7520 (the one with GPS) and it’s a real clunker compared to the 8700. I’ve been recommending the 8700c to everyone I know. Now I just need to get SSH running on this thing…

Zeldman Switches

I can now tell my kids about the day the inimitable Jeffrey Zeldman moved from almost 11 years of hand-coding to use WordPress. He wrote a bit about his thinking in Why WordPress? I’m about to walk out the door to go to Austin for SxSW, which last year was amazing and I thought it couldn’t get any better. When I started WordPress I had a one or two people in mind that in my wildest dreams would someday use the software, and that drove much of the development. Zeldman has switched, and I couldn’t be more honored. Now there’s even more work to do.

New Mac Mini

I’ve been looking to get the two noisy linux boxes under my desk into a closet somewhere, because they’re so loud. One is a very very old PII or something running Gentoo that I had to put by the window and open because one of the fans was breaking down and the box was overheating, which caused it to make an alarm-like sound for hours at a time. AHEM. The second box is a fairly new Dell but it’s a server-class machine with TB+ of storage and it sounds like a plane taking off sometimes. The Dell is running Ubuntu, and also using the third screen on my desktop full-time. Having Linux right there (and on the same mouse/keyboard thanks to Synergy) is incredibly helpful for debugging and testing things, plus I could run X-chat full-time. When the new Mac minis came out they caught my eye — something not as dog-slow as my Powerbook, with a proper monitor and keyboard/mouse, could really be a great OS X experience and I’d still have all the command-line goodness at my fingertips. I ordered the maxed-out one online (they didn’t have any in stock at the SF store) and it arrived. So far so good! Almost as fast as my PC (AMD FX55 + 4GB).