Fast Company has a great and in-depth look at the United States Digital Service (and similar programs across the government) that is really interesting. They have a number of people involved that I really respect, and I can’t wait to see the results of it not just in the remainder of Obama’s term, but the coming decade. It’s shocking how much is spent on IT at not just the federal level, but the waste at the state and municipal level is even more shocking in many ways because there is so much duplication across the country (and the world). I’ll be blogging more about this theme this week.
Category Archives: Asides
“It’s easy to be very busy but not get anything done that you’ll look back a year from now and say was worthwhile.”
“You’ll get a lot of contradictory advice, and often neither side is wrong.”
Entrepreneur.com collected a few quotes from me and blogged some context for each.
How Tesla Will Change The World from the great Wait But Why.
Shervin has an amazing write-up on how Munchery is literally eating the world, and Sherpa’s continuing investment there. If you haven’t tried Munchery yet they’re now in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York.
We are here because the editor of this magazine asked me, “Can you tell me what code is?”
Paul Ford’s amazing What is Code? for Bloomberg. I only spotted one mistake, of course from the Taupe Blazer guy: you’re never at the limits of WordPress.
I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.
This entire interview with Peter Thiel is pretty interesting.
If you’re following along with the customizer and menu work for the next version of WordPress, check out Trust, Live Preview, and Menus in the Customizer.
Techcrunch has a really great essay by Natasha Lomas that I think got missed, The Online Privacy Lie Is Unraveling.
Americans believe it is futile to manage what companies can learn about them. Our study reveals that more than half do not want to lose control over their information but also believe this loss of control has already happened.
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
This story of Adrian Chen in Russian definitely turns weird at the end.
Pitch Perfect and its sequel, which I saw a few weekends ago, are the best geeky kind of fun (though I thought there were some jokes that fell flat in the latest). Longreads has an interview with Kay Cannon, the Pitch Perfect screenwriter, How to Be Aca-Awesome and the changing definition of cool.
Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:
Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.
Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.
We’re trying something new this year: instead of WordCamp San Francisco being the main WordCamp event of the year doing a WordCamp US in a rotating city. I’ve heard some great in-person pitches for places like Phoenix already. Do you think your city would be the coolest place in the 50 states for the first ever WordCamp US? Submit your city in this new survey. It’s open until the end of the month.
Unsubscribing from Newsletters
When Gmail first came out I got on pretty early and procured what I thought was a cool email address, mmmmmm@gmail.com. That’s because matt@ was too short, and matthew@ was taken. Ask anyone with a “cool” email address on a major service or Twitter handle and you’ll mostly hear about what a pain it is constantly getting spam, other people’s email, and people trying to log in to your account. These days it seems that address is used mostly by people forced to put something into an email form at places they don’t want to, so constant mail from mortgage places, car dealerships, porn sites, and countless email newsletters. I never ended up using the account for anything myself besides normal Google stuff.
There’s a service to help you unsubscribe from things called Unroll.me which is pretty neat, and it’ll scan your account to find all of the newsletters and things you can unsubscribe from, and gives you a one-click interface to do so. Unfortunately if you had over 5,000 “subscriptions” as I had, that becomes a 5,000 click operation and they provide no bulk tools, and apparently no plans to add them:
@photomatt unfortunately there's no mass unsubscribe option at this time, though we are seriously considering it for the future!
— Unroll.Me – Easy Email Cleanup (@Unrollme) May 5, 2015
I assume this is because they want people to add newsletters to their digest service instead of just unsubscribing. Code to the rescue! Written by the inimitable Scott Reilly. After you sign up and sign in, go to this page, go to the javascript console (in Chrome: View → Developer → Javascript Console), then copy and paste the below code and press enter.
This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
| var i = 0; | |
| function unroll_me_unsubscribe() { | |
| // Bail if share modal (indicating free limit reached) is encountered. | |
| if ( jQuery( '#fb-root' ).length > 0 ) { return; } | |
| var unsub_link = jQuery( '.LetterList a.uicon-set-unsubscribe:first' ); | |
| if ( unsub_link.length > 0 ) { | |
| document.getElementById( unsub_link.attr( 'id' ) ).click(); | |
| if ( i++ < 6000 ) { /* Upper limit in case something goes wrong. */ | |
| setTimeout( unroll_me_unsubscribe, 1500 ); | |
| } | |
| } | |
| } | |
| unroll_me_unsubscribe(); |
Then sit back and wait, it’s set so every 1.5 seconds it clicks an unsubscribe link. I do this about once a week now since I can accumulate 20-100 new subscriptions in that time. This code will break if they change anything, but should be pretty easy to update when they do. It currently shows me as unsubscribed from 7,868 things! If there was a way to pay for my account on Unroll.me I would do so happily.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
— Thomas Jefferson
Webmonkey Podcast
I was on the Webmonkey Podcast talking about WooCommerce and tech in general, my part starts around 26 minutes in.
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
― Douglas Adams
On the recommendation of my friend Timothy Young I checked out the book The Martian: A Novel by Andy Weir. Think of it like Shackleton’s Voyage (a great recommendation from Toni) but on Mars. I really enjoyed the book, and if you like geeky, science-filled novels you will too. One thing about the publishing I thought was really cool, as the Wikipedia puts it:
Having been rebuffed by literary agents when trying to get prior books published, Weir decided to put the book online in serial format one chapter at a time for free at his website. At the request of fans he made an Amazon Kindle version available through Amazon.com at 99 cents (the minimum he could set the price). The Kindle edition rose to the top of Amazon’s list of best-selling science-fiction titles, where it sold 35,000 copies in three months, more than had previously downloaded it for free. This garnered the attention of publishers: Podium Publishing, an audiobook publisher, signed for the audiobook rights in January 2013. Weir sold the print rights to Crown in March 2013 for six figures.
I was hoping it was on a WordPress blog, but it appears to be more of a static HTML site (his official site is WP-powered) and includes some awesome short vignettes like Meeting Sarah.
When I spoke in Ireland yesterday someone asked if I would blog about them today. I am, but not the best story: Ireland’s media silenced over MP’s speech about Denis O’Brien. Because of an injunction, no media in Ireland can report on alleged corruption, laws I think set up with good intentions (preventing libel?) but being twisted now to prevent the vital functioning of the fourth estate. The country showed amazing mettle in their Yes vote for gay marriage last week, perhaps censorship could be the next thing the populace tackles. (Also I really enjoyed my visit to Dublin, if you want an amazing meal check out Forest Avenue.)
The Misconception about Money and Motivation, a good summary of the work by Dan Pink, Dan Ariely, and others.
In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.
The New York Times answers Why Do We Experience Awe?