You can’t sing. I can’t sing. But we both should sing, from the depths of our bellies because it’s good for your soul. We don’t sing enough in modern society! Hence, my love of karaoke.

Live band karaoke is the best, which I’ve done everywhere from the basement of Hill Country BBQ in New York to someplace random in Davao after a WordCamp, but when you don’t have a four piece band there are electronic substitutes.

The first hack to do karaoke anywhere, which I’m surprised more people don’t know, is just search YouTube for [the song you’re looking for] + karaoke. You get something like this Fly Me To The Moon. Every modern TV has YouTube and you’ll be singing along with the TV in no time. I went down a long rabbit hole of wireless mics, auto-tuners, speakers, etc, and I have emerged back concluding that a USB-C wireless speaker microphone gives a lot of the benefits without as much hassle.

The next level up, and worth the subscription, is that the Karafun apps are actually pretty good. You can even run it on MacOS with an HDMI cable to the TV and they have a QR code and queuing system. Pretty slick, pretty fun, Sweet Caroline.

Many of my friends are ridiculous overachievers, and Hugo Barra is no exception. In response to my birthday blog post present request he has published a magnus opus of over 10,000+ words on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro from his perspective having been present for some foundational moments for Google, Meta, and Xiaomi. This is my dream, to get people writing more. We need more of this stuff on the internet! It’s fun to go down rabbit holes with experts. Cool that it’s on Hugo.blog, too. 🙂

I’m looking forward to the Reddit IPO, and I think it’s awesome that they opened up a top-tier IPO tranche to their community. People with 200,000 karma points or 5,000 moderator actions on Reddit will get access to something that has previously been reserved for the most elite allies of financial institutions. Wow!

I’m sure this was not easy to do so Reddit users should understand that at this very important juncture in the company’s history it has gone above and beyond to include you. I’m mostly a lurker on Reddit so my 958 karma doesn’t qualify so I’ll get access with the rest of the normal folks.

If I ever IPO something from Automattic, it will include the same for people who have contributed to WordPress. And every supporting open-source project underneath it. (It’s turtles all the way down.)

My only fear is that code contributions are structured in a way that is easily legible, so is anything that happens on w.org, but we may miss including people who have contributed to the growth of WordPress in non-legible ways.

This feels significant. Check out this video. Hat tip: Rory Chitwood.

There has been quite a bit of buzz in the WordPress community because during the Grammys red carpet Taylor Swift’s website went down and this is what everyone saw:

Hey there! That looks familiar. What a beautiful WordPress logo! (Hat tip: Alexa Scordato for telling me about this.) The website also had some ups and downs, we haven’t been able to get in touch with anyone on Taylor’s tech team, but if you’re there, we’re standing by and happy to spin up your site on wp.cloud so it can handle any amount of traffic.

This gets even more interesting, because for the first time in my life, after having orbited around the Super Bowl for decades*, I am attending in person. Thanks to the graciousness of my friend and advisor Jason Hoffman, I’ll be in an owner’s suite, wearing a WordPress t-shirt, possibly not too far from Taylor, watching the game. Look for me on TV! I know she loves Tumblr so I’ll have with me a little gift bag of Tumblr swag just in case I meet her.

* How have I been orbiting around the Super Bowl? Even though I don’t follow sports, I’m obsessed with the Super Bowl, and typically host watch parties every year. I love seeing the pinnacle of American achievement. The Super Bowl centers around a number of interesting stories in my life, such as when I was in high school and very poor the Super Bowl was in Houston, and they made McNuggets really cheap, so I ate 104 McNuggets in one sitting. (Sweet and sour sauce, natch.) At that infamous Justin Timberlake / Janet Jackson moment, they needed extras on the field to be their audience and my high school girlfriend was one of the kids in the audience when it happened. There’s so many more stories I could tell!

Okay… wow. The hardware and display are like nothing I’ve ever seen, really feels like it’s from the future. That said, I found the setup clunky and buggy. Some might have been user error, for example I kept trying to “select” things with my middle finger and thumb and not my left finger.

I almost got stuck in the Persona setup, couldn’t continue. I don’t love how my Persona looks. Looking and selecting stopped working and I could only continue by physically reaching out and hitting the buttons. (This must sound ridiculous to someone who hasn’t used a Vision Pro yet. I looked pretty silly!)

I got totally stuck at the part of the setup where it was importing iCloud apps from backup, and I was ready to give up. A friend put it on and was able to get past that step for me. Adding credit cards was a terrible UI, with the security code PIN pad in front of the interface.

I decided to call it a night, and try more tomorrow. Just like I learned to type I think I’m going to need to learn to become fluent in this new interaction paradigm. I did have a before and after feeling, like the world had shifted, not unlike when you saw the first iPod or iPhone. This post probably doesn’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t tried the Vision Pro, but hopefully the team sees it and can take this feedback.