Your Brain on Computers – Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, a pretty fascinating read. I think the main subject of the article, Kord Campbell, is the same guy who used to run a photo sharing startup I thought about working at 6 or 7 years ago.
Category Archives: Asides
Packing for Montreal
As I mentioned the other day, I’m going to Montreal for about a month and a half, maybe two months. I posted to my moblog about packing and Hanni asked what the final manifest would look like. Here is a breakdown of everything I’m taking for the 1.5-2 month trip, which is about 4x what I normally travel with.
Twitter in Iran
The Twitter Devolution questions some of the assumptions we all had about Twitter’s role in the “green revolution” of Iran. For the record, I didn’t shade my Twitter picture green because it’s pink and they would combine to make brown.
WP-guided Missiles
So Apparently WordPress Can Guide Missiles, some WordPress Javascript makes a guest appearance on-screen in a British TV show.
No Paradox of Choice
Financial Times: Given the choice, how much choice would you like? A refutation of the “so-called paradox of choice [that] is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences” according to Tyler Cowen. Hat tip: Ryan Holiday in Tim’s comments.
To Montreal
On Monday I’m going to be leaving San Francisco to spend some time in Montreal, about a month and a half. I really enjoyed my time there last year for the Jazz Festival hence the extended stay this year. I’m looking forward to seeing all the bloggers, WordPress users, friends, and entrepreneurs there. I’m also hoping a WordCamp can happen while I’m in town again.
Automated Snail Mail
Been looking into ways to send personalized letters and postcards through the mail system, old school style. Mail is the new email! The best option seems to be Postful in terms of pricing and API. Wondering if anyone has any experience doing custom mailings like this, and if so what tips and experience you have.
Windows Reboot
Dear Microsoft, every time you reboot my computer overnight without me having any interaction I lose unsaved documents and messages. It completely breaks my trust in a way that’s irreparable. It’s been six years since I first wrote about this. At the time Robert Scoble saw my entry and apologized on his blog in a really heartfelt way. This meant more to me than you will ever know; it was the day I went from being a childish Slashdot-reading Micro$oft-hater to having great respect for a large company made up of individuals who made mistakes but had changed the world. Six years later, though, the bug is still there. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… well, you can’t fool me again.
Video Freedom
VideoPress now gives you the option to only use Free formats, which means Theora and Vorbis played via HTML5.
After the Deadline birthday
Gravatar Profiles
Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like.
Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely has moved his blog to WordPress.com, and today he has a new book out, The Upside of Irrationality. I was a big fan of his first book Predictably Irrational so I can’t wait to check out the new one. He’ll also be swinging by the Automattic office in San Francisco when he’s in town.
Too Much Salt
While linking the NY Times anyway, check out this article about concerns over salt consumption in the US and the industry’s response to it and try not to hear all the quotes in the voice of Nick Naylor.
“There is the iPad”
“Our experience of technology has been largely wondrous and positive: The green revolution ameliorated the problem of world hunger (for a time at least) with better seeds and fertilizers to increase harvests. When childhood diseases were ravaging the world, vaccines came along and (nearly) eliminated them. There are medicines for the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS. There is the iPad.” NY Times: Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill.
Warning: Undo
A List Apart: Articles: Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo. I think I missed that one when it came out. It’s excellent! Encapsulates a lot of the thinking that went into the painstaking implementation of “undo” in WordPress 2.9.
Create Windows 7 Hotspots
Windows 7 has an awesome utility called netsh that allows you to create wifi networks, even if you’re already connected to a wifi network on the same interface, which is actually slightly better than the same feature on OS X. If you don’t want to play with the command-line, there’s a handy utility called Connectify that makes creating a wifi hotspot from your Windows 7 box a breeze. This was one of the things I missed most about my Mac laptops.
Tips for Turkey
I am going to be in Turkey for about 10 days starting on Tuesday. Any tips or must-sees in Istanbul and elsewhere?
DailyBurn & IAC
A company I met through Techstars and later invested in alongside Tim Ferriss, DailyBurn, just was bought by IAC. Congrats to Andy and the team there.
Facebook Over-optimization
On Facebook I was trying to get to an event and clicked “see all” on the friend finder instead of the events area. Then something caught my eye, every friend Facebook was suggesting for me was female, and most I didn’t know. (Update, there’s one guy in there.) The first part of that is interesting — perhaps they’re testing some optimization in the friend-adder with the assumption that since I’m a straight male I’m more likely to add girls than guys, but if so that seems a little skeezy.
BankSimple
When I wrote about starting a bank, aka SafeBank, I was overwhelmed by the feedback and at least once a week since then I’ve been contacted by someone working on the idea. One I hadn’t heard of yet though is BankSimple, which I noticed yesterday because Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to work on it. I’m fully focused on WordPress and Automattic so can’t be involved with any new ventures as more than an advisor, but I’m glad smart people are tackling the problem and I hope to have an account at one (or more) someday.