Category Archives: Events

Conferences, meetups, talks, and gatherings.

Podcasting Session

Events, WordPress

The Podcasting session by Adam Curry just finished up, it was interesting but I get the impression that they’re needlessly complicating things by recreating constructs that already exist in HTML. Wifi is terrible, I’m connecting through my cell phone and I’ll try to blog everything through that. I do have a few of the tiny WordPress stickers so if you want to show your WP pride here at the conference drop by and ask me for one. Dave Sifry tried to mention Technorati when he had the mic and got smacked down, so I’m going to avoid mentioning WordPress myself (even though it is and will always be totally non-commercial) but I think it’s free for other people to bring it up. Anyway, MJ is going to smuggle me in some nutrition so I better get back to that.

WordPress Meetup

Events, Travel, WordPress

For everyone in San Francisco the WordPress Meetup is tomorrow (Saturday) at 4 PM. However there is a slight misunderstanding about the location. All week I’ve been telling everyone it’s going to be at the Border’s at Union Square, when at the meetup site it’s listed as a Border’s someplace way out of town. So to clarify, I’m going to be at the Border’s at Union Square Saturday at 4 PM, not anywhere else. We’ll meet in the cafe and eat, drink, and be merry. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Here’s the store information. I hear the best parking is at Stockton and Sutter. We’re on the second floor.

Pattern Recognition

Events

Good with faces? Help me identify these people from the Supernova dinner in the comments to this post. Pictures can be referred to as #1, #2, etc.

A lot of very interesting people were there. Please leave comments on this entry and not the pictures themselves. Thanks. 🙂

Meetup Update

Events, Travel, WordPress

The three top cities for the WordPress meetup right now are San Francisco, Houston, and Manila (in the Phillipines). Four people have confirmed their attendence at the Borders in San Francisco so far. If only four people come, we’ll still have a blast, but I suspect there will be some surprise guests that should make things very interesting. Saturday at 4 PM, possibly in a city near you. Don’t forget.

WordPress Meetup

Events, WordPress

Wow, this is very exciting—a WordPress meetup! I was just browsing around came across this post on Blogging Pro saying that there is now a WordPress meetup on the fourth saturday of every month. The very first one is coming up on June 26th. Funnily enough though I don’t travel very often it looks like I’m going to be out of town that week. (Any San Francisco WordPress users up for a meetup?) You can bet that I’m going to try and make as many of these as possible. I know at least a few very active WordPress users are in Texas, with developer Ryan Boren in Dallas and a few people in Austin. It would be very neat to have a yearly event where we all got together. BBQ is on me.

Since I last saw it Meetup has gotten some nice enhancements. I’ve been burned at a couple of meetups where I was the only person that showed up. I’ll have to give them another chance.

Have We Met?

Events, Personal

Having a blast here at SxSW. I’m trying to keep a SxSW blogroll of people I’m meeting but after just a day I’m far, far behind. If we’ve run into each other use this entry to leave a comment with your name, URI, and where we met, if I haven’t already listed you.

The panels today were pretty decent, though I’m sorry I missed Jeff Veen’s panel, which I heard was excellent. Monday is going to have some great presentations. So far there have been many memorable moments, some of which I’m sure I’ll be hearing about from others for a while. I’m going to do a few more pictures and then it’s to bed for me. They put some really good panels early in the morning and I still have to grab some sleep.

Fray Day 7

Essays, Events

I'll be at Fray Day 7I’m going to participating in Fray Day 7 here in Houston tonight at 8 PM. I’m a “featured speaker” tonight and I’m going to be telling a story I call “The Little Red Button That Changed My Life.” Several friends have already expressed an interest in coming and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone. It should be a lot of fun for everyone involved. I know Robert Nagle has worked very hard in putting all this together, my Dad told me he heard the event mentioned on the radio Friday morning.

To be honest though I’m scared to death.

Where? The Nexus Cafe (Walden Internet Village) is located on 2828 Rogerdale, 2nd floor (between Richmond and Westheimer).

Oh Beehave

Events, Personal

Sleep? Breakfast, Emily, House of Pies. Study. School, paper. Walking through beautiful clovers. Bee sting. Study. Home and back out. Pizza, Sarah, water, sugar, driving. Study. Sarah #2, chairs. Ring ring. Josh, Diedrich’s, talk, House of Pies, talk, drive, talk. Left turn. Flashing lights. License, registration, heart beat like a humming bird. Drive home, 60 miles per hour. Study. Email, email, study. fin.

Image Fun

Books, Design, Events, Gallery, Meta

Been playing with manipulating images with PHP all night, something I haven’t done much since I had the fancy capital thing on this site, and that wasn’t as much manipulating images as generating images using truetype fonts. With GD included PHP is very easy to use for this sort of thing. I’m storing the images themselves in the database as BLOBs, along with a bit of meta-data I grab from them when they’re uploaded using a web form. I have a small PHP script that returns the images from the database, resizes them to whatever width I specify in the query string, and does “funky” caching so if the image has already been generated/grabbed it returns just about as fast as reading it directly from the filesystem would. I have to have some fun because the site I’m doing this all for uses tables.

Speaking of tables, everyone head over to Big Pink Cookie and see how there aren’t any there. I recreated the basic layout in CSS and then helped Christine tweak it till it became the beauty you see before you now. If you’re curious, here are some of the changes I made:

  • The CSS and Javascript is now in seperate files, as to be easily cached.
  • The header graphic is now a h1 tag with the text hidden and the graphic as the background.
  • The latest pictures from Pixelog at the top of the page are now an ordered list, styled to display horizontially through CSS.
  • There is a “rapper” div (gotta have some flava) of a fixed width centered using margin: auto and a IE workaround.
  • Inside that there is a content and menu div, the menu has a fixed width and is floated on the right.
  • ms that were previously all preceded by “::” are now unordered list items with the :: effect recreated through a list image. Now if Christine wants to change the way her menu looks she just has to edit one file instead af change hundreds of double colons.
  • It now loads really, really fast. Especially when compared to before.

It might still have a stray error here or there that’s keeping it from validating, but give it a few days and all those should be ironed out. More importantly, it validates in spirit. I can now add Christine to the list of site I check when I’m browsing on my Palm over a 9.6k connection. Best of all, I think CSS no longer makes Christine’s eyes bleed, and she can see Tantek again.