Personally I can say that it was the Jetpack features that helped provide the defaults that got me hooked on WordPress. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Josh Pollock at Torque writes about Lessons we can learn from Jetpack.
Category Archives: Personal
Speaking of color masculinity, here’s Kanye on creativity, society, and color from his 2008 FADER interview:
I feel like all the words are in you, you’re just blocking yourself, you’re blocking your creativity. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you. So many people try to put their personality on someone else.
Watching Television
It wasn’t that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that I didn’t have any TV shows I was actively watching. Life has been busier than ever, but I’ve started catching up with shows instead of movies when flying. I’ve been blown away by the high quality of storytelling in the medium of television right now.
So I find myself actively watching a few different shows:
- House of Cards (new season out today!).
- True Detective.
- Scandal.
- Blacklist.
- Empire.
- West Wing.
There are some guilty pleasures in there, and there are probably a dozen shows that friends have recommended to me as amazing that I’ve never even started. (Hence West Wing, I’m watching it for the first time, somewhere in Season 4.)
This is the first time I’m watching things that are still “on” versus something like Firefly or Sopranos which are complete already. There’s definitely something fun about discussing the latest developments with other people who are also caught up, in the zeitgeist, and the anticipation of new episodes coming out, like what I imagine it must have been like with serialized novels back in the day.
Find three hobbies you love: one to make you money, one to keep you in shape, and one to be creative.
I’m not sure the provenance of this quote, but I read it and it really resonated with me, and I’ve found myself repeating it frequently.
I enjoyed this Ars Technica look at USB 3.1 and Type-C, which is probably the cable/connection change people will notice the most over the next few years. (As I look with despair on my dozens of USB devices and cables.) I also dug their retrospective, A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it. Remember serial ports?
To make it a full New Yorker weekend, here’s a longread from Michael Pollan, best known for his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, on the reopened research on the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelics. While we’re on Pollan it’s worth repeating his advice from Food Rules, “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Since it’s Valentine’s day, here’s a little humor from the New Yorker’s Hallie Cantor: What I Imagine My Boyfriend’s Ex-Girlfriends Are Doing Right Now. (That the character is named Matt is completely coincidental.)
I had the great fun the other week of hanging with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, an episode he titled Matt Mullenweg on Polyphasic Sleep, Tequila, and Building Billion-Dollar Companies. His previous guest was Arnold Schwarzenegger (!) and if you dig into the podcast archives there are some really amazing episodes, I’m working my way through them now.
Yo’s Law: “in the 21st century tech industry, satire and reality are not merely indistinguishable but actually interchangeable.”
From Jon Evans’ This Industry Is Still Completely Ridiculous, a hilarious article with a conclusion (the ridiculous stuff is worth it) I agree with.
I write novels. And with just about every novel I write, I try to do something new or different that I haven’t done before, in order to challenge myself as a writer, and to keep developing my skills. In The Android’s Dream, of example, I wrote in the third person for the first time; in Zoe’s Tale, I had a main character—a sixteen year old girl—whose life experience was substantially different from my own; with The Human Division, I wrote a novel comprised of thirteen stand-alone “episodes.”
And now? With Lock In? What new thing have I done to stretch myself as a writer and teller of tales? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s something I’m really proud of, actually:
I’ve written a novel entirely free of semicolons.
John Scalzi in Pacing Doesn’t Just Mean Wearing a Groove in the Floor.
Slack Buys Screenhero To Add Screen Sharing And Voice Chat To Its Work Messaging Platform, which I’m very excited about as a daily user of Slack (on 5 teams now) and through Audrey an investor in Screenhero and a big fan of their vision. As the article mentions, Automattic has been a Screenhero customer as well.
Find Fulfilling Work
Alain de Botton seems to be behind this fun series of videos that tries to apply philosophy to everyday life. This one I think is particularly important for founders, as I’ve seen many unhappy employees at startups because the founder was fundamentally unhappy because they were doing it for the wrong reasons.
I always like reading Paul Ford’s writing, and this one about How PAPER Magazine’s web engineers scaled Kim Kardashian’s back-end (SFW) is funny and accessible. I learned that people still use Movable Type. Also if PAPER used VIP, the story would be short and boring:
- Wake up, press the publish button.
- Watch the stats go crazy. Sip some bourbon.
- Go to sleep.
New Simplenote App Updates for iOS, Android, and Mac, some nice iterations. Update: Simplenote for Android was just highlighted by The Verge as one of the best Material design apps.
Within your heart keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go, and sheltered so, may thrive and grow where doubt and fear are not. Oh, keep a place within your heart, for little dreams to go.
— Louise Driscoll
He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?
The Guardian on Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches. Definitely the coolest pope in my lifetime.
“Fasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as ‘remarkable’.” — Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds.
Harper’s had a great article on fasting a few years ago it’s not online at the moment but here’s a PDF of it. It’s also common in yoga and folks trying to live longer. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but perhaps will at some point this year — I like the idea of doing something by doing nothing.
Working on the right problem is more important than working hard. — Caterina Fake
Found via 84 highlights from The Startup Playbook by Automattician Dave Martin.
The hardest thing in the world is spending the most time on the most important things.
Yesterday’s post was a bit of a downer, so here io9 lists The Most Futuristic Predictions That Came True In 2014, including technologically-assisted telepathy, 3d printing in space, laser weapons, and landing a robot on a comet.
I think it’s good to show both sides of what a distributed organization is like, here are two essays by different Automatticians. Steph Yiu writes Still figuring it out: communicating remotely with lots of people and Chris Hardie writes on Distributed vs. In-person Teams.