Is this picture of Bay area bloggers going to be the Harlem photo of a new revolution? It was nice of KRON-4 to host the event, and I got interviewed for a short while about a few things — hopefully the footage makes it somewhere.
Category Archives: Personal
This is Real Broadband
Care of VVD Communications, the cool company with a bad website, I now have a synchronous 10mbps connection in my apartment. The first thing I did was go to a bandwidth testing site, as seen above. I was using Comcast before which was pretty snappy, but this is a whole new way to experience the internet. This is even faster than the connection I get at work.
This will definitely mean I’ll be able to run a lot more things from home, the upload bandwidth is about 10x what I had before, which means it’ll be much faster to upload pictures, serve files, stream music from home, and all the other stuff you should be able to do in a hyperconnected world. (Maybe I’ll even catch up on photos now.) They were also able to light up all the ethernet panels in my place so now doing some of the multimedia things I wanted to do around the house should be much easier. (Wireless was really too slow.) Best of all, the whole thing is only $35 a month and there was no setup.
I’m still going to have Comcast for a few months until my contract runs out, what I’m wondering now is if there’s a way to have the router balance the internet traffic between the two connections. I’m using a WRT54GS which I’ve loaded up with alternative Linux-based firmware before with good success. I wonder if that sort of balancing would be possible?
Cease and Desease
I just got a “CEASE AND DESEASE” order by another braindead person thinking that WordPress, or “WORLD PRESS” as the email says, has anything to do with sites that run it. (The reference to “WORLD PRESS” means he must have known about my plans for world domination.) The most interesting of these was when I was contacted by the FBI about a fugitive on the run that had a WP blog under an alias.
Little Quake
Apparently we just had a small earthquake here, but I didn’t notice it. Living in California is always full of surprises. 🙂
Geek Lunches Dangerous
Scoble got in trouble for the very long geek lunch/meetup last Saturday in Seattle. He also relates a funny story from the afternoon. We had about 15 people come and go during the meetup and it was a lot of fun — thanks to all who came out.
Travel Troubles
By the way, I’ve never been happier to be home. It’s the little things — like using a mouse and a real keyboard. Unfortunately getting here took the better part of 19 hours. They actually had the hood up on the plane that was supposed to fly me overseas, which was a long delay. I overheard someone say “if they get out the duct tape I’m staying here.” The connecting flight in DC was very missed, but after 45 minutes in line I got the last seat on a direct flight to SFO leaving in about two hours. Then I spent more than two hours in line trying to get a boarding pass and through security, the height being my ticket was once again tagged SSSS which mean I got the “special” treatment at security with my flight set to take off in 8 minutes. (I swear I’m on some sort of list.)
The very worst was I had bought some matchbooks for my sister (who collects them) and they were in my suitcase. The guy asked how many there were and I said “two” because that’s how many I bought at souvenir places. He found another (a free one from a hotel) and another TSA guy came up and said “which two of these do you want?” and took the third one away from me. I was shocked, and said “Are you going to keep that?” and he replied “Well you’re not getting it back.” I stumbled away to the shuttle and ran to the gate, 10 minutes after it was supposed to leave and all the doors were closed but luckily the plane hadn’t left yet. I finally got in around 1 AM and it was too late for BART so I just took a cab. Now I’m home and warm and dry and clean and being back after travelling so intensely makes it seem that much better. Time to disappear under some sheets…
Meeting Ben
While in Florence I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Hammersley who took us to have real Tuscan food, which apparently involves parts of a cow you wouldn’t normally expect to eat. We chatted about a whole range of topics and I learned quite a bit about everything from solo polar expeditions to DNA hacking.
Seattle Trains
The Seattle airport is crazy, I had to get on three separate trains to get from my landing terminal to the departing one. I’m glad I wasn’t in a hurry.
Snapfish Acquired
Days after Flickr, Snapfish is acquired by HP. Quick, start some more photo sites to sell.
100k
Podz caught the counter at 100,000 yesterday, of course the party tonight is going to be a lot of fun. We might need to call it the 105k party though.
Business Cards
Nifty Corners
A different way to do rounded corners, for that chic Blogger look. Hat tip: Phil.
More Inline Editing
Gregory has a plugin that allows the sort of inline-editing we’ve been talking about the past few days.
Making it Hard
Dave Winer says “The WaSP guys aren’t interested, because as designers, their livelihood depends on it being hard for users to create content.” I’m a WaSP guy and my life is devoted to making things easier.
On Stage and Flickr SxSW
A photo of me during the Blog Showdown presentation, Hat tip: Joe Clark. I’ve had a couple of people ask how best to tag me in a photo, I’ve seen some use “mullenweg” or “matt” or “mattmullenweg” but the best bet (and the one I watch) is “photomatt“. (Also, my happiest moment ever.)
Inline Editing
In our blog session Jay Allen described his vision for inline editing of weblogs, it looks like Owen is taking the first steps though I’m not sure why he’s doing it as a theme and not a plugin.
Panels Finished
My last panel was yesterday at 5 PM so now I’m taking as much time as I can to catch the panels that are left and learn a few things. Speaking was more stressful than I expected but most of the feedback was good. I still need to check out the web feedback though, as people are probably more candid online than when they’re shaking your hand.
Zeldman Keynote
I recorded the Zeldman keynote on my camera and the quality isn’t the best (I haven’t even listened to it yet) but I wanted to put it up for people who couldn’t make it. Listen for the surprise towards the end. Here it is: Jeffrey Zeldman SxSW 2005 Keynote. Sorry, looks like I accidentally put up my Jeffrey Zeldman/John Cage remix edition. The link should work now! Everything was really exciting, I can die happy now. 🙂
Civicspace Labs
The new Civicspace Labs site is up, it’s a lot easier now to tell what in the world they actually do. Nice redesign!
Texas Food
I’ve got a “Vote for Pedro” shirt on my chest and baby back ribs and Blue Bell ice cream in my stomach—life is good. I can’t believe how much I missed BBQ!