I Won!

Personal

I’m cleaning up my room, as I always do when the weather starts to get cold, and going through a drawer I found the most remarkable piece of paper. Apparently I had made a bet with my friend Lucas that George W. Bush was going to run for President. For posterity, here’s the entire text of the letter:

On 11-20-98 [we weren’t Y2K compatible] in World Geography with Mista [sic] Molloy, Lucas and Matthew made a $2 bet that George Bush Jr. will run for president.

[signature] Matthew Mullenweg | [signature] Lucas Spath

Matthew says he will
Lucas says he won’t

The person who is right gets the two dollars ($2)

We must have been quite bored to make the language that specific, but I guess next time I see Lucas I should hit him up for the money. I need to make more bets . . .

Retina 5k Mac

Apple, Personal, WordPress

imac-retina-step1-hero-2014 To me one of the most meaningful shifts in computing the past few years has been how the resolution of displays is getting higher and higher, and interfaces are starting to become resolution independent. I feel like when pixels disappear there’s less of a wall between people and the technology, it starts to blend and meld a bit more. It’s something I’ve been personally passionate about since the first retina iPhone, tirelessly beating the drum at Automattic to make everything we do shine on hi-DPI screens, or leading the WordPress 3.8 release that brought in MP6 project to make WordPress’ aesthetics cleaner and vector-based.

I’m sitting in front of a Retina 5k iMac right now typing this to you. (It was supposed to arrive on Friday but came a few days early.)

It’s the most gorgeous desktop display I’ve ever seen, breathtaking at first and then like all great work becomes invisible and you forget that there was ever a time when displays weren’t this beautiful. (Until you look at some lesser monitor again.)

I’ve been using 4k displays, the Sharp and the ASUS, with Mac Pros for a few months now, and to be honest they come close, but this takes the cake in every possible way, including the design and aesthetics of the computer/display itself which is laptop-thin at the edges. If you’ve been on the fence, and you’re okay with the tradeoffs an iMac has in general, get one. I can’t wait for them to do a 5k Thunderbolt display (but it sounds like it might be at least a year away).

P. S. If you’re looking for a gift for the iMac that has everything, consider a slipper to keep its feet warm.

Notes: Between the Stylesheets

Design, Microsoft, Poetry, Web Standards

Here is a collection of some notes I took at the Between the Stylesheets panel, complete with linky goodness. Update: Tantek’s post.

Jeffrey: The thing about CSS, it’s hard to understand unless you first think about markup. It’s hard to rethink the way you approach X/HTML. There’s so much to do that it seems strange to think about HTML, but in fact it’s important. We now have the chance to party like it’s 1993, we have the chance to write it like it was meant. We (designers) could do that until browsers became compliant. Saves Bandwidth. Work is now more accessible. Continue reading Notes: Between the Stylesheets →

It’s Over

Email, Spam

An address that has never been on the web in text or javascript form has begun receiving large amounts of spam, starting a few days ago. This is not a dictionary attack, it is specifically targetted toward this single address. The address is not guessable or a dictionary word. Luckily the address is disposable.

The only form this address has ever been online is in a PNG screenshot I posted about a year ago.

Open Source Business Conference

Events, Microsoft, Open Source

So there is an Open Source Business Conference happening in a few weeks a few blocks away from me and I just randomly came across the site. After SxSW, reading about OSBC is like being in another world: it’s $1500 to go, only two days long, the language on the site is sickeningly corporate, and I haven’t heard of a single person there. Then again, this is an “open source” conference with Microsoft as a platinum sponsor. A real Open Source conference would have no fees, everything would be web streamed, the line between speakers and attendees would be thin or non-existant, and the topics would not focus so much on money. Actually, it would be a bit like Bloggercon.