Small Handheld Recorder

Asides

I’ve gotten some great recommendations for podcasting equipment for when I’m at home, but because I spend so little time at home that’s not practical for 95% of the time when I’d want to be podcasting. Once I was interviewed by NPR and the lady had this awesome pocket thing with a fuzzy mic on the end, the sound quality was great on it. Does anyone have recommendation for something I could carry in my pocket that sounds better than what I use now?

Startup Essentials Update

Asides

Today I talked with Kevin Olsen from Sun’s Startup Essentials program a bit about what happened in our case. He said they were pretty overwhelmed with the few couple of weeks of inquiries, and it sounds like they’re doing them by hand. About 20% of their emails didn’t get through to applicants because they were caught in spam filters. (They’ve started calling and snail mailing to get around that.) Finally someone has mistyped the name of our company as Automatic instead of Automattic (two Ts) and a company that was older than 4 years had applied as “Automatic” and was rejected, and somehow our application got caught up in that.

PHP5 Issues

Asides

Dreamhost upgrades their servers to PHP 5.2 (newer is better, right?) and most of their PHP5 customers break. WP 2.1 had a lot of workarounds in it just to run under 5.2. That’s stupid. I’m sure there is a perfectly rational reason why PHP core was “forced” to break existing scripts, but constantly shooting your users in the foot isn’t a good way for PHP to stay relevant. (I write this as someone whose entire company and livelihood is based on PHP.)