My favorite word to write when doing T9 on my cell phone is “going.”

Although Automattic is a fully distributed company with most people working from home in 197 cities around the world, we think it’s really important to meet in person as well and we bring the entire company together once a year. This year we went to Park City, Utah, and were blessed with amazing weather all week. We were right at the base of a mountain so there were beautiful trails for hikes and runs and gorgeous views no matter what direction you looked.

There were all sorts of activities people did throughout the week from paintball to skydiving to a Magic: The Gathering tournament (I played for the first time in about 15 years) and morning running classes every day at 7 am. I went to a Crossfit class with about 15 colleagues. My body is sore but my heart is happy.

I’m really grateful that I get to work with the people I do, and on the problems that we work on together. It’s far from easy, in fact each year brings new challenges and I make mistakes as often as not, but it is worthwhile and incredibly fulfilling. A few hours ago I gave a closing toast and teared up looking around the room. So many folks that give their passion and dedicate themselves to jobs both large and small, visible and unseen, to help make the web a better place. A web that we want to live in. Here’s a vignette from when we were taking our annual family photo, it’s a goofy and crazy group of incredibly unique individuals that I hope to know and make things with for many decades to come.

This has got to be the worst error message with the worst instructions ever. I want to see the video (Barack Obama) but I’m afraid about what will happen to my computer if I fire up IE.

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.

Eric Meyer’s 13-month baby knows thirty words in sign language, I saw Meet the Fockers earlier tonight and thought that part of the movie was just made up. Apparently not!

So apparently the first year I’m not home for the holidays Houston decides to have a white Christmas, snowing in places that have only seen snow maybe once before in my lifetime. As an early present, however, my friend Jess sent me this awesome picture. Update: One from Sarah too! (And another)

Memos from 1972 made in Microsoft Word, incredible. The superscript feature always bugged me too.

Compare the flash and text-only versions of J.K.Rowling’s Official Site. Separate but equal, right? Hat tip: Jakob.

The Daily Whim asserts that MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site. Pretty scary stuff.

Our Electric Future?, by Andy Grove formerly of Intel.

Groupon has been in the news lately as a rumored 6 billion dollar acquisition target, and of course their blog is powered by WordPress. On that fact alone I’d say, go for it Google!

I’ve linked it before, and it’s worth doing again: WP Cache makes WordPress perform as well as a completely static-file site, able to handle hundreds of requests per second without breaking a sweat. It also maintains with the conventions that were introduced in Staticize for making selective portions of a page completely dynamic, regardless of caching. Think how much performance would scream if combined with something like lighttpd. We’re going to be looking at rolling in this advanced caching into the core in the future.