I met up with Team Social from Automattic in Athens, Greece where they were having their meetup. This day included some injuries, the Acropolis, and a night out on the town.
LeWeb 2010 Talk
The talk Toni and I did with Alexia Tsotsis at LeWeb this year is now online, at the end we talk a bit about what’s next for Automattic in the WP world:
Also chatted with Hermione Way of The Next Web about the biggest tech story of the year.
More Ta-Da
Business Cards
Adobe and Macromedia
Adobe to aquire Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Whoa! At first I thought this was a late April fool’s joke.
SxSW Meetup
Reminder: WordPress meetup at SxSW. 78 signups so far, I’ll try to bring shirts. 
Happy Holidays
I am enjoying the holidays immensely, just keeping too busy to post much. I’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline, stay tuned.
Apple’s Challenge
If I was Apple I wouldn’t be worried at all about Windows, I would be worried about the next generation of Linux desktop software. The main reason I’m considering a G5 for my next desktop purchase is that I want a powerful machine that Just Works when I plug stuff in and can still run all the open source tools like Subversion, rysync, PHP, MySQL, etc etc that I rely on. It’s also interesting that all the software I regard these days as truly essential isn’t desktop software, it’s server software. I can survive switching text editors or graphics programs or even operating systems, but if I had to use ASP and SQL Server instead of Perl/PHP/Python and MySQL I’m not sure what I would do. I can function without these things on my desktop, but having to access them remotely (if it’s pretty transparent) prohibits some pretty cool stuff and diminishes my productivity.
Windows and OS X are tools I use to get things done. Linux desktop software (X, KDE, Gnome, etc) is a hobby. If I could focus on getting work done instead of getting my wireless card to work I could consider as a serious and cheaper alternative to a OS X desktop. (No matter what I want one of those new Cinema displays though.)
To preemptively clarify, my comments do not at all apply to Linux in the server space, where it by far the most mature and capable platform out there and I would hardly consider anything else.
New Blog for Cathy
I just set up a blog for Cathy.
Scotch Whisky Guide
Notcot
The Notcot group of sites, like NOTCOT.ORG, display information in an interesting way. Very compelling and well done. Not new, but new to me.
Cumulative Advantage
Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? An interesting series of tests where they show that commercial success is mostly a function of chance and early adoption, not quality. I wonder if the same holds true for software and websites? (Youtube?)
Stuff
My things are finally here. Thankfully the movers were pretty good, I’d heard some horror stories from people that had me anxious. The Comcast guy gets here tomorrow, and then I should be able to really settle in at home. Things I missed most: bed/pillows/blankets, camera battery charger, shoes, and vanilla candles.
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah
Happy Christmahanukwanzakah everybody.
Extraordinary Machine
“I still only travel by foot and by foot it’s a slow climb but I’m good at being uncomfortable so I can’t stop changing all the time.” The latest from the unreleased Fiona Apple CD. Hat tip: Jess.
New Sphere
Sphere, which I’m an adviser to, has just re-aligned. What do you think? Update: They also have a WordPress plugin.
Visiting Shindo Labs
Visiting the Shindo Laboratories showroom, pork ramen, and then leaving Tokyo, Japan.
Comcast Cable
I finally got internet hooked up at my house today. I ended up going with Comcast mostly because MJ sweet talked me into it. I just ran the speed test from DSL Reports on it and it came back 3469 down and 230 up. That’s over three megabits downstream, crazy! I could get used to this. Now I can finally get start getting things done from home again. (I had internet before but it was a patchy wifi connection that wasn’t reliable.)
Meebo IM
Meebo is IM Chat 2.0, and in the tradition of many Web 2.0 ventures they have a WordPress blog. Hat tip: Derkilicious.
Gnome 2.8
Some screenshots of Gnome 2.8. Looks nice. Like any true geek, I’m more interested in the nice shadows on everything than the actual improvements. Are the shadows stock? 
I keep going back and forth on my Linux desktop. I’ll use Gnome for a while because it seems cleaner and then I’ll switch to KDE because I seem to get more done and I like things like being able to press Win + M to minimize all the windows. Hat tip: Wes.