Two things I’m going to blog publicly to get myself to finish them faster: First off, I really need to finish up the Automattic site so you guys can see some of the cool stuff we’re doing there. Second, I’ve been playing with some cool gadgets lately and developing some pretty strong opinions about them which I’d like to start posting and sharing.

If you’re a Facebook user and a reader of this blog you can now add me to your Facebook. The “pages” feature of Facebook is neat because before I was conflicted because I wanted to add everyone I met at various conferences or WordPress users as a “friend” but then news feeds and such basically become unusable. I’m going to try to use it like a mailing list sending out some travel and life updates, like if I’m going to be in a particular country. Sign up here. 🙂

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.

I think in a few years books will be written about Snakes on a Plane and the fantastic (WP-powered) blog which is following it.

“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.

Eric does a linklog. In for a penny, in for a dollar. The one thing that bugs me about this type of link blog with the commentary in the title attribute is that Mozilla and family cuts off the title tooltip when you hover over the link. To see the entire message I either have to view source or right click and chose “Properties”, which also has a set length and I usually have to select the text and move my mouse to get it to “scroll.” Is there a better solution?

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.

So here’s the scenario: I have a work calendar on Outlook 2003 which gets all the work meetings. I use iCal on my Mac to keep a calendar with mostly personal events and it syncs via DAV online. I would love to combine all of these and sync them together and to some sort of web interface, and make all the events and alarms go to my phone, a Motorola RAZR. Is this even possible? Update: Groupcal looks like exactly what I need.

Happy Christmahanukwanzakah everybody.

Is it just me or is half the internet seem to be down? I can’t get to extremetech.com or parts of zdnet.com, and I just got a 500 error from blogger.com when trying to leave a comment on someone’s blog. What’s interesting was the message: “Please contact the server administrator, blogger@trakken.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” Trakken.com redirects to Neotonic, which according to its meta tag, ” Neotonic Trakken is a powerful web-based Online Customer Support system.” The domain is registered by David Jeske who has an email at Chat.net, a PHP-Nuke site that hasn’t been updated in two years. David worked at eGroups and Yahoo and then started Neotonic which signed Google as its first customer in 2001. If you dig a little deeper you can see what Trakken really is. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Blogger is just a highly customized PHP-Nuke installation and should be released under the GPL. Someone contact the FSF.

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.)