Did low-key drinks at a fun bar called Thee Parkside for birthday, always fun to see friends new and old. Experimenting with a new camera, the Sony NEX-7, though these blurry bar photos don’t really do it justice.
Twenty-Eight
This is the tenth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), 23, 24, 25, and 26, 27. Wow… I don’t think I’ve ever done anything for ten years in a row before.
The public awareness of blogging comes and goes every two years, but for me it’s been a rock of intrinsic goodness that I keep coming back to. I think that’s why I love working on the platforms around it so much.
I was on the road a lot this year, covering about 190k miles over 245 days. (An average velocity of 21.6 mph.) I spent longer stretches in the same place, and often to places I had been before, which was nice for starting to appreciate the character of a given place. (52 cities and 12 countries.)
It was also one of my most productive years yet. The big resolutions from last year — launching Jetpack, Jazz Quotes, three major WordPress versions — all were completed, and as the team at Automattic grew and matured I was able to focus my time a lot more, even finding time to start coding again and switch (back) to Mac after 8 years on Windows.
In my twenty-eighth year I want to focus more on friends, family, and loved ones, something I’m running late for by doing this blog post, so will wrap this up now and see you all more later in 2012. 🙂
Reminder: In lieu of gifts, I’m trying to raise $28,000 to help bring clean water to Africa. It’s ambitious but I think we can do it. Please chip in!
All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40.
Over the holidays I chatted with Mathew Ingram about the future of the web in 2012 and beyond and he turned that into an opinion piece on GigaOM you should check out.
SOMAArts show and Om’s place
Sister is in town and went to the Get Lucky: The Culture of Chance show at SOMArts, had some food truck Mexican food, and swung by Om’s place to catch up with some friends. Shot with Charleen’s Canon S100, which is a fun pocket camera that had some pretty decent shots in low-light, especially given its size.
WordPress (and Tumblr) got a name check by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the other night. 🙂
Exclusive: Microsoft and Nokias Plans for Marketing Windows Phone in 2012.
I dont want to reveal more, and Ive been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week. But with these leaks, as with the equally inaccurate LTE leaks last week, I felt the need to set the record straight. The way tech blogs work these days is that any information, no matter how inaccurate, is simply parroted between all the gadget blogs and then, inevitably, to the increasingly lazy mainstream news as well. So lets at least get it right.
Mr Thurrott, perhaps if you didn’t sit on stories for so long other people wouldn’t break them. Your responsibility is to your audience, not Microsoft’s CES launch plans.
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
I’m turning 28 next week on January 11th. My friends and family always complain that I’m impossible to buy for, and it’s true, I don’t need any more stuff. (Exception is a mixtape / playlist, I eat those up.) The most important luxuries in my life are time, friends, and time with friends. The thing I covet is impact. So this year going to try something different: I’m giving up my birthday to raise money for charity: water and provide clean water to people that need it. 100% of money donated goes directly to projects in the field. Please donate — let’s build some wells. 🙂
Introducing Jazz-Quotes.com
I attended an interesting high school called the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, or HSPVA for short. More than computers my main passion when I joined was the saxophone, particularly jazz, and that’s what I studied for 4 years alongside many talented friends who would later become professional musicians.
As a result of this interest, almost from the beginning of this website (then photomatt.net) I had a section of my site for jazz quotes. It’s actually remained frozen in that old design for four years or more, and it was one of my resolutions for 2011 to relaunch it.
Well, with minutes to spare, I’m happy to share with you guys the new Jazz-Quotes.com.
There is a lot of work left to do on it to turn it into the more of a community-driven site that I envision, but there’s no reason the few hundred people a day that come to my site looking for jazz quotes shouldn’t get to enjoy them in this fresh new design on a dedicated domain. (Powered by WordPress, natch.)
Happy new year, everybody! I think 2012 is going to be an amazing year. Now to put another log on the fire.
DHH writes at 37signals Stop whining and start hiring remote workers. Automattic does the same, except we use P2 for our projects and virtual water coolers, IRC for our chat, Skype and Google+ Hangouts for calls and screensharing, and pretty much never email. When people read these things about 37signals their first criticism is always “does it scale?” For Automattic it has to a hundred people and growing.
One-click Restores
VaultPress now supports one-click database restores direct server-to-server so you don’t need to download or upload anything.
I ended up on the Forbes 30 under 30 for Social / Mobile this year, which is good because I only have two more years to make this sort of thing before being demoted to less exclusive “100 under 100” lists. For something more meaty check out this in-depth interview with Japanese devleloper magazine Gijutsu-Hyoron, by Bart Eisenberg, which included some pretty thoughtful questions.
Check out the new WordPress for Android 2.0, it’s a bottom-up redesign of how our mobile apps can work.
If I were going to start a gadget site, it’d look and work just like The Wirecutter from Brian Lam. Review sites like CNET review stuff when it comes out, and don’t update old reviews when new stuff comes out, so the best printer in March when they did the review might not be still the best printer in December when you want to buy one. Wirecutter picks one thing, and one thing only, and constantly updates their recommendations to keep the context of new products. And, of course, they’re powered by WordPress. 🙂
Where are they now? The Vancouver riot Kissing Couple. Crazy story, and apparently not a hoax like I had heard before.
Dave Kashen on building a values-driven startup on GigaOM.
“But with the Zuccotti Park encampment removed, and the opera closing on Dec. 1, is that it for Gandhi in New York? Or is it worth asking, what would Gandhi do in the world today?” What Would Gandhi Do? in the New York Times.
The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we’ve done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage. […] Christensen even suggests that in slavishly following such thinking, Wall Street analysts have outsourced their brains.
Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy in Forbes. Hat tip: Lane Becker.