Today the legendary Om Malik celebrates his 50th time around the sun. For many that know him, Om defies definition: He’s first a writer, and finally always a true friend, but in between he’s an investor, photographer, oenophile, closet Bollywood fan, critical thinker, and sartorialist. He’s also been my friend and confidant for over a decade now, and I cannot wait to see what his next 50 years bring for him and the world.

Here’s some snaps of Om over the years, from 2008 to just a few weeks ago when he was blonde for a few days. Happy birthday, buddy. 😀

Some days Amazon just drives me batty. Part of it may be the fact that I have 3 distinct accounts on Amazon, all with the exact same login, but which one I get depends on on what password I use when I log in. One of these accounts gives me the discount for using A9, the rest don’t. Depending on which one I logged into last, my A9 search history is hosed. The wishlists are in various states of upkeep, and all different. It’s confusing and frustrating and really turns me off from Amazon. I wish I could just delete all those accounts and start fresh. (If they let me export my wishlist first.)

The new Twenty Ten theme is now live on WordPress.com and the default for all new blogs created on the service. As an aside, WP.com (11 million sites) was switched over to 3.0 over the weekend. I love it when we’re able to do that early because we find a ton of bugs in the integration and merge, and then we have 11 million beta testers banging on the software before we do the shrink-wrap release.

Jeremy’s search for a home network storage appliance is very similar to my own, so go give him advice. I’ve also been considering just getting another dedicated server instead, for ~$100 a month I can get a high-bandwidth server with 250+ GB of storage and upgrade it every year. Of course this might not be necessary with home bandwidth going up — I got two offers this month for 10mbps and 25mbps internet connections in my building for under $30 a month, a third of what I just paid to Comcast.

I’ve been looking to get the two noisy linux boxes under my desk into a closet somewhere, because they’re so loud. One is a very very old PII or something running Gentoo that I had to put by the window and open because one of the fans was breaking down and the box was overheating, which caused it to make an alarm-like sound for hours at a time. AHEM. The second box is a fairly new Dell but it’s a server-class machine with TB+ of storage and it sounds like a plane taking off sometimes. The Dell is running Ubuntu, and also using the third screen on my desktop full-time. Having Linux right there (and on the same mouse/keyboard thanks to Synergy) is incredibly helpful for debugging and testing things, plus I could run X-chat full-time. When the new Mac minis came out they caught my eye — something not as dog-slow as my Powerbook, with a proper monitor and keyboard/mouse, could really be a great OS X experience and I’d still have all the command-line goodness at my fingertips. I ordered the maxed-out one online (they didn’t have any in stock at the SF store) and it arrived. So far so good! Almost as fast as my PC (AMD FX55 + 4GB).

Research proves what open source folks have been saying all along: “An analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code shows that it contains fewer bugs per thousand lines of code than commercial counterparts.”

How to disable GreaseMonkey, now if only Google would let us disable Autolink.

Even though I’ve stepped down as the organizer for all of the Meetup groups I was involved in, they kept bugging me every few days to “be an organizer” for the very groups I had left. Want to delete yourself from Meetup entirely? Here’s the remove from Meetup link.

I’m using this nifty plugin from Scott Yang which was pointed out to me by Alistair. It’s actually replacing a bit of code and mod_rewrite rules I had to do the same thing, I wish I had thought of this sooner. I could see something like this making it into the core.

Mike and Clay wrote in that WordPress has been named Web Application of the Year by ArsTechnica. Wow, that’s quite an honor for the entire team.

VideoPress now gives you the option to only use Free formats, which means Theora and Vorbis played via HTML5.