… a friend just sent me this. So excited.

…hmm… Wordpress and embedded youtube are not working together. Here is the link, you should watch it.

Also, this Fedex commercial makes me laugh

Anyways, I loved Heroes last season, it was the only TV show I actually watched. And seeing as how I tend not to watch TV, that’s saying something./Nat

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I attended BarCampBlock this weekend. I only attended on Saturday, and for what I attended, it was amazing.

For those of you who are lost on what BarCampBlock is, I’ll give you a quick once over. BCB is a BarCamp, which came in response to FooCamp, an invite only event held at O’Reilly’s Sebastopol offices. The concept of both conferences is basically take a normal conference and cover it in web2.0 and chaos. The web2.0 because the attendees are the ones giving speeches. Everyone is expected to give some sort of talk, or at least contribute to the discussions. The chaos comes from the fact that the schedule is as the attendees make it. You show up, put your topic in a time period and go. But somehow it all works out, and everyone learns a lot. As Tara Hunt said at the opening of BarCampBlock, BarCamps are what you make them.

So, what did I do at this little shindig with over 900 people in a little corner of Palo Alto? Well I showed up around nine am on Saturday with Andrew Yates, originally planning on helping out at the front desk. The help didn’t seem to be needed, so we grabbed a cup of coffee and then helped put the infamous grid together.

Then there was a little opening ceremony and the gates were figuratively opened and the grid was bum rushed as people went to get their topics up on the gird. Mass chaos ensued. It was awesome. :) (more…)

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So today was kind of crazy, but it had a few highlights.

1. Meeting two employees I had seen on the net, in person
I met Dominic and Ken in person at Dreamweaver’s Frumpy Friday. Dom I had been following on twitter, and Ken I had found on Flickr.

2. Read a good review of one of my favorite companies.
I love Timbuk2. They make amazing bags, and their new Hacker bag looks pretty schweet. Laughing Squid has a great review of the Bag. And I think that this bag will sell very well of the SF based company. (more…)

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A blog that I am currently loving is Serif. Serif provides interesting designs that usually center around typography. Serif also talks about innovations in type and other news in the design world.

One neat thing that Serif does is hold these things called “revisions.” Revisions allow for readers to send in their versions of current designs. The current revision, revision 4, ends today. Revision 4 asked readers to design covers for their favorite books. I am very sad that I stumbled across this so late, because I would have loved to make a cover for my favorite book, Neuromancer.

So head on over to Serif and check out some of the designs people have submitted. They are all very good.

In other news:

• Crazy EA employee going through wikipedia and changing history. - This just pisses me off
•  Some high schools forcing students to specialize. - I am a strong believer that students should spend HS figuring out what they want to do. I even think that requiring students to declare a major upon entering college is ridiculous. The current mindset in parenting is to push kids into maturity at a younger age, and this in my mind is what is causing all of the problems we have in education, especially here in California.
• If you haven’t played with Pandora yet, you should. And if you have and want to save what you listen to Last.Fm, check out PandoraFM

Hasta

/Nat

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What’s this? My favorite Genre, Author, and state of mind, all in one post? Hurrah!

Ok, I discovered a wonderful thing last year, right before the infamous wipe of my archives. This wonderful thing was a new Gibson book. I was so happy in my discovery I created a Wikipedia post on it, and then forgot about it. Right before Harry Potter premiered, I checked up on the article, only to find it was coming out a few days later. Huzzah!

But at the same time I had started my internship at Adobe, and thus it slipped again from my memory. Thankfully though, Michael Heilemann showed me the light, when I stumbled across his post. Praise the gods, Spook Country has been released and I will be going to buy it tomorrow. (more…)

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You know what I love? Hot Coffee. You know why I love Hot Coffee? Because thanks to the whole lawsuit thing, Hot Coffee doesn’t remind me of the wonderfully delicious drink, instead it reminds me of coding and the nerd culture as a whole.

This weekend I attended SuperHappyDevHouse 19, known affectionately as shdh19. Shdh, is at it’s core a place for geek, nerds, designers, and developers of all kinds to meet, greet, and possibly even get a few personal projects pounded out in code. This time, shdh was located in Los Gatos, which was awesome because it was near my house. I originally went with the goal of programming, but ended up spending more time meeting people, which was better for me, I think, because I really don’t know a ton of people in the area with the same interests as me. This of course is due to the fact that I haven’t attended more of these events, not because they don’t exist. Because in all honesty, finding computer “enthusiasts” in Silicon Valley is like finding people with bad teeth in fifteen century Britain. (more…)

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Thunderbird that is. According to this post by Mitchell Baker, the Thunderbird product is not getting enough love, and I totally agree. Having thought about the topic a little, I think one of the better solutions is to break Thunderbird off and create the Thunderbird Foundation. Although I don’t have a buisness background, or even a deep connection to the Thunderbird movement, here is my reasoning.

• Thunderbird is a powerful product but the shadow that Firefox and the infamous Outlook cast is dark and long. While many know of Thunderbird’s existence, it is not a mainstream product the way Firefox is. Creating a separate foundation will, in theory, promote much needed hype and help Thunderbird establish itself more as it’s own product and not the bastard child of Firefox.
• In terms of Outlook, Thunderbird has heavy competition. Outlook is one of those applications that works well enough, but it is so widely used, especially in the business world that many users aren’t realizing it’s potential. I believe that if Thunderbird gets moved to it’s own foundation, it could have the opportunity to have more money and people thrown at it, not too many mind you, and become a more professional app.

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I have a disturbingly large amount of broccoli on my plate this weekend. First off, Friday night, Harry Potter. I don’t know how much needs to be said about Harry and his wacky adventures, but I’ve been reading this since the first book came out in Britain, and I am hooked. It amazes me how much this book sucks me in. I normally get sucked into books, but I swear I’m addicted to HP and all of it’s goodness. What’s even funnier, I don’t like Harry too much as a character. Sure he’s interesting and angsty and all, but the two things that suck me in are Harry’s past (you know the whole, good morning Harry, your life sucks, time to go be a wizard thing) and the supporting characters. Ginny, Hermione, Ron, the twins, Neville, all of the professors, etc. It’s just how well developed the world is that J.K. Rowling writes about. I feel as though I can reach out and touch it, yet not too much is described so my mind can wander.

On Saturday, I will be attending WordCamp. In all honesty, I would much rather attend Sunday, but more about that later. I am really excited about the general idea, and I’m hoping the event will get me excited enough to get me writing more often. As I said, I had hoped to also go on Sunday, because I love the developer side of Wordpress, I’m even thinking I might finally release the few plug-ins I “wrote” (as in I wrote them, but they suck), so the extra help would have been nice, but oh well.
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Hey there readers. For the 4 or so of you still visiting my page, welcome. As a few of you know, through twitter, Facebook, or just general contact, I have recently returned from a trip with my immediate family to eastern China. I visited five wonderful cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Xi An, Guilin, and Shou Zhou, each incredibly different, and all relatively large.

I’ve been staying away from the details of exactly what we did, mainly because it’s pretty detailed. But I’ll give you guys a little run down of the trip. We landed in Beijing, and i got food poisoning from the buffet dinner we had at the Hotel. While my parents and brother spent the next day touring the Forbidden Palace, Temple of Heaven, and Tienanmen Square, I got used to pucking ever half hour. The next day we hit up the Great Wall of China and some tombs. And the next day we visited the Summer Palace and took a plane to Xi An. (more…)

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Another quick update, also conveniently Starcraft based. Back when i was active on battle.net, there were these awesome maps called Tower Defense. You built a maze trying to keep the constant wave of baddies from going to the other side of the map. Well, I was pointed to the this fantastic flash game called Desktop Tower Defense.

Same concept as the Starcraft maps, you build a maze with different types of towers that try to kill off all of the bad guys before they reach the end.  To understand how popular this game is, check out it’s news page, the stats are showing at least 2000 individual players each hour, plus over 5 billion bad guys destroyed each hour.

See what others in the blogosphere are saying, and also check this hilarious post on why you shouldn’t play this game.

Cya later,

/Nat

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