
Every so often I feel like I miss out by not making the trek down to Comic-Con. This is one of those times.
Sorry about the bit of downtime this morning and afternoon, folks! I’ve been trying to spread the hosting for my domains across a few users and I managed to take down my site in the process. Apparently I forgot about the quirks involved in running WordPress under mod_php. D’oh!
Things are back up now tho — PHP as CGI FTW! — so no worries.
As far as I’m concerned, this video is absolute genius. Of course, I might be a bit partial due to the fact that I’m totally in love with the new Girl Talk album — but that’s really beside the point.
Now that it’s a given that I’m buying a 3G iPhone, I need to figure out how to use a jailbroken first gen iPhone to pull traffic data for my TomTom One. It might take a little work tho as Google’s not turning up any solid results.
Anyone on the LazyWeb have any ideas?
P.S. It might be a wise idea to buy .Mac at Amazon (for $69.99) in the next few days if you don’t already have it. That way, when MobileMe replaces .Mac you’ll have saved $30 on your first year of service.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.
Dear iTunes,
Just because I have a habit of deleting podcasts from my library before I sync my phone doesn’t mean that I’m not listening to them anymore. So please don’t go and stop updating their feeds for me. I hate having to manually tell you that I want to keep listening to the shows that I love. I understand that you’re trying to be helpful and everything, but it’d be best if you’d just cut it the fuck out.
Love,
Jason
A few days ago Michael Arrington dropped a piece of his Silicon Valley into my LA by throwing an absolutely massive party down here. And after talking things over with friends and spending some time thinking about the events of the evening I’ve realized that they are two great tastes that don’t really taste all that great together.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It was great to get some recognition from TechCrunch‘s ringleader that LA is a viable technology player by having him throw a 1500 person event with an open bar and Perry Farrell DJ’ing. As far as I’m concerned, that was totally welcome and downright awesome. Seriously, thank you for that.
But I have a modest request to send your way, Mr. Arrington. If you ever plan on throwing one of these gigantic tech mixers here again, please go ahead and leave the drama at home. Because I don’t know how the folks up your way do things — but your actions on Thursday don’t give me a very encouraging idea of how you handle your business and personal relations. One of the things I love about Los Angeles is the fact that the events that get thrown by the locals are — for the most part, anyway — pretty unpretentious and (to borrow a line from Andrew Warner) more about community than conflict.
A little over a year back, we had an issue with some BarCampLA attendees being problematic. And we’re talking far worse than just being annoying to the event organizers. Excessive and open alcohol and drug abuse, making female attendees feel uncomfortable and badgering speakers to the point where talks turned into one way shouting matches made some attendees leery of coming again. We had a few people who were ruining the community because they couldn’t behave like adults.
Instead of banning the people outright from our events and making a scene tho, we issued a code of conduct. If you couldn’t follow it, you were asked to leave and that was that. Yeah, it’s sort of a hippie thing to do — but it worked. The rules kept a tight enough rein on the people causing problems to the point where they either stopped coming or calmed down considerably. Sure, there were folks who didn’t want the people to have the opportunity to show up at all, but excluding people is not in the spirit of BarCamp.
Of course one could argue that the TechCrunch/PopSugar party was a ticketed, private event. Still, you would think that a quick search over the Excel spreadsheet before it was printed and a few emails to let people know they’re not welcome could have spared everyone involved a bunch of unnecessary bullshit.
Anyhow, if you need any tips for throwing an event down here Mike, just let me know. Even if you don’t want to deal with the likes of me, I can put you in contact with people who can help you save a bit more face and perhaps make you come off better than you managed to the other night.
I’m not a total curmudgeon about the evening by the way. The pre-event dinner at Palms Thai (props to Mike Prasad for putting that together), the people I hung out with at the party and the two afterparties that organized themselves via Twitter were fun as hell. What’s more, they boiled themselves down to the people that make this community great. So while the main event left me a bit drunk, cranky and in need of a shower, the rest of the night left me wonderfully full of hope and optimism for what we’re cooking up here. Our potential is limitless — and we’re just getting started.
A spam just managed to slip thru my filters and into my inbox. While that’s a rare occurrence, it’s hardly news. The thing that’s worth mentioning is that the message was addressed as being from from “Helvetica Jones”.
Now I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that’s the name of the greatest Fontsploitation movie never made…
Pardon me, I’m busy falling in love with LOLthulhu…