Jason Cosper

Blog

  • It’s Oh So Quiet

    There’s somebody who I care about and love a lot — and I haven’t been giving her the attention she deserves both on this blog and in other aspects of my life.

    That person’s name is Sarah.

    See?  When was the last time I brought her up?  It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

    Shame on me.

    You know, when a relationship is fresh and new and you’re just crazy happy to even be in love?  You want to sing that shit from the rooftops because it feels so good.  That feeling of happiness doesn’t go away — but it does end up becoming something comfortable.  It becomes so comfortable in fact, that you start taking the fact that you even have it at all for granted.  The frequency of fawning blog posts drops and cameo appearances in your Flickr feed gradually slow to a near standstill as well.

    Well, maybe not your Flicrk feed or blog.  But that’s what’s happened with mine.

    So why did that happen?  It’s not like she’s gone somewhere.  Hell, save for a few really rough patches where I’ve been a complete jackass, she’s been in my life all this time.  And I haven’t stopped loving her or caring about her.  In fact, my love for her grows every day.  She’s a massive influence on my life and the decisions I make.  This is something she’s aware of, but most of you have no idea about what’s going on at all.

    As public a person as I am, I’ve been finding that I’m growing this tendency to want to keep parts of my life private.  Mostly because the relationship I have with Sarah is just that — a private one.  Then again, I could just be making excuses.

    Still, I started out talking about her every chance I could get with glowing bits of praise and adoration.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that I never should have stopped doing that.  She still lights up my insides with an intensity that is unrivaled — and the world deserves to know that.

    So everyone, say hi to Sarah again.  You’ll be seeing a lot more of her around these parts.

  • The Importance of Being Earnest

    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.

  • Motivation

    “Everybody keeps on talking about it, nobody’s getting it done.”

    LCD Soundsystem, “Yeah (Crass Version)“

    *sigh* I hate being one of those new age douchebags that talk about personal mantras — but I still feel compelled to share this.

    I have to confess that every time I find myself hitting a brick wall mentally or I start lacking any sort of motivation, the line above manages to find its way into my head — and always at the right time.

    And as cheesy as this might end up sounding, whipping out my iPod and giving the track a quick listen actually ends up pushing me forward.  At that very second I want to be the person who stops letting the talk and bullshit cloud my mind and instead be the one who starts doing.

    So that’s what I do.  Well, for the most part anyway.  I mean, it can never really be that simple, can it?

    Still, I’ve realized the strength of this song.  “Yeah” is my auditory can of spinach.  It works really well at giving me short bursts of awesome, and that’s totally fine by me.

    So what kicks your ass into high gear?  Enquiring minds want to know.

  • Movin’ On Your Left

    One of the nice things about living in North Hollywood is that I’m less than a mile’s walk from the Red Line station.  Because of this, I’ve been taking the subway into work every morning.  There’s actually a few benefits to this:

    • I get a nice walk at the start and end of my work day.  And I’ll still continue to call it nice until Summer hits and the Valley gets over 100° F at 9 AM.
    • Work pays for my metro pass.  Well, they reimburse me for it whenever I get them the receipt.  Still, the fact that they’re willing to pick up any of its cost is really nice of them.
    • I find that I’m way less stressed when I don’t have to sit in traffic.  Listening to a podcast or some music is way more chill when you don’t have to wonder why the guy in the other lane is drifting over for the nth time.

    I do have one gigantic pet peeve tho — people who stand still on the left side of the escalator.  Now I know that moving stairs are still a novelty to some, but most regular commuters know that the right is for standers and the left is for the folks who like beating those smug stair climbers out of the station.

    I know it’s pompous for me to assume that Los Angeles is listening — especially when I have access to my site’s metrics and I know that my traffic falls well short of the city’s population — but please quit being part of the problem, left-standers.  And for God’s sake, kindly get out of the way when someone says “excuse me”.  I really hate getting pushy, but I swear that I will if I have to.

  • Introducing LAWPUG

    Since a lot of my day job involves dealing with WordPress issues — which are mostly caused by 3rd party plugins or sites not being ready for the Digg effect — I’ve become really passionate about WordPress as a platform. Now I’m not to the point of being a hardcore zealot just yet, but I find myself getting closer and closer as each day passes. ;)

    Inspired by Joe Crawford‘s BOF at the last BarCampLA, I’ve decided to start a group for Los Angeles based WordPress users. The idea is to meet monthly for a meal and have a small, semi-structured talk (or Q&A) to get other folks who are passionate about WordPress to come together and exchange ideas.

    The first one is going to be a little more relaxed tho. We’re meeting for a nice Sunday brunch at the Los Angeles Farmers Market near Starbucks and Lotteria in the southwest corner (3rd & Fairfax) on April 6th at 12:00 PM.  We’ll use this meeting a chance to get to know the other people in the community before we start diving into the fun technical stuff at future meetings. All the important event info should be up over on Upcoming, so please try to add yourself there so we can know how many tables to try to grab.

    I’m really looking forward to getting this jump started and seeing some new (and old) faces from the LA tech community. Please feel free to spread the word if you’re interested in helping get this subset of the larger community going and drop me a line if you have any questions.

  • Time To Get Away

    Sunset at McWay Falls

    I realize how funny it is to be complaining about needing a vacation — especially since things have been so quiet around here the past couple months — but I feel like I need to get away for a bit. When things get silent here, it’s because I’m in head down, super concentration mode.

    I’ve got more than two weeks of vacation banked up at work and I’m itching to take my first real break in over eight years.  No conventions, conferences or unconferences.  No networking events or parties.  Just me and someplace quiet where I can go for a week and reset myself.

    The question is, where do I go?  Anyone have any ideas?

    Sunset at McWay Falls by kaiyen.

  • Jottings In An Old Notebook

    I’m purging a bunch of stuff that I’d rather not move with when a note from someone I used to hang out with circa 2004 fell out of an old notebook. I had no idea that it was there, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t downright inspired…

    Dew Be Due Bee do
    ERIS is Loki in Drag
    and of Course Lassie as The Beaver

    If I knew who it was from, I’d give credit — but now that I’ve cataloged it, into the bag it goes.

  • Is Fontsploitation Even A Genre?

    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…

  • True Love Won’t Desert You

    I just have to go on record and say that this shot for shot recreation of the video for Journey’s “Separate Ways” is seriously the best thing that I’ve seen all week. If you even sort of like Journey, you owe it to yourself to stop everything you’re doing and soak all of its majesty in right this second.

  • Wither Seven Grand?

    So last night I was informed that Seven Grand is going to enforce a dress code of “collared shirts on the weekends” for the dudes in the new year. I can totally understand why they’d do that — seeing as how it’s a really nice bar and you’d want to discourage the riff-raff from hanging out — but it’s a little dismaying nonetheless. Of course I say that because I’m pretty sure I’m the sort of scruffy riff-raff they’re trying to discourage. It also tends to make things a little less fun and a lot more pretentious.

    I mean, watching “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” while listening to the Cramps and drinking some whiskey doesn’t really lend itself to the whole “strictly enforced dress code” experience, does it?

    I guess Bar 107 just became my weekender when I’m downtown.