Month: July 2007

This past week, a few firsts: WordCamp, Stinson, Wii, ‘Trapped

A quick wrap-up of this past week which included a few “firsts”:

– My first WordCamp this past weekend — quite amazing.  Great to see this very active WordPress community coming together to share ideas and meet up in person.  If you take a look at the WordCamp schedule page, you will see pingbacks to lots of great coverage like Barry’s ‘high performance WordPress” presentation.   In addition, there are a ton of photos of the event on flickr,  and Brian Oberkirch has a nice WordCamp round-up.

– Stinson beach.  In a word “wow”.  I’ve been up here once before for a quick lunch, but spending a few days here has really solidified this place as gem in my mind.  Even managed to boogieboard/bodyboard for the first time !

– Wii.  I had played the boxing and golf game briefly while at CES last year.  But @ our off-site this week we’ve had it hooked up to a projector and loaded with sports game, notably tennis.  As a somewhat old school gamer I really loved the change of pace with the Wii.  It’s simple, fun, and way more social than most other console games.

– Trapped in the Closet.  A must see hip-hopera 🙂  What was great, and a first this week, was watching it followed by “Trapped in a Drive Through“.

WordPress.com Facebook App

Joseph Scott just posted on WordPress.com that the new facebook app is ready to go.

Blogs are one of the ways the Internet has fostered greater communication among people than ever before. Social network sites like Facebook provide a more structured way to keep up with specific people. Wouldn’t it be great if you could mix the two?

With the new WordPress.com Facebook App you can do exactly that.

Definitely go check it out.

Hit by the OS X 10.4.10 update problems – having flashbacks to BSOD

os x crash I’m speechless ! Just had my mac crash and require a restart (panic) for the third time in about 20 minutes.

Looks like it’s related to a 10.4.10 update that has caused problems with wifi when running on battery power. Plugging the power cord back in seems to have stabilized the situation.

For a few minutes I thought it was Firefox related, since that’s what I was using when the crashes occurred.  I tried out Camino for a bit ( it has been a while since I last used it ) — and it’s really a slick browser. Only thing holding me back from using it full time is the lack of plugin support.
Back to this buggy OS X update. As one user, tele_player, on the apple support forum put it:

 > …and this is better then Windows? Somehow I am
> starting to feel like I bought into the marketing
> hype of Apple products… =(
Right now, it doesn’t look better than Windows, but a screwup like this is actually VERY unusual.

Let’s hope we see a quick fix soon.

My favorite videos that are marketing / HR / recruiting tools

Some smart companies are creating videos that not only are fun to watch, but truly act as a recruiting tool for their companies / services. So while some of these sites rely on social media / UGC, they are seeding their own services by creating content for their own site as a way to kick things off.

A few examples:

1) I saw this one a few months ago, and my first reaction was “I would love to work there”:

We did this video one night after work. We are a company called Connected Ventures, a group of friends who work for: Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker… and, we’re hiring: connectedventures.com/jobs.shtml

watch video here

2) And this one most recently is a farce on raising money from VCs ( in hebrew, but with subtitles ), promoting their new how-to video site 5min (thanks Ouriel).

5min is a place to find short video solutions for every
practical question and is also a place for people who want to share their knowledge.

watch video here

3) And of course, FunnyorDie which launched ( I believe ) with the first episode of “The Landlord”: watch video here

4) Our very own beta video player on wordpress.com was launched featuring Matt and Barry “after-hours”. Click to watch.

5) And lastly, one of my favorites, from the Gmail team, which is a cross of a screencast and a puppet show 🙂