Been looking into ways to send personalized letters and postcards through the mail system, old school style. Mail is the new email! The best option seems to be Postful in terms of pricing and API. Wondering if anyone has any experience doing custom mailings like this, and if so what tips and experience you have. ¶

Dear Microsoft, every time you reboot my computer overnight without me having any interaction I lose unsaved documents and messages. It completely breaks my trust in a way that’s irreparable. It’s been six years since I first wrote about this. At the time Robert Scoble saw my entry and apologized on his blog in a really heartfelt way. This meant more to me than you will ever know; it was the day I went from being a childish Slashdot-reading Micro$oft-hater to having great respect for a large company made up of individuals who made mistakes but had changed the world. Six years later, though, the bug is still there. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… well, you can’t fool me again. ¶

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

One year of After the Deadline. ¶

Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like. ¶

Dan Ariely has moved his blog to WordPress.com, and today he has a new book out, The Upside of Irrationality. I was a big fan of his first book Predictably Irrational so I can’t wait to check out the new one. He’ll also be swinging by the Automattic office in San Francisco when he’s in town. ¶

While linking the NY Times anyway, check out this article about concerns over salt consumption in the US and the industry’s response to it and try not to hear all the quotes in the voice of Nick Naylor. ¶

“Our experience of technology has been largely wondrous and positive: The green revolution ameliorated the problem of world hunger (for a time at least) with better seeds and fertilizers to increase harvests. When childhood diseases were ravaging the world, vaccines came along and (nearly) eliminated them. There are medicines for the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS. There is the iPad.” NY Times: Our Fix-It Faith and the Oil Spill. ¶

A List Apart: Articles: Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo. I think I missed that one when it came out. It’s excellent! Encapsulates a lot of the thinking that went into the painstaking implementation of “undo” in WordPress 2.9. ¶

Windows 7 has an awesome utility called netsh that allows you to create wifi networks, even if you’re already connected to a wifi network on the same interface, which is actually slightly better than the same feature on OS X. If you don’t want to play with the command-line, there’s a handy utility called Connectify that makes creating a wifi hotspot from your Windows 7 box a breeze. This was one of the things I missed most about my Mac laptops. ¶

I am going to be in Turkey for about 10 days starting on Tuesday. Any tips or must-sees in Istanbul and elsewhere? ¶

A company I met through Techstars and later invested in alongside Tim Ferriss, DailyBurn, just was bought by IAC. Congrats to Andy and the team there. ¶

On Facebook I was trying to get to an event and clicked “see all” on the friend finder instead of the events area. Then something caught my eye, every friend Facebook was suggesting for me was female, and most I didn’t know. (Update, there’s one guy in there.) The first part of that is interesting — perhaps they’re testing some optimization in the friend-adder with the assumption that since I’m a straight male I’m more likely to add girls than guys, but if so that seems a little skeezy. ¶

When I wrote about starting a bank, aka SafeBank, I was overwhelmed by the feedback and at least once a week since then I’ve been contacted by someone working on the idea. One I hadn’t heard of yet though is BankSimple, which I noticed yesterday because Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to work on it. I’m fully focused on WordPress and Automattic so can’t be involved with any new ventures as more than an advisor, but I’m glad smart people are tackling the problem and I hope to have an account at one (or more) someday. ¶

Surprise: Traditional Blogging Platforms Still Reign Supreme, comparative activity metrics across blogging platforms using some data from Postrank. I think if they included WP.com users with custom domains we would be double or trip where listed — even more if they included self-hosted. ¶

The best part about traveling is the forced minimalism. My life at home, as it has evolved, is quite complex and full of stuff. On the road I’m reduced to what I carry in a small backpack and hand bag — clutter becomes a physical burden. I really enjoy this simplicity as it helps me focus. One of my favorite things to watch as a friend or colleague travels more is how their bag gets smaller and smaller with each trip.
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