Filed under: Personal
Tags: Birthday, Resolutions
Today is a fun day — 2011-1-11 (not 1:11 PM anymore, I’m a slow writer) and I’m turning 27. This is the time of the year I always look back, and from last year’s resolutions I actually did pretty well. I was able to simplify a number of areas of my life, including reducing the number of computers running in my place. I bought my first apartment and remodeled it. I slowed down my eating by chewing more, a vignette that made Tim’s new Four Hour Body book. Redesigned this site. I didn’t bike at all, but walked a ton. I started exercising with a kettlebell over the summer and was pretty consistent about it until last month, with some noticeable improvements in strength and energy. Got all the old photo galleries imported going all the way to 2002.
I petered out on Farscape, and didn’t display my photography anywhere in print, so a wash there. I spent a week in the woods with Beau at Tracker camp. I joined the board of the non-profit Grist, and was able to expand charitable donations to cover more organizations than previously, including Charity: Water, FSF, Apache, Archive.org, Samasource, EFF, and GAFFTA. I had a tweet go viral and end up on Time and CBS (I still need to blog about that), and a blog post about shipping go viral and get over a hundred thousand visitors. (With an interesting traffic pattern too — lots of Twitter and Facebook like you would expect, but 92% of the traffic from the long tail or blogs like Daring Fireball.)
Speaking of launches, was lucky to hit all the big ones I had planned in the beginning of the year in that abbreviation-coded list: VaultPress, new Akismet, mobile WordPress apps for every platform, Ma.tt themes, Audrey Capital, WordPress Foundation. Also hired 28 new Automatticians, added 7.2 million blogs to WP.com, and had 38 million downloads from WordPress.org.
This year, along lines of simplifying, I have six main goals:
- Increase the release frequency of core WordPress, I think we can hit our goal of three major releases this year. (Only did one last year — 3.0.)
- Keep reading the New Yorker every week, and hopefully work in a few more books every month.
- Launch a new jazz-related site I’ve been working on sporadically.
- Finally upload my un-uploaded photos for 2005-2010.
- Keep exercising regularly. (The first time I have a health-related resolution, if you believe it!)
- Launch secret new thing, code abbreviation JP.
It’s not a resolution, but I think I’m going to spend a lot more time in Houston in 2011. As for some other stats: 208 posts here on ma.tt (up Y/Y for first time since 2007), 535 posts on my moblog, 4,456 comments, and posted 2,432 photos. The top five posts were 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number, Wildcard DNS and Sub Domains, The Headers of Twenty Ten, Change OS X Computer Name, and Sonos vs Squeezebox, but most of the traffic was to the home page. My top emailers were Toni, Rose, Paul, my Mom, and Raanan with 3,028 emails between them. I sent 10,813 emails to about 2,228 people.
According to TripIt, which I love and use constantly, I was on the road 227 days out of the year, traveling 122,066 miles across 59 cities and 17 countries.
27 is a really awkward age — I’m not young anymore but still before the looming 30. It’s inbetween. That said, I think 2011 is going to be a year where a lot of things come together and a lot of the foundations laid down in 2010 (and when I was 26) come to fruition.
This is the ninth year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22 (this one is funny), 23, 24, 25, and 26.
Filed under: Essays, Personal
Tags: Birthday, Resolutions
Today I am a quarter of a century old. To be honest I never thought I would be this old, it was a number beyond where I could imagine or visualize but the last few years have just gone by in a blur and here I am, 25 years young and finally able to rent a car without paying an age penalty.
Following up from the open source resolutions, here’s what I’m going to aim for this year in no particular order:
- Learn a language where WP has a big impact (probably Spanish).
- Take more videos, post at least 2 a month.
- Post 10,000 photos in 2009.
- Post at least one book a month I’ve enjoyed.
- Don’t try to do everything myself.
- Redesign Ma.tt! (And get back up in the search engine rankings for “Matt” on Google.)
- Post more personal stuff. (Like this.)
- Spend more time working with and coaching other young entrepreneurs and startups.
- Donate to 5 Open Source projects that touch my life daily.
- Learn to make/prepare one food item a month.
- Launch, launch, launch! (Real artists ship.)
- Get people to capitalize WordPress correctly, and stop using the fake mis-proportioned W. (Here are some correct ones.)
- Print my favorite picture of another person every month and send it to that person in a picture frame.
- Reinstate WordPress Wednesdays and make it easier to do an amazing photoblog with WP.
(Hat tip to Boris Mann, Benji, Niall Kennedy, John Roberts, Titanas, Network Geek, Avinash, Kirb, Julie, Mark Jaquith, and Kabatology for the resolutions.)
This is the seventh year I’ve blogged my birthday: 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23, and 24. If you had asked me 7 years ago where I would be today I couldn’t have imagined all of the amazing things that have happened, the incredible people I’ve met, and the communities that I’ve become a part of. Thank you. Here’s to the next 25.
Every year my birthday sneaks up on me, and this was no exception. After the lull of the holidays and the whirlwind first few days of the year, I am now officially 24. This is the sixth year I’ve celebrated with you guys on this blog, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. This year should be interesting because many of the things I started 2–5 years ago are just now starting to come to fruition. I’m also hoping there will be some big changes on photomatt.net, including possibly a change in domain name. I’ll post more on that as it develops though. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!
Another day, another year! One step at a time, I seem to have found myself another year older. 2006 was a great, I’m just amazed at how quickly it went by. Time flies when you’re having fun. Previously: 22, 21, 20, 19. (Have I really been blogging that long?)
Filed under: Uncategorized
Tags: Birthday, photomatt22
We’re very proud to announce the final release of Matt 2.2, a full year in the making since the last major release. This version includes dozens of enhancements ranging from DSLR support to the new facial hair module (which we could never quite get to work in previous revs). The knowledge base has been expanded, though it’s still a bit light on the experience benchmark. We’ve also fixed that bug that was around since about 1.7 where it thought the knowledge base was already full. Now it knows more, but knows it knows less. Short-term RAM is still a little flakey. Email processing is also still slow, but the “piano” and “reading” plugins have come a long way. This version also runs without a support contract from a major corporation. Most people surveyed agreed this was a solid upgrade, but we know there’s a lot of work left to do still. We hope to continue listening to feedback and keep up the regular release schedule.
The rumors you’ve heard are true, today I turn 21.
Filed under: Personal
Tags: Birthday
This is it. Last year my birthday was loud and surprising, this year it was chill. Both have their attraction.
Awww thanks. Mad props to Craig for the WordPress header (currently in rotation).
While I’m here I’d also like to wish a happy birthday to Dave, who had a birthday a few days ago and didn’t tell anyone. 
Well the day so far has been really wonderful. Last night was spent with great friends watching movies, playing on the trampoline, huddling for warmth, and of course counting down to my birthday in central, mountain, and pacific time—new year’s eve style. After a few interesting experiences at House of Pies I found myself dog-tired and decided to call it a night.
This morning was a little rushed getting things ready for the HPUG meeting but everything turned out alright. We did something never done before and actually joined the Palm and Web Technology SIGs for a party. Since I lead the Palm SIG and present in the Web-Tech SIG that was a lot of fun for me, as I always feel like the two may never meet.
I’ve just gotten warning that there are people coming over to my house and that a blindfold is involved, so this should be interesting. Gotta go . . .
