Lots of people making resolutions about learning to code. That’s great, but I’d be content if you spent an hour a week blogging something.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) January 2, 2012
Sister is in town and went to the Get Lucky: The Culture of Chance show at SOMArts, had some food truck Mexican food, and swung by Om’s place to catch up with some friends. Shot with Charleen’s Canon S100, which is a fun pocket camera that had some pretty decent shots in low-light, especially given its size.
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WordPress (and Tumblr) got a name check by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show the other night. 
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Exclusive: Microsoft and Nokias Plans for Marketing Windows Phone in 2012.
I dont want to reveal more, and Ive been sitting on this information for weeks so that Microsoft can make its big announcement at CES this coming week. But with these leaks, as with the equally inaccurate LTE leaks last week, I felt the need to set the record straight. The way tech blogs work these days is that any information, no matter how inaccurate, is simply parroted between all the gadget blogs and then, inevitably, to the increasingly lazy mainstream news as well. So lets at least get it right.
Mr Thurrott, perhaps if you didn’t sit on stories for so long other people wouldn’t break them. Your responsibility is to your audience, not Microsoft’s CES launch plans. ∞
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
I’m turning 28 next week on January 11th. My friends and family always complain that I’m impossible to buy for, and it’s true, I don’t need any more stuff. (Exception is a mixtape / playlist, I eat those up.) The most important luxuries in my life are time, friends, and time with friends. The thing I covet is impact. So this year going to try something different: I’m giving up my birthday to raise money for charity: water and provide clean water to people that need it. 100% of money donated goes directly to projects in the field. Please donate — let’s build some wells. ∞
DHH writes at 37signals Stop whining and start hiring remote workers. Automattic does the same, except we use P2 for our projects and virtual water coolers, IRC for our chat, Skype and Google+ Hangouts for calls and screensharing, and pretty much never email. When people read these things about 37signals their first criticism is always “does it scale?” For Automattic it has to a hundred people and growing. ∞
VaultPress now supports one-click database restores direct server-to-server so you don’t need to download or upload anything.
I ended up on the Forbes 30 under 30 for Social / Mobile this year, which is good because I only have two more years to make this sort of thing before being demoted to less exclusive “100 under 100″ lists. For something more meaty check out this in-depth interview with Japanese devleloper magazine Gijutsu-Hyoron, by Bart Eisenberg, which included some pretty thoughtful questions. ∞
Check out the new WordPress for Android 2.0, it’s a bottom-up redesign of how our mobile apps can work. ∞
If I were going to start a gadget site, it’d look and work just like The Wirecutter from Brian Lam. Review sites like CNET review stuff when it comes out, and don’t update old reviews when new stuff comes out, so the best printer in March when they did the review might not be still the best printer in December when you want to buy one. Wirecutter picks one thing, and one thing only, and constantly updates their recommendations to keep the context of new products. And, of course, they’re powered by WordPress. ∞
Where are they now? The Vancouver riot Kissing Couple. Crazy story, and apparently not a hoax like I had heard before. ∞
Dave Kashen on building a values-driven startup on GigaOM. ∞
“But with the Zuccotti Park encampment removed, and the opera closing on Dec. 1, is that it for Gandhi in New York? Or is it worth asking, what would Gandhi do in the world today?” What Would Gandhi Do? in the New York Times. ∞
The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we’ve done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage. [...] Christensen even suggests that in slavishly following such thinking, Wall Street analysts have outsourced their brains.
Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy in Forbes. Hat tip: Lane Becker. ∞
Automattic just reached 100 people. On Monday we’ll be 102. ∞
The three biggest myths about women in technology, by Allison Scott and Freada Kapor Klein. Hat tip: Mitch Kapor. ∞
The Art of Right Now by Hiten Shah. ∞
