[Image: Nonsensor]
I had read Brian’s post—actually I caught his quip earlier in the day, but it didn’t really sink in until I saw Alex’s post illustrating that the original Weblogs, Inc. management team was now completely gone. I had a blast spending time with the entire Blogsmith team at SXSW and finally got to meet Brian; yes, I did meet him at WINStock, but being in the middle of a complete platform overhaul is no time to meet a dev. Gavin has an interesting post describing much of the platform’s growth and how the team got to where it is today. I know Brian is going to have a lot of fun over at ComicMix and I look forward to working with him in the future (I should get cracking on that Galactus WiFi helmet).

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that today is the two year anniversary of both my college graduation and my first post going live at Hack-A-Day. The second of the two keeps gaining notoriety since it was the catalyst for every thing that has happened to me since then.

I’m headed back to Nebraska for a friend’s wedding and to spend time with the folks. I’ll be there April 26th – May 6th.

While at the airport I picked up a copy of Fast Company magazine because Hack-A-Day was rumored to be in it. Well, the article is actually about some company called Facebook—I think they publish those Who’s Who books. That’s Facebook engineer Alex Moskalyuk rocking the fine Hack-A-Day threads. I met him at DEFCON last fall when he was working for Yahoo. Yes, the sombrero is required when sporting HAD gear.

I returned yesterday from SXSW and have a ton of work to get to. Which is kind of refreshing since I actually like my job. I picked up these vinyl Hack A Day stickers today. I think I’ll peel out the skull and just leave the wrenches. Shmoocon in D.C. will be your first chance to get one from me.

The term hacker is usually used by the press to indicate someone who breaches computer security systems. Using hacker this way is somewhat controversial. At Hack-A-Day we’re proud to embrace the original definition: a computer enthusiast. I got a tip the other day that apparently we’re wrong. Here’s the exchange that followed. Continue reading →

I’ve got most of my gear set up now. The office floor is still covered in random crap. We had another torrential downpour the other night. I guess all the rain is going to arrive in October. In the free time I’ve been cutting videos from ToorCon for Hack-A-Day. Here’s the keynote by Cory Doctorow. My friends from Midnight Research Labs also released a great tool. I got the slides from Aaron and cut them into the video. They’re both 50 minutes and recomended only for the nerdy. It takes iMovie at least 10 hours to squeeze the ~1Gig MP4 down to 170Meg MP4 while maintaining the 640×480 resolution. I think it looks great. That’s a hell of a lot of time though and I really doubt iMovie 7 is going to add render farm support.