With the impending shutdown of HipChat (February 2019), my team has been working hard on migrating everything over to Slack. Why not have some fun while we're at it? Slackmoji Firstly, what is Slackmoji? Slackmoji (the word) refers to Slack + emoji — namely, the custom emoji you can add to your Slack account. It adds a bit of color and personality to the default Slack experience. Since I work in technology and the web, my set of Slackmoji tends to be Mac/Web/Browser-centric.

Back in 2006, I was 26 years old. My long-time friend Matthew, and his friends, Vada and Joe, and I worked hard to kick-start an “Internet Startup” here in Silicon Valley. We would come out of investor and lawyer meetings and comment on the tendency for how people over 35 “just didn’t get it”. They didn’t understand what we were trying to accomplish. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace were all the rage, and these guys couldn’t understand the whole point of status updates.

This is the message I just sent to the Lockitron team. I’m tired and frustrated at how poor the communication has been around schedule delays. I ordered in October 2012. My original ship date was supposed to be October 2013. The date passed, and there were no updates. Then, April 2014 was the ship date. Still nothing. It’s now July 2014, and it still hasn’t shipped. I’ve read the blog posts. I know you guys are behind. But how about this — if you’re going to miss the forecasted ship date by a matter of months, why not send me an email to let me know that your website is lying to me?

For those who don’t know, Louis C.K. is a stand-up comedian. I personally find angry humor to be some of the funniest, and Louis C.K. is a balding, red-headed, middle-aged, middle-class, white guy who’s pissed off about everything. I’d heard that he’d recorded a live special and was making it available, DRM-free, for $5. That’s right — five bucks. I briefly considered torrenting it since I’m sure it’s all over the place by now, but in the end I decided that watching him rant and rave was worth the five bucks.

I’m not able to upgrade my iPhone until next summer when the next iPhone will presumably be out. That said, I find this sort of technology absolutely fascinating and I absolutely love how easy Apple has made it all.

Recently, I became the owner of a shiny new black, 16GB iPhone 3G. I’ve had a BlackBerry Pearl (8100) for the past 2 years, and the iPhone is a significantly better device for me. Here’s why. For starters, I’m an avid Mac user. I’ve spent many years on Mac and Windows systems, and I overwhelmingly prefer Mac. One of the biggest problems that I had as a Mac + BlackBerry user is that the syncing tools suck. PocketMac is a disaster, and the Mark/Space app (whatever it’s called) only works about one day per year.

Twitter has tweaked their design as of this morning, and they added a link titled “Tell us your story,” in which they ask about your thoughts as a Twitter user. Here’s what I had to say. I’m an information junkie with a limited attention span. Twitter has all of the interesting links and thoughts of a Digg, Newspond, del.icio.us, or Ma.gnolia, but is filtered by people I follow, giving me a much higher signal to noise ratio for links and services that require my attention (or that I may want to give my attention to).

Last year, I co-founded a company by the name of Foleeo (which will likely change names because of Palm’s Foleo) that is working on a solution to the ever-increasing rift between record labels, movie studios, and people like you and me who want to get music, movies, and TV shows under far more reasonable terms. But like Google with search, that’s simply where we’re starting. We’re also working on what I (very esoterically) refer to the “citizen-centric social anti-network”. Many of the ideas behind this venture were recently described by Chris Messina in a much more eloquent manner:

Update: See images of Digg’s homepage at WordDissociation.com. I’ve been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to think of a good opening line, and I can’t. I’m speechless. Something very intriguing is happening this very moment: The users of Digg are outright revolting. This is the digital equivalent of the Los Angeles riots. But what’s more interesting is the fact that as of 9:00pm PST, Digg is letting them. (As I was writing this, Digg went down. This is getting more interesting by the minute…)

I think I’m obsessive-compulsive. Not like the guy who washes his hands hundreds of times a day, or like Adrian Monk — the TV detective that suffers from all sorts of phobias and anxieties and has these oddball little quirks — kind of obsessive. But a little. I think it all started when I was a kid. I was the kid that had to have all of my toy cars lined up exactly right, or it was no good. When I was about 5 years old, I randomly watched my dad put his socks on.

I’ve succumbed to the dark side. My brother, my sister, my 2 best friends, and another really close friend were all telling me about this great website where you can find anybody you’ve ever known because everybody is on it. I’m now on MySpace. *Hangs head in shame* I want to apologize to all of you that had any respect for me as a person, a blogger, a web developer, a music lover, or anything else. I have let you all down.

Okay, so have I ever mentioned how cool my wife is? Yeah. I had my 26th birthday last week, and when I got home that night, I had one of these awesome little toys waiting for me. The 60GB model. Yeah. But that one was broken. So I exchanged it for a new one, and that one has been awesome. Combine that with Tivo, Tivo AutoPilot, and a few hours of patience, and I was watching Tivo’d episodes of Alias, Lost, Veronica Mars, and the Mind of Mencia on my iPod the next day (which came in handy because I had a lot of riding-in-a-car to do that day).

I had posted this link in my sidebar a while back, but it’s something that I get a kick out of every time I see it. It’s always interesting to see how the father of the web standards movement got started… Zeldman.com in 1996 »

I think I’ve discovered a great concoction for building your own makeshift Media Center System. TiVo is already pretty great at managing your TV shows, but the method I’m about to discuss add a viable music option to the mix. Luckily, I had nearly everything already, and just didn’t know it until this morning. What do we need? Before we get started, we need to make sure that we have everything we need: Either a Windows 2000/XP PC or a Mac running OSX A TV (which I think just about everyone has) A Networked TiVo Series2 with system software 7.

I just bought my wife a TiVo for Valentine’s Day (*giggles like a little girl*). No, she’s definitely not a geek like me, but I seem to have passed along the “Electronics and Gadgets Virus” to her. I am absolutely stunned by the coolness that is TiVo. Pausing live TV? Record anything you want by saying “Record this show whenever it happens to be on.” It actually came in handy tonight when we were watching 24 tonight. A couple of friends of ours were going to come over to watch it with us, but were running about 10 minutes behind.

My birthday is coming up on Tuesday (lucky me!), but I was allowed to open a present early. My wonderful three-year-old daughter (and her wonderful Mommy) knew exactly what to get me… another toy. Introducing my new iSight. With the 15 minutes I’ve had to play with it, it’s very cool, and will make chatting my long distance friends even better. I called my best friend Eric to see if he was home and could come online so that I could see this thing in action, but he wasn’t home.

Is this the answer that Airport Express owners have been waiting for? A USB powered remote control that can handle a variety of media apps, including iTunes. From the developer’s website: When used with AirPort Express the Express Remote provides a powerful way to locally control music being streamed from iTunes on a remote PC or Mac. It’s due to be released in November sometime. I think I’m gonna get one. Let’s just hope that it’s everything it seems to be.

Well, for those who seem to be intrigued by what goes on in my life, here’s a little update on what’s been going on. Dead Hard Drive My 160 GB drive bit the dust last weekend. I’m still at a loss for why. The upshot is that it only took about 15 minutes to get a new 200 GB drive up and running in my system. The downside is that I’ve lost everything besides my boot drive, installed applications, and my music collection (which are all on other drives).

After buying my PowerBook G4 last month, I’ve been wanting to add another 512 MB stick of RAM to it to bring the total up to 1 GB. I compared Apple’s prices to other manufacturer’s and found that the best deal was from Crucial.com. I’ve ordered memory from Crucial several times and have always found their prices, shipping speed, and customer service to be simply phenominal. I give them my business whenever they can. After two days, my memory chip came in and I went to install it.

Haiku Does anyone here know what “Haiku” is (…and no, I’m not talking about a 17 syllable Japanese poem)? Haiku is the brand-new name for an open source project that was formerly called “OpenBeOS”. How many here know what OpenBeOS is? OpenBeOS is a project whose goal is to re-create, from scratch, an open source version of the late BeOS 5. BeOS was a very cool operating system that had many modern-OS features before Windows, Mac OS, or Linux did.

Mozilla As the rest of the world is reporting, Mozilla Firefox 0.9 is now available, as well as a release candidate of Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7. Awesome. For those who were using bleeding edge builds of Firefox, you’ll need to manually move your profile data to the new folder. The Profile folder changed twice since Firefox 0.8, and FF 0.9 only moves the 0.8 profile rather than the 0.8.0+ profiles. Gmail I got a GMail invite today. I haven’t used it much yet since today was a very busy day at work, but I like how I’m told I’m using 0% of 1 Gigabyte.

I’m writing this from work because my computer is dead. Well, not actually dead, but it might as well be. It won’t boot. Now, before I get a string of “Boot to Safe Mode using F8” comments, I need to let you know that I know what I’m doing, and if it was that simple I wouldn’t be writing this post. What’s actually going on is that my computer can’t read the boot partition — which won’t allow Windows XP to load — which means that I can’t even get to where I could press F8 to boot into Safe Mode.

Whoa! I really like my new DSL.

When it comes to networking, I’m still somewhat of a beginner. I understand many of the concepts, can put together a Workgroup or Domain using Windows 2000 Server, and can generally not screw things up too much. One of the many things that I still don’t understand is what the crap is wrong with our server. I’m trying to get the internet connected to our small domain at work. I’ve got two NIC’s connected to the server: one for the DSL connection, and one for the internal network.

I’ve discovered something cool about JavaScript… not something useful, but something cool. I’ve discovered the end of the rainbow, or at least the Math object. I was sitting at home in my underwear eating Cheetos® and watching Cartoon Network this past Saturday, when something dawned on me. I recalled a conversation I had with my best frind about 8 years ago about the Mac’s 256, Thousands, and Millions of colors versus Windows 8, 16, and 24-bit color. He was saying that he was excited because he’d pushed his Windows 95 computer to display 16.

Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog Studios and Douglas Bowman of StopDesign are working with Apple to bring standards-compliance and forwards-compatibility to Apple’s very simple, elegant, and full-of-panache website. Bowman has commented that this doesn’t necessarily imply an visual changes, but I don’t believe that they would necessarily be ruled out either. It’ll be exciting to see my favorite computer company convert to web standards with the help of two leading figures in web design. I’ve also seen comments from Eric Meyer and Todd Dominey.

I had really been hoping to get a job with Netscape doing some sort of Standards Evangelism. Oh well. Anyways, I just read this post on Zeldman’s site. I thought it was interesting.

Many of us knew it was coming, but had hoped it wouldn’t. A quote from Glazblog and Zeldman reads: “People, it’s over. Netscape is dead. Nothing to see here.” MozillaZine was one of the first (and so far, the only) site to comment of the death of this web pioneer. To quote: “It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they’ve even pulled the logos off the buildings).

Either that, or I just need a new ISP. My cable modem has been cutting in and out alot over the last week. Resetting it seems to help, but I shouldn’t have to do that as often as I have. This sucks.

If you’re one of the 15–20 people who ever used the BeOS, I’m sure you were pretty bummed out when they were bought out by Palm Computing a while back. We were all going to miss our brilliant little alternative-OS. Those of you who miss the BeOS may be able to see it again very soon. The OpenBeOS Project is moving right along in resurrecting a fully-functional, completely re-written from the ground-up, R5-compatible version of BeOS 5. At the moment, the project is still called OpenBeOS.

Apparently Zeldman’s accusation that 99.9% of all websites are obsolete is inaccurate. According to this thesis, only 99.29% of websites are obsolete out of an examined 2.4 million. Zeldman has formally retracted his earlier estimate.

I’m adding a new article to the “Articles” section of this site. This article from Zeldman.com discusses XHTML 2’s few benefits and many pitfalls. This [switching to XHTML 2] would be a big deal if everyone in the web business was itching to use XHTML 2. But aside from a few academics and XML geeks, nobody we know is in a hurry to use an unfinished, unsupported markup spec that abandons familiar methods to achieve unknown benefits. Web designers have been slow to adopt even technologies that provide clear benefits and are known to work well, like CSS1.