Guess my galavanting is no secret anymore…

Ok, hopefully you got a chuckle from this but I thought this was really cool. There have been many promotions that have allowed us to place our mugs within videos but I don’t believe any have provided the realism that you get from this new one generated by the folks at MySpace with Fan Video. Just simply visit the site, login with either your MySpace or Facebook credentials and you can choose from 8 videos that all have different effects to get your avatar on either service directly into the video. You can even string up to 6 videos together. I chose 2 to bring you my little story. Once the video has been created they offer an easy way to share on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, as a link to a page (which is better quality than the embed. Here’s mine) or as an email to your friends.

I found out about the service last night from newly announced Director of Content Socialization Sean Percival (Congrats to you my friend) and I would have posted this sooner but demand went through the roof and the service went down until earlier tonight after they deployed more servers or clouds or lumberjacks I’m not too sure how they did it so fast. In any case go check it out. I tried all 8 videos as it’s very addictive. MySpace no doubt has a hugely successful viral video campaign about to launch but get there before your friends. You don’t want to be Fiddy’s 2nd best friend :)

Itching to at least get a few system enhancements I looked into where I could make some upgrade improvements. I started with my video card. I occasionally like to play games on my PC so this was a good place to start as I had an Nvidia Geforce 9800 GT with 512Mb of RAM which could use an upgrade now that I have a Samsung T240HD 24-Inch LCD HDTV Monitor capable of a 1920 x 1200 resolution. So I went to Tom’s Hardware which offers a great post every month that breaks down which video card is the best to buy at various price points. Here’s the post I read and my timing appears to have been pretty good.

As mentioned in the video there were 3 cards tied in the $150 price range. There were a few key reasons I chose the 5770 over the others. It’s a newer generation card and the only one of the 3 that supports Direct X 11. Secondly I it was the only one that supported 4 video outs. It has 2 x DVI 1 x HDMI and a DisplayPort. Lastly the card uses the newer 40-nm semiconductor process technology which uses less power and produces less heat. This makes this card the quitest of the bunch as well which is an issue for me. My last several cards were pretty loud when playing games.

So having decided which card to buy I now had to decide which company to get it from. There are quite a few of them that OEM the card and each offers small distinctions between them and in some cases they will vary in speed. I headed over to Newegg since the reviews on there usually provide some good guidance as to which computer hardware to buy and I found the Sapphire to be the highest rated of the 5770’s on there. I headed over to Amazon to see if they had the card which they did for $10 less than Newegg and no tax.

So I tested the card with Call of Duty 4 and it ran beautifully at 1920 x 1200 resolution giving me well over 60 FPS on average. It also ran very quiet the entire time. I’m very happy with this card.

I also decided to go from 4GB of RAM up to 8GB since I was moving to the 64 Bit version of Windows 7. This should offer me some more headroom to run multiple apps without worrying about gobbling up memory. For this I found a great deal on some Corsair 4 GB (2 X 2 GB) Memory Kits for $79.99 a pair. These were very cheap for some highly rated memory designed for over-clocking which I wasn’t planning on doing anyways but what the hell. They look pretty cool with their heat spreaders too. More sexiness for inside the case to go with the pretty Saphire girl which nobody will ever see.

I then decided to remove the 2 x 500GB Western Digital drives that were running in RAID 1 fashion to be replaced with a single 1TB drive. I figured I didn’t need the RAID 1 inside my machine anymore having recently built a RAID 1 NAS. I just need to make sure that I’m continually backing up to it. I chose the Seagate Barracuda ST31000528AS 1 TB SATA Version 12. I like that I’m removing one more moving part, hot and noisy item from my case.

Lastly I decided to replace my DVD Burner which was the only thing using the IDE interface. I wanted to replace it with a SATA version so I could remove that ghastly looking cable (which nobody will ever see) with a nice clean SATA version. I chose the Plextor PX-880SA 24X DVD Burner with LightScribe and 2MB Cache. This also was a high rated drive at Newegg and I purchased it there for a mere $39.

So what do I mean by syncing? Well there are programs that will keep a mirror image of a source directory to a specified destination directory. The reason I want this is because after a backup I will often move directories around and delete them. When you setup a backup scenario these changes aren’t reflected, but if you setup a sync, they are. In the past I had used a program called Second Copy that did this well but I have recently discovered two new free apps that also provided sync functionality and wanted to give them a shot as it’s always nice to have a free solution to recommend to people. More on that in a minute, but first let me share my hell with you.

So I setup the first of these new backup apps which was called GFI Backup. I decided to use my MP3 collection as the source directory for these tests (huge mistake). It appeared to be a pretty nice program with a clean and simple interface. The backup process worked great, but the setup options related to synchronizing folders was a little confusing and I couldn’t get them to work properly. So I went on to the second app called Syncback which I read about in Lifehacker backup tools roundup. I decided to create a new source directory for this test with just a subset of my mp3 files in it. I did however place the destination directory in the same root directory as the one I setup for GFI Backup. I also could not get Syncback to properly synchronize the directory. So I gave up and went to bed that evening.

The next day I went to my machine and as I often do loaded Winamp and click the play all button for my collection. I noticed that it was skipping around from track to track in the player and suddenly felt my heart sink. I knew that behavior. It meant that the data from the loaded library wasn’t located in the directory. I quickly went to my MP3 folder. I saw all my folders in there but as I poked around within directories I found them all to be empty. I then went to the destination directory on my NAS. Same thing, no files. I went into panic mode. I double and triple checked the directories but no luck. At this point I realized that something in my synchronization setup of the backup apps had gone seriously wrong. I’ll say that I never went back to try and determine what exactly I did wrong, but if it was that easy to screw things up, I wanted nothing to do with either. To be fair, they both operated fine as backup programs, but synchronization can be a little trickier and neither made that setup work easily. Also, the fact that I shared a destination directory for my testing may have lead to the problems as well. So take my mistakes with a grain of salt and if you choose to try these programs do it with some unimportant data files first so that you don’t have to worry about losing anything important. I know better than taking the actions I did for these test. I can sometimes be a bonehead.

Anyways, at this point it was time to seek out a recovery program to attempt to undelete as much of my MP3 collection as I could possibly salvage. One thing to note is that whenever you delete data on a hard disk your best bet is to stop doing any file related actions on the machine and stop using it if possible. This will ensure the chances of recovering the data. When you delete files all the data is still on the system and the operating system just sets a flag to not show them in your file system. If you start moving files around and writing new data to your system then you risk overwriting the data that is on there and thus lowering your chances of recovery. So I had used a few recovery apps in the past and needed to refresh my memory as to which were good.

I found this great Lifehacker story on the five best free data recovery tools. I had used a few of these before and just wanted to determine which would be the best for the job. Of the five listed I decided to try the two which offered the most functionality which were Recuva and Undelete Plus. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that Recuva was far better. It scanned the drive very quickly (less than a minute) to determine which deleted files where on my system. The same operation took about 20 minutes on Undelete plus. Also, recovering files using Recuva was very fast it appeared to be able to do a several within a second or so whereas Undelete Plus took several seconds just to recover a single file. Now this may not seem like a big deal but I had to recover over 15,000 files. Lastly, the ability to filter the results by a specific directory worked great in Recuva and I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Undelete Plus. Needless to say I chose to use Recuva.

(Click image for full view with details)

Recuva also had a nice feature that showed the probability of being able to recover each file that it scanned as being deleted. In my case it appeared that over 95% of the files had an excellent chance of recovery. So before I started I got an external USB hard drive I had which also had a snapshot of my MP3 collection on it from 2 years ago so at least I had something but have obviously acquired quite a bit since then. I created a new directory on the drive, flagged all files in my MP3 directory and told Recuva to go to work. After ~2 hours I was able to recover over 15k files for a total of over 60Gb of data. That turned out to be over 95% of my lost files. I was pretty amazed by how lucky I was.

I had to take screenshots (because there is no facility to save the file info) of the remaining files Recuva identified as being poor or having no chance of recovery so I had a record of them. This way I had a record of what I lost. I did locate some of the files that they listed as having a poor chance of recovery and they worked so it could be a painstaking process to try and determine which are good and which need to be replaced but at least I have a record of them. Overall I’m extremely happy with Recuva and sending this awesome freeware a donation for what they’ve done for me.

The other issue is that there was some data that was still ok and on my local drive that didn’t get deleted. I knew this because showing properties on my local MP3 directory showed that there was 5Gb of data still on it. but there was no way I was going to click individually on the hundreds of folders many of them nested to determine where the data was. Ok, if push came to shove I would have done that but I was pretty sure there was a tool to do this for me. I remembered that there are some file / directory compare tools out there and was able to find WinMerge which was recommended on Lifehacker as well (Yes, I like Lifehacker). So I compared the original MP3 directory to the recovered one and WinMerge showed me that there were 7 directories on the original that weren’t on the recovered one. Nice, so now I was able to identify these folders with data in them that wasn’t deleted and could now merge them into the newly recovered MP3 directory.

But there were still more files to be found as that wasn’t everything. Apparently some of the folders in the source still had files in them. So the issue was that I would still have to click on every folder in WinMerge to try and find which ones had data on the original directory versus the newly recovered one. That was going to be a pain so I looked into a way to do a directory listing of the source to try and root them out. I found this great tip on how to create a text file of a directory using the command prompt. This worked perfectly. I opened the file in a text editor and then began searching the file for the value “.mp3″ which then uncovered the only folders that had files in them. Bingo, that worked and now I finally was able to locate every possible file I could recover.

The last thing I want to mention is that I could have taken another course of action that would have probably insured a closer to 100% recovery. If you remember I had all the data on my NAS which also was subsequently deleted. I read about a process where if I would have taken one of the drives in my RAID 1 array out and placed it in an external case and then plugged it into my computer via USB and used a program called Diskinternals Uneraser which would mount the NAS ext2 file system and then undelete the files that way. But I figured I had done a pretty good job with my recovery process and really didn’t want to go through all the trouble and then risk any issues by putting that drive back in the NAS and losing any data on their after the process. Enough damage and time had been wasted already.

So as you can see this was a very agonizing process that I brought upon myself by not really being careful testing new software that can be very dangerous on unimportant data. I was very lucky to find such good tools to help with the recovery and hopefully this will be useful to someone else who unfortunately runs into a large data loss situation. So I’m going back to using Second Copy for backups and Synchronization which has worked perfectly in the past. I just hope I learned my lesson and can avoid this torture from happening again.

I was becoming afraid of not having redundancy with my 750Gb drive so I decided that I wanted to upgrade to another RAID 1 configuration for this data. But I didn’t want this to be done inside my main computer, I wanted to go external. Lastly I wanted the data to be shared across this external drive to my network and not dependant on my personal machine being on.

The solution was to find an external 2 bay NAS. Once I made that decision I began my research. Buying a NAS is somewhat of a tricky affair as there isn’t as many resources available as with other major electronic products. Also, there are many companies with offerings that I had never heard of. After spending tons of time Googling my way across many websites and resources I finally landed at the NAS section of SmallNetBuilder.com which offered the best information.

What made the site so great was that they offered a custom filtered charts area where I could plug in the requirements of what I was looking for and view products returned that they had reviewed and rated. One of the most important factors for me was the network speed of the device. Other things I was looking for was BYOD (provide my own hard drives) RAID, Gigabit LAN, FTP, UpNP and a reasonable price.

After narrowing down the field based on my requirements the D-Link 323 appeared to be a lead contender based on having gotten good reviews and being the lowest priced solution by far. The review on SmallNetBuilder was great but I wanted to hear the voice of the people. So I made my way to the Amazon and Newegg pages and also found that the users who had purchased this unit were happy. I was sold and ordered mine from Amazon. But before I did, I had to decide which drives to put in the unit. At the time I made my purchase in April, the best bang for buck was for 1 TB drives. I did more research and found overwhelmingly good recommendations from several people for the Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA drives which is what I bought.

When I got all the hardware I arranged it nicely for the unboxing shot you see below and then immediately dropped the drives into the enclosure. It was easier than snapping together two Lego blocks. I then powered it on and followed the directions to setup my 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. The setup is done through a great simple interface using your browser that is very similar to managing a router. That went smooth and then it was time to backup the 750Gb drive in my machine to this new NAS. Sure enough the speed ratings were true and I was happy with how quickly the process went considering it was happening over LAN and not USB or external SATA.

After I copied the data over I was able to remove the 750GB drive from my local machine which I was happy to do which provided less power, noise and heat now from my main machine. Speaking of which there is a nice setting for the NAS which allows the 2 drives to go into hibernation mode which you can configure from the menu. So I continue to navigate and learn all of the features and menu system. Some of the other features offered by the D-Link 323 that I didn’t mention before are that it also can be an iTunes server, DHCP server, Bittorrent server, and offers Dynamic DNS support. You can also control access to the device by users and groups along with defining quotas. It’s a very feature rich device. And if you still are yearning for more there is a hack you can do to get even deeper root access with even more features with mods from here.

I really like the interface to control the device. It’s very clean and simple and offers tons of features. One of the only issues I had with the unit was with the iTunes server. I didn’t plan on using it, but ended up enabling it to see how it worked. I ended up not needing it but after having enabled it I noticed that my drives didn’t seem to want to hibernate anymore. The only way to fix this was to disable to the iTunes server. Not a biggie for me, but maybe for you. Also, I’m not sure if that was just my setup or a bug in the firmware but worth investigating if that’s important to you. I was able to successfully get the UpNP running and recognized by my PS3 and in turn was able to stream all media from the D-Link 323 to it.

So in conclusion I am very happy with the D-Link 323. It was great to be able to purchase such a feature rich and high performance NAS that came highly recommended even though it was the least expensive one available. If you are looking for an external enclosure that you can tuck away in the closet next to your router, get redundancy so you don’t worry about losing data, and getting great speed over your lan, than this is the NAS for you.

see more Funny Graphs

My idea would be to throw up a site where people could come up with ideas for a topic that is voted on a weekly basis and then executed on a given day. Perhaps it could be known as #trendingtuesday.  The website would also provide an archive of #trendingtuesday’s past. I could probably throw up the site fairly easily using a CMS platform like Pligg or cobble one together with Drupal to get things started. It would also be cool to have a real-time feed of the topic on the site during the day it runs. Perhaps this is just my brain acting up since I may be over caffeinated but I thought it might be fun to do.

I’ll start it off today with the idea that got me thinking about this in the first place. I thought it would be fun to reveal things that we may be embarrassed to admit in the form of #geekconfessions. (Note: Guess I’m not the innovator here. I just searched Twitter and it appears that @direflail came up with this idea as well).  So I plan on shooting out a few tweets today using the hashtag and see where it goes.

So if this doesn’t take off, how about using a similar plan to create a trending topic calling out the actions of #douchebags? Now that sounds like a very necessary public service.

So I took these home and decided to film my kids eating them. In retrospect with the possibility of social services knocking on my door, this may not have been the best idea. But after all was said and done, the laughing, the crying, I decided to finally post the video for all to see.

The kids and I watched this for the first time in years today and we really got a kick out of it. Then the lightbulb went off in my head wondering whether they still made these gems. So we went on the hunt and found a new version of them called Bean Boozled. I guess the Harry Potter license ran out. Nonetheless these are similar but with a new twist. They put in two identical colored bellies, one tastes good, the other blah! There were some newly added flavors including skunk spray, rotten egg, baby wipes, pencil shavings, toothpaste, and moldy cheese. So I turned on the camera 5 years later to capture the kids tasting these again and not surprisingly had very similar results.

Disclaimer: Kids, please dont try this at home :)

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies for the First Time

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies Five Years Later

Bonus: I came across this rather amusing tasting review of the beans which I thought I’d share if you’re curiousity is still captured by these.

I knew that many people I invited lived pretty far away and along with that I live in Chatsworth which is known to be one of the hottest places in the San Fernando Valley. So I felt I needed to do something to entice people. I remembered an episode of Entourage (Season 3 Episode 2) that really had fun with the valley heat and decided to chop it up and use it as part of a promo video. The result is what you see below:

I hired a taco cart and beer was flowing from the keg and My wife Esther was pouring her sweet margaritas. Esther also surprised me with an assortment of awesome geek cupcakes varied enough to please everyone. KW was also kind enough to bring some Korean BBQ ribs which the taco guy gladly grilled for us.

I was looking for a cool way to crowdsource the music. So thanks to the tip by Mike Fabio I setup iTunes DJ so that any quest with an iPhone or Touch could tap into my library and vote on which songs to play. This turned out to be a really cool way to allow guests to choose music and I recommend others to offer this at their party.

I had a great time and really enjoyed everyone that came by. I won’t go into details because I think the great photos that people took speak for themselves. I look forward to doing this again.

Photos by Adrian Caluci

Photos by Polly

Photos by Michael Timmons

This year I was excited and looking forward to what many call spring break for geeks. But I did however have some specific goals. I wanted to learn about concepts and technologies that were gaining steam and see what new services were being launched. Listen to case studies and get sage advice from peers. Meet many great folks IRL that I’ve become friends with virtually. Talk to people about the X PRIZE Foundation and our current and upcoming plans.

I’m going to provide my highlights in chronological order as for some reason I find it easier to recollect it that way.

Thursday 3/12/2009
Mike Fabio prepares for our feast at Stubbs

I decided to arrive one day early both so I could get a decent night’s sleep as well as complete my registration and get a badge before the show started. Both of these decisions appeared to be very good ones as I saw the massive line formed the next morning on my way to the first panel.

After getting my badge I headed over to Stubbs for my first BBQ which is almost a rite of passage when attending SXSW. I was guided here by my colleague Mike Fabio who joined me at the conference. Mike had already eaten BBQ for lunch and had plans for a BBQ tour de force if you will while in Austin. I must say that the food was fantastic and very different than the BBQ I’ve eaten in LA. Though I will say that my favorite LA joint is Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas BBQ, which is a must vist if you’re out here.

From there we both popped out or phones to check what was going on and made our way to Ginger Man. I fell in love the minute I walked in after seeing the massive wall of draft beers available. Mike started us off with Magic Hat #9 and then I moved on to several other ales. While there I met Matt Galligan whom I had communicated quite often during the development of Lifestreaming service SocialThing. After we talked he went to battle chugging beers with Kevin Rose. Apparently the Boulder contingency seemed to be taking over the bar as I met Jeremy Tanner and Andrew Hyde. I really enjoyed talking to Jeremy and after a few beers I really started to go off on some strange tangents which led to me utter something very strange which Jeremy quickly posted as an OH and I have no idea what the context was anymore, as if that even matters. We then headed back for the hotel where I reviewed my plans for panels to attend with the must use service for the conference at Sched.org.

Friday 3/13/2009

Wake up, hit the lappy to check out what’s up and then off to the convention center we headed. We entered the building and quickly ran into another LA buddy Jason Cosper. Seconds later Marc Vermut joined us as we made our way to BBQ location #2 at Iron Works for a quick lunch before our fist session. The BBQ did not disappoint.

Since X PRIZE will be going through a much needed site re-design in the coming months I wanted to see a few panels on where things are headed both with regards to design and content. The first panel I saw was a bit of a let down as it approached design from too high a level. The second panel I went to was run by Paul Arnett of Clearleft titled Unnatural Experiments in Web Design and showcased some very innovative sites that were doing really interesting things I hadn’t seen. Paul also discussed Silverback which is an app that provides what I’ve been told is a great tool for usability testing.

During the day I made my way to the TechSet bloggers lounge for the first time. This was the first place where I witnessed the large throng of bloggers and other tech digerati confined to a single room abuzz with activity. This was definitely the place to meet, hang out and chat with folks in a nice relaxed atmosphere before the night descended making it much harder to do in the dark, loud and inebriated states that followed shortly after the conference ended each day. Much thanks to Brian Solis and the rest of the TechSet crew for providing such a great place to hang out throughout the conference as well as for throwing the party I will discuss next.

Speaking of drinking… the end of day one concluded and it was off to find our first of many parties which has been the catalyst of what has made SXSW such a legendary conference to go to. We headed for the Techset party at the Belmont lounge. This had to be the biggest party that seemingly attracted the most people. Many areas required breathing in and squeezing to make your way through the crowd. It was here that I began meeting quite a few more people. I spotted Drew Olanoff and went over to introduce myself to be greeted with a huge bear hug. Drew is such a cool guy who recently auctioned off real estate on his arm for a tattoo on Twitter for charity. I was lucky enough to hang out with him some more over the following days. Later I was talking to the aforementioned Jeremy Tanner again when Gary Vaynerchuk came by and handed us his sporty new green wristbands. I was about to reload my drink when I see Corvida walking by who I grabbed and offered up my own hug.

I spotted fellow LA techie Sean Percival with his lovely wife and chatted with them a bit. I also had to show them my limited edition autographed Lalawag card. Be sure to visit their site at Lalawag.com which serves up some very interesting details about the LA tech scene. Speaking of which, it was great to have so many of us from the LA crowd in Austin. The LA tech scene has really come a long way in the last few years with many great events and meetups taking place all over the city. In Fact, Andrew Warner & Sloane Berrent were on a panel discussing exactly how LA has transformed into such a great tech community.

Saturday 3/14/2009

First panel I headed to was Curating the Crowd Sourced World which sounded intriguing to me and had Gina Trapani on it but unfortunately I was let down. As I would come to find out over time some of the multi speaker panels with moderators were hit and miss. One thing I also came to determine is that instead of focusing so much on the panel topics and catchy descriptions, you are usually better off just identifying great speakers regardless of the topic discussed. Also, I learned that starting your day talking to other SXSW veterans to gather intel on which panels they planned to attend was the best way to determine what to attend.

I was upset about too many panels that I was interested in running simultaneously. I’d like to see them spread out more. I ended up taking a gong show approach and gave panels 10 minutes to gain my interest, if they failed then I moved on. I’d like to see SXSW add a site mechanism prior to the conference where users could show interest for a given panel. This could serve a few purposes. For one, it could help guide people, secondly it would help determine the size of a room to have it in. I went to several panels only to find standing room only or if arriving a little late a line formed were ultimately I couldn’t get in. I also didn’t hear about any adequate back-channels for the conference. Sure there was a Meebo room but I heard it wasn’t very active.

with Louis Gray

So after leaving my first panel I headed to one run by Facebook’s Dave Morin. He was discussing the search for a more social web. After his talk was over I spotted the blogging machine that is Louis Gray as he was wrapping up his thoughts for a post on his Macbook. It was the first time I’d met him but it felt like we were old friends who just hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Louis and I headed off to lunch with Allen Stern of Center Networks and Drew Olanoff. Allen was discussing his newly launched Cloud Contacts Service with us and we munched on our food which for the first time was not BBQ related.

Later in the afternoon I attended a panel I had been looking forward to titled Feed Me: Bite size info for a hungry internet. It was made up of heavy hitters in the Lifestreaming services arena including representatives from Facebook, Microsoft, Yammer and Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed. I’m a big fan and have been an active user of FriendFeed since the service began and looked forward to hearing Paul’s views. Shortly after the discussion began I decided to live blog it a bit on my iPhone in a post that got imported from Twitter. The discussion veered into the need for open standards with regards to data and I really hope this is achieved soon. We shall see.

FriendFeed Crew photo by Aaron Brazell

One of the most entertaining (and informative) panels I saw was the Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam. This discussion consisted of several folks using a poetic style to share the social media strategies each of them used for their respective organizations. Representatives from the American Red Cross, National Wildlife Federation, American Cancer Society, and the Humane Society made up the poets. Their presentations included giving specific examples of the services and methods used as well as analytics behind them to show effectiveness. The panel was so good at providing details around their efforts that for profits would have benefited by attending it. After each presenter completed their verbal stylings, a set of judges which included Beth Kanter and Holly Ross provided feedback.

Photo courtesy of Aaron Brazell

Later that evening we headed out to the Cogaoke Karaoke competition that was made up of entrants that were voted on the web to participate. The MC opened the festivities and did a bang up job to get things started but unfortunately things went downhill from there. Many weak performances followed, although there were a few bright spots but overall not quite the caliber of performances to make me want to revisit if they come back next year. This is the risk you run by allowing online voting for entrance into a competition. One of those bright spots I mentioned was Aaron Brazell who provided a nice rendition of Eminem’s Lose Yourself. After Aaron’s performance we got a small crew together made up of many FriendFeeders including Derrick Jefferson, Erin Kotecki Vest, Sean Loyless, and Marco Nunez to find another Karaoke bar to take the bad taste that was left in our mouths. So we headed outside and in three separate groups rented some bicycle chariots and journeyed to our new location. We had a great time hanging out and found a nice place that provided some very good performances which quickly wiped the horrible memory we had shortly before.

Sunday 3/15

with Matt Mullenweg

Nothing exciting to discuss on the panel front from the morning. As I started to get hungry I headed out for the WordPress BBQ Meetup. I decided to walk to this event which ended up being much farther that I had expected but it was worth it. The food was great in a nice outdoor area of a co-working space in Austin called Conjunctured. I hung out again with Jason Cosper as well as Chris Darbo who was telling me about his work at Flexilis which provides security against theft, hacking and other crap from mobile phones. The features we discussed sounded great and I’m really looking forward to becoming a beta tester. I also ran into Paul Arnett whose panel I had seen and mentioned earlier and was able to meet Mr. WordPress himself, Matt Mullenweg. I had a good talk with Matt which included discussing current things at X PRIZE where he remembered having provided the hosting for the Anousheh Ansari Space Blog for us at Wordpress.com. I had a great time talking to Matt and many others at the BBQ.

The only other Panel this day that made an impact on me was the one run by Gary Vaynerchuk. I had seen videos of other conferences he has spoken at but it’s really something to see him work an audience live. He has energy oozing from every pore and if he wanted could just be a full time motivational speaker. He’s THAT good at it. The funnest part was watching him take questions from the audience where he welcomed the countless people pitching their goods prior to asking a question which is something shunned at all other panels. His quick and direct answers to all questions asked were great amidst the sea of vagueness I had heard in other talks.

I was looking forward to the Activity Streams meetup at the end of the day and headed out to where we were supposed to meet just outside the convention center. We had a pretty good sized group and they decided to move it to a nearby restaurant. Unfortunately this wasn’t communicated well and we seemed to have lost many people on the trek over. At the meetup were many of the usual suspects whose work I follow as part of my coverage on Lifestream Blog. This included of course Chris Messina (Activitystrea.ms), David Recordon (Six Apart) , Matt Galligan (SocialThing), and Ari Steinberg (Facebook). Unfortunately, all of these guys were at one corner of the table during dinner far from me so I wasn’t able to listen to or discuss anything related to Activity Streams or anything else for that matter. This was a bummer since it was the first time I had met these guys and I would have really liked to hear about the paths each of them was currently working on and how they’re progress is going on pushing the Activity Streams initiative out.

with Chris Pirillo
Photo courtesy of Andy Sternberg

Leaving feeling a bit empty from the meetup I was off to yet another party. I was really looking forward to this one being thrown by Chris Pirillo (Gnomedex), Loic LeMeur (Seesmic), Erin Kotecki Vest (BlogHer), and Ping.fm. I was looking forward to meeting many people there. I got to Club De Ville and liked the outdoor venue. It was also not jam packed with people and you could actually hear yourself talking. I spotted Marshall Kirkpatrick and quickly went over to finally meet him. I’m big fan of ReadWriteWeb and they have provided some great coverage of Lifestreaming so it was nice to finally hang out with Marshall. I also talked to Mark Rizzin for a while about his new project which sounds great and I’m really looking forward to.

I then saw Chris Pirillo and made my way to say Hi. I’ve enjoyed watching his live performances, viewed his podcasts and written about several of his Lifestreaming projects. We both also are pretty active on FriendFeed. Once again that initial meeting felt like someone I’ve known for a long time. Chris was telling me about a follow up he has planned for his WicketPixie theme. I’m excited about what he has planned as this was the first entrant into the WordPress Lifestreaming theme game which has led to many great additional themes that have since been released. Right as I was talking to Chris and watching his live streaming broadcast I noticed Robert Scoble had just arrived. He made his way over and quickly engaged the users on the live stream. I then tapped his shoulder and introduced myself. This made for an interesting meeting as it all happened on the live stream. Not very exciting for the viewers but a pretty great moment for me having met both Chris and Robert at almost the same time and being the meat in a geek sandwich. I wandered around some more and came across many familiar faces and friends from LA including Andy Sternberg (Live Earth), Andrew Warner (Mixergy), and Mike Prasad (Girl Gamer).

I was also fortunate to meet some new LA folks here as well. I met Douglas Campbell who puts on a monthly event that I had heard about in LA called Mindshare. It was great meeting him and learning more about the event. I can’t wait to go to my first one. I also hung out with LA dwellers Evonne Heyning and Geoffrey Emery. Evonne was telling me about her Lightning Temple which sounds like a pretty amazing project. Geoffrey was nice enough to capture a few photos of Scoble and me.

Photos of my bromance with Scoble courtesy of Geoffrey Emery

Monday 3/16/2009

So this was my final day at the conference and it wasn’t going to a long one either with my plane leaving in the afternoon. I woke up late as the long nights and lack of sleeping had finally caught up to me. I packed, checked out of my room, and headed towards the convention center. I had planned on going to the panel on Beyond Aggregation to hear Louis Gray, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Micah Baldwin speak on it, but I did not make it in time. I arrived just as it was ending but was able to hang out and chat with a few folks outside the hall. I also met Phil Glockner and after everyone filtered out, he and I decided to go to the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management Destiny panel. Just look at the description:

This panel will feature the results of an ‘Iron Chef’ style competition pitting three teams of all-star Web developers from the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities against each other to develop the same Web site in each of their chosen open source content management platforms

This sounded awesome because they were using Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla (2 of which I use) for the competition. So as we made our way to the hall we were stopped dead in our tracks with a long line of people waiting to get in. Another disapointment having to miss what looked to be a great one to watch. I was able to find this review of the panel and the official site created for the panel can be found here.

with Paul Buchheit

I was in need of some caffeine so Phil and I headed down to the Hilton’s on-site Starbucks. I’m standing in line when I spot Paul Buchheit sporting a FriendFeed t-shirt on. So Phil and I sit down and begin a discussion that covered many topics including developments at FriendFeed. Paul says hello to another guy sitting at the table next to us who happened to be Sam Altman, CEO of loopt. He was telling us about new features and other interesting behind the scenes info of his service. Sam then told us he was headed to meet some friends for lunch at PF Changs and asked if we wanted to come. Phil, Paul and I all decided to join him.

After we got to the restaurant we met several guys from Justin.tv and a few other folks I didn’t get details on, but we had a great conversation. It was so valuable and pretty amazing to listen to people provide insight and details about how they run their businesses. You learn some great things just listening to these guys talk. It’s one of the big takeaways from this conference. You really get some of the best value just spending time talking to people outside and in the halls of the conference. After lunch I headed back to the convention center just to walk around for a little bit and say goodbye to people I saw before making my way to the airport.

Summary

So first off, YES this is an amazing conference to go to and lived up to all the hype I had heard about. I most definitely plan on coming back next year. I mentioned several of the issues with regards to finding the quality panels and being able to attend the over-booked ones but I plan on rectifying those issues next year. I think for a first timer I was really able to get the full effect of the experience which was the main goal. I’m already looking forward to next year.