Actually, other than being tired from having a four week old child at home and shooting 1000 pictures (thankfully, I didn’t post all of them), this year’s Gnomedex was distinctively lacking in an aftermath.

No controversy (I think) and lots of great speakers, ideas and attendees wrapped this year’s meetup into the best Gnomedex yet. I met a lot of really nice folks who wanted to share their ideas, projects, tattoos and good will.

My top moments at Gnomedex this year

• Scott Maxwell - Mars Rover Driver
• Beth Kanter raising $3700 in aid for Cambodian kids
• The Hallway Conversations - always the best reason to go to Gnomedex, the people.

What happened at Gnomedex?

There are lots of great summaries of the show out there, so I won’t give you mine. Here are some of the best.

• CenterNetworks - Great overview and highlights from Rick Turoczy, whom I wish I met.
• Derek Miller - Gives his Twitters a full grown blog post
• Beth Kanter - The Value of Attending Gnomedex: Priceless
• Chris Brogan

Thank you

A huge thanks to Chris, Ponzi and the Gnomedex crew for all their hard work again this year. You guys put on the best show and attract the best folks time and time again. I’ve mentioned before that despite all my years in the Internet biz, Gnomedex 2006 was my first “Internet” conference. It’s now the only one I can’t miss every year.

Finally, Beth Kanter via Dave Delaney summed up Gnomedex 2008 in eleven words:

Use technology for good and it will make you feel good.

Had a great time at this year’s Wordcamp in San Francisco. I met a lot of great people and had a lot of great conversations and I think, got some pretty decent photographs of the event.

I did have some mixed feelings about the event, but I recognize that creating a low cost, high quality confernce a is a series of trade-offs and I think the Wordcamp organizers made a lot of good decisions.

• Two tracks, one for users and one for devs.
  This was smart as it got everyone together in the same facility on the same day, and I’m not a dev, so there were no decisions to make :-).
• The UCSF facility is awesome.
  Plenty of space to run the two track event and let people spread out, take notes, Twitter, blog, process photos etc. The only problem with this place is, it’s out in the middle of nowhere. I suspect those that drove were pretty happy with parking.
• The WiFi was great!
  (But I still used my EVDO card to let other folks use the bandwidth). This is a pretty common complaint at events and the UCSF folks clearly had some bandwidth and a well managed network.
• It felt big.
  This is both a point for and against the conference. I miss the intimacy of the Swedish American Hall, but I’m excited for Wordpress’ explosive growth. I didn’t get to talk to everyone I wanted to, but there is always the Internets.

I didn’t take many notes, but I did take a lot of pictures. Here are some links to folks who did blog.

• Top 10 Wordpress plugins
• All day coverage - The Web Life
• All Things D
• Lorelle on Wordpress
• Ma.tt’s list of photographs

Finally, a huge thanks to Matt and all the folks who helped with the conference.

I switched from AT&T in 2001 to Sprint, and I really had not looked back. I had AT&T ever since they bought Cellular One and their Frankenstein analog/digital network was great when I was using my Nokia 6120. That network (or networks) was ubiquitous as I called people from every inch of California backcountry and rarely, if ever, had problems.

Then, they switched to GSM….

Which worked…

Nowhere.

Sprint to the rescue

I dropped AT&T just after going on a cross country road trip where my phone worked very few places and my girlfriend’s (now wife) phone worked everywhere. Sprint’s service had been really great for me. I even have an EVDO card from Sprint that works beautifully. Sadly, they didn’t get the iPhone and I knew that it was a matter of time before I switched back to AT&T’s service.

Surely, AT&T’s network is better now, right?

That said, switching to AT&T had been largely uneventful (the phone doesn’t work as well as Sprint in my house, but it does work). I spent the last four days in San Francisco and had a completely different experience.

My iPhone worked somewhat at the office downtown, but I dropped about five calls during the day. The phone was completely unusable at night, at my cousin’s in the Castro or my friend Becky’s house. When I was on the network rarely did I ever see 3G and thus left it off to not consume battery power.

Too many people or bad chipset?

So, I’m not completely oblivious to the problems the iPhone has been having since launch. Most recently, there have been hopes that the problems can be solved by a simple firmware update or worse a hardware recall.

“What I was told was that 90% of the disconnects are initiated inside the phone, which would exonerate AT&T. Most of the disconnects are being generated by crashes in the driver code for the 3G chip, which comes from the chip vendor, not something Apple written and outside of Apple’s direct control.”

Now, I’m not a network engineer, but I don’t really buy that it’s a software problem. Maybe it’s my past experiences with AT&T (and lots of others with a similar experience with the Edge iPhone), but the differences between Seattle and San Francisco’s networks are fairly stunning and so far, I’ve only had problems in SF.

SF - How has your iPhone experience been?

This sucker would be going back if I lived in the city. To be generous, my experience has been pretty sub-par. How about you?

Stephen Colbert was waving around his iPhone last night in a tirade against Jobs’ “kill switch.” I thought it might be interesting to see what apps he has on his iPhone.

Beyond the standard apps, AIM, Facebook are the most obvious, but I can’t figure out what the last one on the right is.

Anyone have any ideas?

UPDATE August 18, 2008

I love the Internets! I posted this picture on Flickr with the same question and thanks to my new pal and fellow Flickr user, Jose D. Lopez, we’ve got an answer!

Apparently, the mystery app on the Colbert’s iPhone is truphone, a VOIP app for the iPhone. I haven’t tried the app yet, but I do have to wonder, why would a guy like Colbert need a VOIP app? Maybe being a cable news anchor doesn’t pay all that well?

I kinda doubt it :-)

Here are a couple of events you can spot me at in the next couple of weeks.

Wordcamp 2008

While I haven’t blogged as much in the last year as I would have like to, the crowd that Wordcamp attracts is a great one. Great presentations of the past have included Jeremy Wright, Rashmi Sinha, Om Malik and John C. Dvorak.

This year’s lineup looks to be just as promising.

Wordcamp SF 2008 takes place this Saturday, August 16, 2008 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in in San Francisco, CA.

Here are some of my pictures from last year’s Wordcamp.

Gnomedex 2008

It’s kind of funny, for all the years I’ve spent in tech, Gnomedex 2006 was really my first tech conference. Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex conference always has good presentations up front and even better conversations in the hallway.

Hell, if nothing else, I like going to see who is going to get obliterated by Dave Winer (last year was Jason Calacanis).

Gnomedex 2008 takes place August 21st through 23rd, 2008 at Bell Harbor Conference Center here in Seattle, WA.

Here are some pictures I took at Gnomedex 2007.

Meet up?

Drop me a line if you’re planning on attending and would like to meet up.

If you live under an advertising rock like I do, you rarely see political ads but I do frequently watch the Daily Show, so I catch the particularly interesting ones.

A recent McCain attack ad against Obama likened the Democratic candidate to a vapid celebrity that wasn’t ready to lead. Paris Hilton (one of the celebrities) created a response to the video presented below.

Hilarious stuff from Ms. Hilton and the good folks over at Funny or Die.

(via Laughing Squid)

I share a group calendar with my coworkers at Boxbe and I don’t always remember to update my “cloud” calendar to be inline with iCal. This pretty much solves that problem.

What’s CalDAV?

CalDAV is an open standard for sharing calendar information from a desktop computer with a server. In this case, I’m sharing iCal calendar information with Google Calendar and my co-workers can see my schedule.

Previously, I could publish my calendar to Google Calendar, but I couldn’t make any changes to it on Google’s servers. Supporting CalDAV makes this works in both directions.

Setting up

It’s pretty easy to set this up. Here are instructions for setting up iCal and Google Calendar.

The only real trick is getting the URL correct for your calendar which is a URL that contains your Gmail address https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/ [ your Google Calendar email address ] /user.

There are some known issues, but nothing there was a show stopper for me.

I just started using this today, so I’ll let you know if I have any issues with it.

[via Daring Fireball]

About to get on a plane and head down to the San Francisco Bay Area for the annual Maker Faire this weekend.

This is the first Maker Faire I’ve attended and I’ll be bringing Heather and Olivia in tow for the event. We’re all pretty excited for some hard core nerdery this weekend.

What is the Maker Faire?

From the site:

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things.

The event takes place Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds.

If you are unfamiliar with the Maker Faire, here’s a little video.

If you’re going and want to meet up, call me at 415.297.4215. Alternatively, I’ll be on Twitter with status updates all weekend, so follow me here. Hope to see you there.