This made me laugh pretty hard, so I had to share it.
Credit to Sean Bonner on Twitter for this.
A bad day at the station
In my time in radio, I’ve been apart of my fair share of absolute train wrecks. Those broadcasts that start off innocent but head straight down the drain. On the air, it all works out and everyone does their best to maintain some sort of professionalism so it looks like what happened was supposed to happen, but behind the scenes, everything has gone to shit.
Global BC’s noon newscast had that happen this past Monday, and they played this one off beautifully.
Dare I say, this video has a good chance of going viral…
Why sports are pretty cool some times
I was at BC Lions vs. Saskatchewan Rough Riders game this past Friday, working the radio side of the play by play broadcast from BC Place. I’m not the biggest football fan, but the passion and excitement of the game is always what draws me into watching a game from time to time.
Finding this clip on YouTube, this game had two great elements to it. A ridiculous comedy of a play that results in a touchdown combined with pure athletic power on display in the field goal block towards the end, the real reason I’m posting this. Seeing that happen on the field in real time was amazing.
A new design to johnbollwitt.com
I’ve reworked the design to my website to challenge my limits in terms of web design. It’s taken me about a month or so to get the overall concept down, but it was time to do something different in order to push my boundaries with what I know and am comfortable with. The various sixty4media projects that we’ve been working on has made me think about this a lot, and a recent project for my day job saw me take the website for one of the radio stations I work for, The Beat 94.5, to a temporary overhaul into a complete WordPress site.
The basic inspiration for this design was a hot afternoon while drinking a Vitamin Water, something that I’ve become a fan of over the past year. Looking at their label, I found myself admiring the simplicity of the design to market their product. When it comes down to it, it’s just text and colors. No fancy graphic logo or mascots. Text was the only thing selling their product, so I found some inspiration in that.
For the most part, this effort was one of design over function. I’ve asked for opinions of some folks that I really respect and taken their feedback, which should never be overlooked. I tried to incorporate how other people felt when they saw it but then tried to one up the recommendation in order to push the personal challenge ever more.
If you find problems with the site, be sure to let me know. Any good web designer will tell you that any project, especially something to do with your own site, is constantly in development. You’re truly never satisfied.
San Francisco and WordCampSF 2009 Slideshow
We’re home from San Francisco, and it felt great to get back to the PNW. When you’re traveling like that and staying in a hotel room for a few days, it’s your own bed that you start to miss.
That’s not to say that we were all ready to leave San Francisco. That was my first time being there, and we saw quite a bit for only being there for not that long. This happens when you take an impromptu walk for about five hours. Combine that with getting around for all the WordCampSF events, the trip kinda wiped us out in the very end.
Here’s a slideshow of all the photos that I have posted on Flickr from the weekend.
Hitting the San Francisco ground
The original plan for today was to take part in the WordCampSF Developer Day down at the Automattic offices, but after a late night at the party and Dale having his return flight home later in the day, we thought it would be a shame to not get out to experience the city some more. Neither Dale or I have been to San Francisco, so it was a easy decision to make, even though I’m sure there was some really great things talked about at today’s developer sessions.
Needless to say, I took my camera along and gathered about 50 shots during our journey. We spent most of that time on foot, and when they say that this city is a tad on the hilly side, we experienced it wholeheartedly.
Tomorrow afternoon we leave this city, and it’s been a really great experience to visit and see as much as we have. San Francisco is an amazing place that could really grow on me if given the chance. I can’t say that I’m a fan of the way the temperature fluctuates almost minute to minute, but no place is perfect (especially if you visit Vancouver for a week during the nearly month long streak of rainy days).
If you would like to see more photos from today, view them here.
WordCampSF 2009: That’s a wrap
WordCampSF 2009 has come and gone, and the day was everything you could really want from an event that is put on by the group of people who have the day to day job of making WordPress be everything that it is. The day stayed fairly well on schedule, the food was excellent, there was an abundance of water (which is always a huge thing for me personally when it comes to any event or conference), the location was a perfect fit, the wireless was blazing fast, and there was plenty of places to plug into when your battery was running low (aside from the minor issue of a circuit breaker tripping in the downstairs room a handful of times during an afternoon session). I’m really not one to complain about many things, but there isn’t very much that I can complain about when I try to think about it.
There were a lot of great people that I ran into today as well. It was great to see Lloyd and Lorelle again, and I even met a developer who came all the way from Orlando to be at this WordCamp. When you have the chance to be around a group of people like this, especially in a city like San Francisco, you’ll make that long journey to spend a weekend talking about all things WordPress.
Steve Souders had a really good session about how to make your themes faster when it comes to page load times, and Scott Porad gave an interesting session on what goes on in the empire that is known as Pet Holdings, Inc., home to I Can Haz Cheezeburger and many other hilarious sites.
My time at the Genius Bar was relatively slow, but I did get asked at least one question as how one gets a basic, entry level to HTML because the person felt that might help them as a user with WordPress. That was a really tough question to answer, and I could only think to direct him to the WordPress Codex. I’ve been doing this stuff since I was about 14, and a lot of that was trial and error combined with simple reverse engineering. It’s not so much about having trouble with teaching what comes naturally as much as it’s tough to teach what took years to just make sense, so I hope I helped that person out a little bit.
In all honesty, I spent a large part of this afternoon reading through some of my RSS feeds on Google Reader that have been piling up over the months. I’m still not used to having a laptop that actually allows me to function on a very efficient level. My old PowerBook G4 was very sluggish, and this weekend has been one of discovery in terms of what I can actually do with this beautiful MacBook Pro. I spent my time at the Genius Bar doing some padding of my own genius by plowing through the various WordPress related feeds that I’m subscribed to and bookmarking things of interest into my Delicious bookmarks. If you want to get an idea of what I’m finding interesting, that’s a good place to check into.
Tonight is the post-WordCamp party at the Automattic headquarters on the San Francisco waterfront, just near AT&T Ballpark. It will be another chance to talk to people and get to know this community of developers and users more, and that’s what is really important when it comes to these types of gatherings. These are the people who are making the world get better and better when it comes to the Internet.
We also know how to have fun. As Matt Mullenweg said in his session today, “If you make a feature request at the party tonight, you have to do a shot.“
Adding WPtouch to my WordPress site
Hot on the heels of today’s WordCampSF 2009, a recent survey on Twitter by Matt Mullenweg showed that two of BraveNewCode’s plugins for WordPress took number three and one.
WordTwit is something I’ve been using for some time now, and it’s a must have add-on that automatically posts updates to Twitter when you publish a post. Version 2.0 has brought on some great improvements that keep the plugin simple yet very powerful.
Taking number one is WPtouch, a plugin that makes your WordPress site optimized for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android mobile devices. It’s been available for some time now, and I’ve been very slow to getting it installed onto my site. Call it being lazy because it’s a very quick and easy process to upload it to your WordPress installation, activate it, and you’re done.
Dale and Duane are consistently working on improvements to the WPtouch infrastructure, making it better and better with each release. Keep your eyes on their blog to get the latest news on what’s next.
Crusing along at WordCampSF 2009
After a GPS and Google Maps adventure of helping our taxi driver get to the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it’s been a jam packed morning at WordCampSF 2009. And actually, it’s been very relaxed and chilled in terms of the sessions so far today.
Andy Peatling gave a great session on BuddyPress, Matt Cutts from Google had a variety of great insights when it comes to SEO and your WordPress site, and the “State of the Word” by none other than Matt Mullenweg himself was great. I learned a lot about the history of this CMS, and the future looks really promising for WordPress on multiple fronts. It’s one of those days that makes you excited to be a developer and gets those ideas cranked up in your head.
There have been a variety of great announcements that are going around the circles, and I can’t even recall them all. It’ll take a little while for me to digest them all and give my insights to later, but a lot of what I’ve seen today make our projects with sixty4media clients look even more exciting when it comes to current and future endeavors.
Needless to say, there is a lot more to check out today. The afternoon sessions are getting ready to kick off, and I have my time at the Genius Bar at 4:55PM to 5:45PM. If the morning has been any preview, the rest of the day should be pretty kick ass.
Wandering around downtown San Francisco
We just got in from a small journey around the downtown area of San Francisco, so I thought I would make a quick post with various photos from our venture with John Biehler after he got into town this morning. Rebecca has a pretty good group of photos you can check out as well.
You can see all of my photos from our trip to San Francisco in this flickr set.