Those of you that follow my Twitter feed probably noticed that I almost made it to Serbia about a week ago. I was scheduled to fly over there to spend a month helping out our software development team, but at the last minute it all fell apart. It appears that all the stars at work have realigned, and I’m most likely heading to Serbia this week. I’ll be gone most likely for around four weeks, and will be getting a small apartment out there. My flight will most likely take me from Vancouver to Frankfurt, and then onwards to Belgrade. From Belgrade, I’ll be taking a car or a train up to Novi ...

Also, if you still want to be eligible to win a Nintendo Wii, head on over and fill out the survey. I haven’t been very quiet about my recent reservations about Google. I really don’t think they really have any amazing products any more, and are heading in a downward spiral. People used to brag about Google’s flat corporate structure as a huge bonus, and at first it seemed really appealing. But after recently visiting the company’s main location in MountainView, and talking to a few people, I’m more of the opinion that it’s hurt them more than it’s helped them. In fact, I think part ...

I’m just heading out the door to meet my fate – I get the results of my MRI back today, and should know whether or not I’m having surgery again on my eye socket. I meant to wake up today and do a humorous post about boxer shorts, but I probably won’t have time until later tonight. I’ve had my head down deep in work the last few days. Part of that has brought to my attention a PHP framework called Symfony. I’ve spent about 30 hours playing with it, and I can say that’s fairly amazing, even though it’s a bit daunting at first. All these people who swear how awesome Ruby is should ...

Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for WordPress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory. A snapshot of the media player The main benefit of the way I’ve done it is that ...

There are a bunch of guys over at my place right now, messing around with blogs, media, podcasts, and of course, beer. Right now it’s John Bollwitt, John Biehler, and Boris Mann is downstairs with the next shipment of beer. I’ll update this as the day/night goes on. We all have a few projects we want to do. I’m currently moving all my websites over to Media Temple, which is basically easy but requires a bunch of grunt work to pull off. After that I’m going to attempt to make really awesome movie/mp3 player for WordPress. John Bollwitt making scrambled eggs, photo by John Biehler Wow, ...

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology ...

Lately I’ve been noticing a ton of problems over in Facebook land. First of all, alot of the searches seem to return inconsistent results. Sometimes certain friends will appear, and another times they don’t. It seems to be entirely random, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass once you cross over a 100 friends or more. Local gastown-walking-guru Rod Bruno has also had his account randomly deleted several times now, with no apparent explanation. Also, from time to time when I try to login I get the “your user account is down for maintenance” message, and then told to try again later. Maybe ...

About six months ago I released the Crossroads wordpress plugin. I haven’t really kept up to date with the usage statistics for it, but today I stumbled upon them. There are currently 370 authenticated users, generating around 20,000 API calls a day to Flickr. Not bad. ...

Photo by Kris Krug Starting at 1pm this afternoon, a group of internet enthusiasts will be gathering down at the Bryght offices for some food, drinks, Nintendo Wii and lots of fun. It’s going to be a chance to mingle with like-minded people, enjoy some music, and even catch up on whatever internet-related project you currently have on the go. I’ll be meeting up later tonight with Kris, Kim, Boris, Rebecca, John, and a whack of other people I haven’t met yet. I think Kim even challenged me to a drinking contest, something I’m sure she’ll regret tomorrow. ...

Tonight I found myself down in the gastown area, having a few beers with old pal Boris Mann down at the Bryght offices. He was nice enough to invite me to some of the Thursday night BBQ lovin at his offices, and introduced me to the ever-sought-after “Save On Meat” store around the corner from the offices. Photo by Roland TanglaoAfterwards, I stuck around and hung out for the Drupal monthly Vancouver meetup and learned both about Drupal 6.0 and some of the Install Profile work that the guys at Bryght have contributed back. I’m in the process of setting up a new website with a different ...

Well, it’s only been a little over a week since I open sourced the plugin used on this website. So far, based on the flickr API key statistics, it looks like 25 people are using it, which is pretty cool. A couple of people have emailed me a few suggestions, so I’m gonna try to release a new version soon incorporating some of them. If you are using it, then drop me a line and let me know! ...

I finally cleaned up the main plugin for this website enough that I’m ready to release it to whoever wants to test it out. You can read about it and download it from the Crossroads Page. Basically all the flickr pieces on this website are handled by that plugin, so if you like what you see on this website, then feel free to test it on yours. I still have a ton of work to do on it, mainly in the speed optimization area, but I figured it’s good enough now for some people to test out. Enjoy. ...