It was fun while it lasted.
OK, maybe not “fun” necessarily, but maybe “satisfying”, in that it was nice to make enough money off my blog to cover the cost of my VPS hosting plan plus a bit of extra spending money every now and then. But, alas, as of right now, I’m ending that relationship, despite the fact that it’s been relatively good so far.
This weekend Dan and I headed up to San Francisco for WordCamp 2007, the second annual convention / get together for WordPress enthusiasts and developers.
It was a really good time, and there are so many thoughts and ideas spinning around in my head afterwards that it will be a challenge to work them all into something useful, or even to just capture them here before they get drowned out by other responsibilities. Almost all of the sessions were inspiring and thought provoking, drawing me into reconsidering many aspects of my involvement with WordPress, ranging from how I write and structure this blog to how involved I am in contributing to the community at large through development work.
There will certainly be more posts to come here on all of those subjects, but for now I’ll just sum it up by saying that I’m really glad I stumbled onto WordPress nearly three years ago, and that I’ve had a blast contributing development-wise to an open source community / project that I feel provides a real benefit to people in the real world (not just a geeky thing for programmers to enjoy, not that there’s anything wrong with that…), and am eager to do so more productively in the future.
Well, like I said before, I had originally planned to do sort of a daily update while we were in the city, but we turned out to be otherwise occupied and didn’t have much time for blogging. Even after that, I had still planned on doing a more detailed wrap up, but I think I’ll just hit some highlights and the things that I still remember thinking “I should blog about this” about…
Friday night we got in in the evening after losing most of the day to flying and the time change, and just went out to the nearest “nice” Mexican restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. I put nice in quotes, because while it was on the higher price end of the scale and definitely aiming for a more hip and trendy crowd, I personally felt the food left a bit to be desired. I think part of it may have been that we come from So Cal and it’s tough to compare the Mexican food here to there, but the other thing was that I think they were going for the “fusion” thing, where they put their own unique spin or signature on a particular classic style. While it’s interesting, I think a lot of times that just doesn’t work. Sorry, I don’t remember the name of the place so that I can recommend avoiding it, but I think for now I’ll just recommend not going for Mexican food in NYC at all - there’s plenty of other stuff to choose from.
We also talked a bit about what we wanted to do the next day, since we literally had no plans going into the weekend. I actually found that I preferred that a bit, since you can just relax and take it as you go. We had taken the bus tour and hit all the major tourist attractions the last time we were there, and I’d still recommend that for first time visitors just to get your bearings and check out where everything is, but this time now that we were more familiar, it was much more convenient to take the subway everywhere, since it takes you within blocks of anywhere you need to go, is constantly running, and is nearly free (relative to all other options) if you pick up an unlimited metro card.
We decided on Saturday (after a Starbucks breakfast) to head for the downtown TCKTS booth to see what half-price tickets for shows were available. I highly recommend hitting the downtown location, as it opens at 11am rather than 3pm like the Times Square one. In case you’re not familiar, this is a place where they sell extra tickets at a huge discount, with the only drawback being that the ultra popular shows sometimes do not have tickets available. It’s absolutely the way to go, though - the price is so much better and most shows were still available.
We picked up tickets for Curtains that night and a matinée of 110 In the Shade for Sunday, both of which were excellent. From there we took the train over to Coney Island for a day at the beach and the aquarium. Later we headed back and grabbed some dinner at a fancy steak place before the evening’s show. The next day we headed up to the upper east side, walked from there through Central Park to the upper west side for breakfast and walked around there for a bit, before heading back to midtown for the matinée. After that we did a bit of shopping and then headed downtown for dinner in Little Italy.
On Monday morning after breakfast we headed over to the museum and spent some time checking that out until it was time to go back and grab our bags from the hotel and hop back on the train to JFK. I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting some stuff all over here, but that’s what I get for waiting a week to post about it.
Wow, I’m really behind on here. There was a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to post about last weekend in NYC before I forgot, and now there’s a whole other load of stuff to post on from the WordPress con, not to mention still not having posted an update with photos of the wall I finished.
I’ll try to tackle them slowly and hope that I cover everything. Along with trying to catch up on the posts, there’s a ton of blog-related ideas and changes swirling around in my head as well, inspired by some of this weekend’s discussions. More to come on that.
Just wanted to do a quick post recommending the best new podcast I’ve heard in a while: Radio Lab.
I heard about the show from an excerpt on a recent episode of This American Life. I really liked that portion I heard there, and I just finished listening to the episode on placebo and a fascinating one on sleep and dreams.
To get an idea of what it’s like, it has kind of a similar feel to TAL, but all based around scientific studies of a particular topic each episode. Give it a try, I think you’ll like it.
I wanted to do some sort of daily update thing while we were there, but I never seemed to get around to it. I might fill in some more details later in a bigger post, but for now I’ll just give a quick summary.
We had a lot of fun. We got to see a couple good shows as well as a bunch of stuff that we didn’t experience last time. I’m still jealous of the subway system (although I realize it’s more specially suited to that denser area), and we definitely got our money’s worth out of our Metrocards ($24 for 7 day unlimited use, which gets you anywhere you need to go the whole time).
One cool aspect was that we did no pre-planning at all, we just went and figured out what we wanted to do as we went, and that worked out very well. I’ll try to post more details later once I get some more time.
Actually, we don’t leave until tomorrow morning, but it will be way too early in the morning to do any posting then…
We’re on our way to NYC for an extended weekend of fun, and the kids will be enjoying “Cousin Camp” again with Jacquie and Randy.
Check out this excellent video where Blitzer leads into an interview with Moore with a classic teardown piece (which Moore later discredits - see link at end of article) centered around his new film.
The trap totally backfires on Wolf, when Moore launches into a scathing reprimand of CNN and mainstream media in general, for all the crap they’ve pulled in the recent age of commercially dominated journalism, especially their woeful negligence around all aspects of the Iraq war.
I’m by no means a die hard Moore fan (and please let’s not turn this into a debate around any of the subjects of his films - I’m not interested), but I have to give him major props for this one.
UPDATE - the page does have links to the followup pieces as well. Part two is great also, when Wolf brings up some obscure, out of left field rumor about a Sicko showing in Iran, and Michael responds brilliantly.
I stayed up way too late last night playing this addictive game: Desktop Tower Defense 1.5.