Blather.org, recent blatherings from Miguelito Buzzard

Posterous, awesomeness

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:01:00 -0800

About a year ago I began talking with Juan about an idea to simplify website publishing. It seemed so obvious that the most comfortable, intuitive and practical means for sharing digital content such as text, images, etc. was email. Everyone has email and knows how to use it, so why not build a site/service that makes use of your email client as a publishing tool... as usual, we were too busy or too lazy or just too distracted to pursue this concept, but luckily someone else wasn't, enter Posterous.

All I can say is that I am glad these guys had similar ideas, because their execution is just plain awesome. It's simple and clean, elegant and expandable, intuitive and collaborative... like I said, awesome.

Anyway, I considered redirecting this domain to my Posterous feed, but I think I will wait until they allow some more customizations to the interface, for now I will be (hopefully) making more regular updates on my Posterous feeds:

Blatherings
Benjamin
Petey-Pops

Send an email to post@posterous.com and setup your feed too, it's that easy.

A voice (kinda) for aliens

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:10:00 -0700

We recently put together a little experiment around the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The overall idea is to communicate how significant the impact of these aliens is to our economy and country as a whole. While we are showing immediate stats, we don't plan on announcing the results until at least November 5. We could really use a hand spreading the word, so if you have a chance, Digg Aliens Vote.

WTF?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:10:00 -0700

This site reminds me of somthing...

Summer wrap-up

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:08:00 -0700

I'll try to keep this short for the 15-20 of you that read these now quarterly updates.

Our son Ben was born on July 23 here in SF. He's been a lot of fun to date and seems to be a pretty easy baby compared to some stories I have heard from others. I have a lot of photos and video that I haven't found the time to process, but I will get them up over at flickr as soon as I do.

We haven't traveled at all this summer except for regular visits to the country house for a little suburban relaxation. That all changes next week when Juan and I are off to Brazil to speak in Sao Paulo and Rio. The engagement is a conference for marketing and advertising design, as far as I can tell. Our talk is called "The Juanderful World of Cuban Council" and is basically an overview of the company and our work to date.

Timely Acronyms

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:04:00 -0700

I don't know when it started and I don't know why I am so compulsively obsessed, but it drives me completely insane that so many people are unaware of the difference between Standard Time and Daylight Time in their communications.

For example, when organizing a phone call or a meeting with someone's personal assistant in say, June, and that person writes "how does 1pm PST work for you?", I sometimes respond "That will be fine, should I put it down as noon or did you mean PDT?", which is totally obnoxious of me, I know... but I can't help it. I get especially bent out of shape when the acronym mis-usage comes from a lawyer, aren't these folks paid ridiculous rates to accurately communicate while crossing all of their t's and dotting every i?

I'm not sure whether it has to do with a lineage of time-sensitive engineering types on my father's side, but somewhere between the railroad engineer, the television engineer and the industrial engineer I have become a relentless time acronym enforcer and it is driving me nuts.

All I can ask is that everyone please do your part to make sure that more people understand how to properly communicate the accurate acronym when referencing the time... and if that's too complicated, then just skip the daylight savings bit altogether and reduce your acronym length by 33.3% by using PT, ET, etc.

Flow or Flop?

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:04:00 -0700

Excited about the recent release of Flow this week, I dove right in as soon as I received the release announcement. My first task was to download an entire site to update my working copy. After about five tries and multiple freezes/crashes, I finally gave up and went back to old, reliable Transmit.

Later in the day when I was having an odd problem with the development site on my local machine, but not on the hosted version, I found that Flow had overwritten one file with the contents of another. Obviously this was baffling and quite frustrating as it meant that the application had to completely mix up not only the location of the files, but the naming and contents as well.

Anyway, I think Flow is a great concept, but further development and testing is certainly going to be needed if the product is going to survive/thrive.

NC, Berlin and LA

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:04:00 -0700

It's been a busy month of travel between North Carolina, Berlin and Los Angeles. Two parts work and one part play, Now that it's over I'll be glad to not spend 40 hours in a coach airplane seat inside of 30 days for a long time, if ever again.

Charlotte was easing into Spring with bright, exploding pear trees that resemble cherry blossoms, just with less of a red tint. While in Charlotte I rented a Prius and I have to say, they're more fun to drive than they look. So much fun in fact, I have been considering trading my car now in for a newer model Prius.

Berlin was almost indescribable. I will say that I absolutely loved the city as a whole. That's pretty good considering that I was only there for three days, the weather was either snow, sleet, rain, wind or overcast and the fact that I don't speak German. While I was there my friend and childhood neighbor also happened to also be in town vacationing and though I had just seen he and his wife in Charlotte, we managed to meet up for a brief visit in a coffee shop one afternoon to escape the snow. All in all I think I walked about six miles and slept about 14 hours total.

Long enough to get home, unpack and begin to settle, Dara and I were off again. We spent a quick weekend in LA visiting some friends and eating our way through Silver Lake. We even managed to catch up with Brett and Gina who gave me private sampling of the new Rancid album due out this September. First impression, it's a damn good record.

This weekend I am off to Chicago and followed by a day trip to Cleveland on my way home next Monday. After that I aim to be grounded in SF until the end of June when my sister graduates from Kellogg @ Northwestern.

Heading to Brazil with personality

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:03:00 -0800

Juan and I have been invited to speak this summer at the Arteccom FIND conference in Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo Brazil. While we can't talk too much about what we are going to present quite yet, I can share some of the general press materials that we have been putting together. Those materials include some fun headshots that we took earlier today. I hope you get as big a laugh out of them as I did.

Music, Hospitals, Babies, Tattoos and Travel

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:03:00 -0800

The past month has been pretty eventful in a lot of atypical ways for me. When trying to break it out into categories all I end up with is "Music, Hospitals, Babies, Tattoos and Travel". So let's run through them one at a time to not completely confuse you, the reader (assuming you will even get through the first paragraph).

Music
While Tom and I haven't had a follow-up meal, there has been some more music industry related excitement, for me anyway. Back in early February I got to meet up with Brett and Gina who were in the studio with Rancid while they were recording their new album. Being a fan of both Brett and Gina as well as Rancid, this was an exciting afternoon to say the least.

February was a big month for Glen Hansard and The Frames with Glen and Marketa's oscar win. Being a longtime fan of The Frames I thought I would put up a mix here that has some of my favorite tracks from all of their albums and several of their live shows. I have mentioned the album in the track name in case you are interested in where to find a particular song version. Most of their stuff is available on iTunes, so it shouldn't be a problem to purchase (hint-hint).

Hospitals
On my way home from the recording studio with Rancid I was on the phone with Dara when I experienced two sharp pains in my chest followed by my body entering into shock. Basically I felt as though I couldn't breath, I was very dizzy, my left arm went numb and I began to black out, all while driving down the freeway at 70MPH in the dark. Luckily I managed to focus enough to pull off at the next exit while Dara called 9-1-1. The ambulance arrived and shuttled me to the local hospital where they did the normal rundown of tests and scans. Everything came back clean and I was released about an hour later with no definitive diagnosis.

I have since followed up with a cardiologist who keeps forgetting to return my calls. At this point the most likely diagnosis is a panic attack, which is different than an anxiety attack and can have similar physiological symptoms as a heart attack. Either way, I'm doing fine now and haven't had a relapse or similar experience since.

Babies
As I hinted before, Dara and I are pregnant with our first child, and this week we found out that we are having a boy. We're both very excited (nervous) and looking forward to welcoming our little one into the world on or around July 24th. We're now getting into the naming puzzle and would really love any outside advice on sites that may offer some help. If you know of any, please send an email to nonsense AT blather DOT org.

Tattoos
Ever since my father passed away almost four years ago I have been considering a memorial tattoo of sorts, but I have never really settled on anything. As an attempt to motivate myself, Ferris and I made an appointment a couple of months ago with Henry Lewis over at Everlasting Tattoo. With days left until the appointment, and realizing that Henry is particularly outstanding at birds and lettering, I decided to get a buzzard with the words "March Forth". The day my dad died was March 4, 2004 and I have always thought it interesting that the word can also be interpreted as "forth" or forward. So far I have the outline (which is outstanding on its own) and an appointment for the shading in mid April, so I will post some photos when it's all done. This makes number three, and they keep getting larger, so Dara is slightly concerned about what's next.

Travel
With NY out of the way for now, I have a trip coming up that goes SF, Charlotte, Berlin, Charlotte, SF. In an effort to try to minimize time zone acclimation, I planned it this way. But thinking about the paradigm shifts between North Carolina and Germany, I think that even if my sleep is normal my mind may be a bit twisted up culturally. We also may head to LA near the end of the month to visit some friends instead of the usual business trip.

That's it for now folks and make sure to send me some baby name websites!

Hello 2008, what happened to January?

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:02:00 -0800

It's kind of shocking that the year is already more than 10% over. It's been a busy year so far between work and home and everything in between. The holidays were nice and we definitely managed to get a little quit time with family back in Charlotte. While I was there I even managed to meet up with Chandler one afternoon at the gun range with my brother.

In January Dara and I went to New York for a long weekend so I could see the new office and catch up with everyone there. The weather was fair, kinda cold, but bearable. Though I didn't have a chance to make all the usual rounds, I did get to see Johnny and a couple of other old friends. For our trip we flew Virgin America for the first time and I have to say that these guys definitely do a few things right. The whole "Red" system of self-service is just brilliant and truly should have been implemented years ago. If you have ever been that anxious person that waits and watches as the flight attendants slowly make their way to your row with the drink cart, then you will really appreciate VA. Aside from that the relaxing lighting and music along with the entertaining safety video really made the experience enjoyable. In conclusion, I highly recommend seat 3F.

Tomorrow I am off to LA for some meetings early in the week. Again, I'm flying VA and coincidentally I am again in seat 3F both ways, just like NY, which makes me think I should only ever fly VA seat 3F to not ruin "a good thing". The trips to LA have slowly gone from relaxing and friend-filled to in-and-out business frenzies with scattered intersections of friends and food. In the "good old days" it would be a five to ten day run in Venice with a lot of focused development time and relaxation instead of constant freeway cattle drive between meetings and appointments.

Unrelated, we are looking for a seasoned Python/Django adviser/consultant, ideally in the bay area, for a large and quite exciting project that is on the horizon. This project is likely to run for 8-14 months and will be a lot of fun on several different levels. So, if you know anyone that you think might be a good fit, let me know.

One last thing... BOING!