5 years! And over 2,000 posts!

Anyway, I thought that this would be a good time to start--again. I've been slowly (given that Ning takes up 99% of my time -- and a fun 99% it is!) building up a new blog to reboot. For the moment it has a basic template and there won't be much stuff there. I've also decided to keep this blog in place for now. I may add 301s for the feeds soon, but I'm still thinking about the rest.

The new blog is at blog.diegodoval.com. Here is the link to the new Atom feed. Update your bookmarks!

And see you on the other side. :-)

Unrelated -- CNN permalinks stop working after a while. How to solve that? (see last year's entry)

And this year is the 5th anniversary of this blog! Surely I can come up with something special for that one. :)

This is entry 2001.

PS: I couldn't resist. :)

3 Months ago I got fed up with Windows. I mean, really, really fed up. Coincidence?

I'd been trying Vista for a long time (I first installed it a year ago, before the first full betas).

I installed the final version (from MSDN) as soon as it came out last year and I was really astonished at the amount of stuff that was either broken or didn't work right. UAC was still there, as bad as ever. Weird incompatibilities abounded. And using Office 2007 was such a strange experience (what with the different UI for Outlook and the rest of the apps and all) that slowly but surely I got fed up.

Then I read more in depth about the various security layers and DRM mechanisms that Vista has put in place to make sure you can't the see content that you'd paid for unless you have an "approved" device. Because, you see, surely you must be a digital thief if you want to use unencrypted digital paths!

So over December I planned the switch. In Jan I got a Macbook and later when we did a refresh of machines at the office, I got a Mac pro. Then I used Parallels to suck down the windows installs I had into nice little comfortable VMs that now sit on my desktop -- Vista included.

No doubt I may get tired of OS X later for some reason -- everything has its quirks, but for now, and for the last three months, I've been happy as a clam.

I started thinking about this as I wondered how to start writing again, and then it hit me that the switch probably was part of the reset process in my brain. The last several months I've been slowly (VERY slowly, about half an hour a week :-)) making tiny changes to my hosting infrastructure to make it easier to manage and cheaper -- I'll talk about that later.

Lots of other changes planned (in the same small increments!) including a redesign, a domain switch and so forth.

But for now, this is a good start. :-)

In the meantime: have a great 2007 everyone!

Last year's birthday I was still in Ireland, a few weeks later I posted about the "controversy" around a certain stealth startup called 24HL, now, of course, Ning, where I work :) -- then left Dublin slightly more than a month afterwards.

Quite a ride. I can't believe I've been back in California for almost a year. Wow.

Hm. I've literally have stayed off the blog and the site, completely wrapped up in Ning work (there's a whole lot of cool stuff coming down the pipe... just a little more patience!). But... as time goes by, blog posts start to accumulate in my head (the title for this one has been bouncing around for weeks). In the meantime, a lot of stuff happened: Russ stopped blogging, at least for a while :), E3 and the PS3 stuff, Vista getting delayed, Yahoo! and eBay, Google & Dell, more web 2.0ish activity that can be described in a long series of posts, including the whole O'Reilly web2.0-trademark-brouhaha just a couple of days ago, and a lot more.

Comments accummulated on various posts... backups lagged... etc. Weeds! Go get the lawn mower! Prepare the tools!

Ahem.

Now somehow I fell into it, just writing again. Feels good!

Btw, mentioning Russ is not random, aside from him being a good friend I think I've been going through similar soul-searching as it relates to the blog and what exactly I want to say or express with it. No, I'm not quitting, I feel I've been comfortable enough with taking these "breaks" from it as they come. This is one of the key things of a blog as opposed to something else -- it's gotta be done with passion, and you have to be able to walk away from it, otherwise it's just another fancy trap we have built for ourselves.

One of my not-really-earth-shattering conclusions from my thinking about this is that we need new tools -- the tools dictate a lot of what we say, and how we say it. We need tools that stream with us, from tiny snippets of text, thoughts, links, comments, to entries, multi-part entries, and then articles. Right now, it's not that easy to move seamlessly from one to another. And that hampers expression.

Anyway, these are just disconnected thoughts right now. We'll see if I get into a new kind of groove for blogging. Anyway, for now at least, I'M BACK! The 4-year anniversary of my blog is in just over a month. Quite an occasion to start things up again. :)

Anyway. Let's see if I can get back in the fray.

It's been a hectic few weeks, with a new release of Ning (which I'll talk about in a minute) and a 2-week visit by my brother and his wife. Last week we took a four-day road trip down the coast to LA (through Route 1, which is astonishingly beautiful), then to Las Vegas, and finally back home through Death Valley National park. I've wanted to go to the desert for a while now, and now that I've been there I know I'll be going back soon. On the Nevada-California border we stopped for a bit and there was no wind, which created perfect silence. Awesome. Highly recommended if you're ever looking for a cool trip through the area.

Then an article that's actually interesting about the early days of Sun also over at News.com. I got registered with the Computer Museum here but I keep forgetting to check their schedule. Something to keep in mind.

The Acme Coffee Challenge was not completed as expected, Mike has more details here. It was a good showing though. 75 cups. Definitely something interesting to experience but not something that I'd personally like to repeat anytime soon. :)

The truth is that we are working on some new stuff at the office and, well, the coffee will come in handy. :)

PS: we started at 5:30 PM, Sunday Jan 8th.

Next up: I demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with my newly acquired Acme(TM) Rocketsled. Wish me luck!

PS: I was in fact in awe of Mike's goal for a while, for sheer bravery if not originality. I thought: I may consume copious amounts of coffee, but 100 cups in a day! Ah, pure genius. "I will stay alert to Mike turning into a blur and report accordingly if it happens" I said to myself. Then I realized he planned to drink 100 cups over 48 hours. Treachery! I sweat coffee at that rate. I eat entire coffee plants for breakfast! Bah!

PS2: Yes. I am kidding. I don't eat coffee plants for breakfast.

PS3: Although... the general tone of this post is making me reconsider how much coffee, in fact I am ingesting. Needless to say, it's all Mike's fault.