A few years ago, my housemate Emily and I sat down for an afternoon and created Written? Kitten!, a writing motivation tool that rewards you with pictures of kittens for every 100 words you write. Since then it’s had over a million visitors and has gained heaps of fans among writers of all kinds. Sadly, I no longer have the motivation to maintain it, so I’m looking for someone to take it over. This would involve: I transfer the domain to you, and you continue Continue reading → Just a quick note to say that I’ll be in North America starting next week, for about two weeks: San Francisco April 6th-10th (meetings, coworking, jetlag recovery, tacos, etc) Montreal April 10th-15th (AdaCamp Montreal — I’m fully booked up from the afternoon of the 12th onward, I’m afraid, but have some time before that) Ottawa April 15th-19th (friends, maybe meetings, coworking, etc) San Francisco, again April 19th-21st If you’re in any of those places and you’d like to catch up, ping me! I’ve got a Continue reading → I’m terrible at New Year’s resolutions, year-in-review posts, “theme word for the year”, or anything along those lines. My best resolution of all time, back in 2002 or 2003, was “eat better quality cheese”, and I’ll never hope to match it again. Still, things are a mess for me at present and something needs to change, and today, before the “work year” starts, seems like a good day to take stock. I’m not going to make resolutions, because everyone knows they don’t stick (except the Continue reading → I seem to have had this discussion a few times lately, so I’m going to save myself the trouble of repeating it and just write down all the problems I have with hackathons. (Yes, I know lots of people have previously posted about what they don’t like about hackathons; I’ve linked some of them at the bottom of this post, if you want some other opinions too.) They’re too much commitment Me: I’m kind of interested in your thing. How can I get involved? Them: Continue reading → I often hear that making an event more accessible, or even providing information about accessibility, is “too hard” for event organisers. I contest that. I make basic efforts toward accessibility for almost every event I run, mostly in the form of documentation, and it’s not that time-consuming or difficult. I estimate I spend about 20 minutes on it for a small event at a new venue, and less than five minutes if we’re running a second or subsequent event at the same place. It’s hardly Continue reading → As I mentioned earlier today, I’m off to Europe shortly for AdaCamp Berlin, then in November I’m going to India for AdaCamp Bangalore. I’ll be leading both events, which means I get to welcome everyone and set the stage for the unconference, make sure the sessions and workshops run smoothly, and that the culture of AdaCamp meets its usual high standards. The Ada Initiative just posted this announcement and interview where I talk a bit about my experience with AdaCamp, running various community events, and Continue reading → I haven’t mentioned this on here yet so I thought I’d better do so before I actually, you know, board the plane. I’m heading over to Europe next week and the week after. The main reason I’m going is AdaCamp in Berlin, which I will be helping run, but before and after that I’ll also be spending some time in the UK and running this Growstuff event, to get stuck into some serious code with some of our UK-based developers, in London on Oct 18-19. Continue reading → tl;dr — if we usually talk on IM/GTalk you won’t see me around any more. Use IRC, email, or other mechanisms (listed at bottom of this post) to contact me. Background: Google stopped supporting open standards for IM a few years ago. Other background: when I changed my name in 2011 I grabbed a GMail account with that name, just in case it would be useful. I didn’t use it, though — instead I forwarded any mail from it to my actual email address, the Continue reading → This is a post I made on Growstuff Talk to propose some initial steps towards interoperability for open food projects. If you have comments, probably best to make them on that post. I wanted to post about some concepts from my past open data work which have been very much in my mind when working on Growstuff, but which I’m not sure I’ve ever expressed in a way that helps everyone understand their importance. Just for background: from 2007-2011 I worked on Freebase, a massive Continue reading → Continue reading → A story I got from someone who says she got it from an older Dutch woman. I wouldn’t mention the Dutch woman thing except that this story just seems so Dutch to me. Anyway. Two frogs fell into a bowl of cream. They swam and swam trying to get out, round and around in the cream, for hours. Eventually one frog gave up, stopped swimming, and drowned. The other frog kept swimming, refusing to give up. Finally the frog’s activity, splashing around in the cream, Continue reading →