I’ve been meaning to write a full blog post on this blog for quite a few days now, because with the conventions, McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for his VP, and now with the approach of Hurricane Gustav, there have been so many thoughts going through my mind. If you’ve been watching my Twitter this past week, you’d get an idea of what I’m talking about.

However, it’s clear that Hurricane Gustav is set to repeat history, making landfall in almost the exact same place at almost the exact same time and with almost the exact same strength as Hurricane Katrina did three years ago. There are many things that fascinate me, and hurricane seasons are one of those things. I’ve been spending this weekend tracking and watching Hurricane Gustav’s progress as much as I spent lots of time in 2005 tracking its record-breaking storms. There are so many things ironic about this storm that I’m just flabbergasted to thing about it.

But I’ll leave that to another blog post. I’m not a so-called “live blogger,” I prefer to wait until events have progressed and I’ve had the ability to digest all of the information. There are a lot of thoughts from this past week (and likely more coming up this week) that I want to blog about and I’ll be doing that later this week.

However, the important thing right now is that Hurricane Gustav is now just hours away from making landfall near New Orleans, and it looks to be a disastrous storm that even Mayor Ray Nagin is saying will be worse than Katrina. All I can say is that I hope that most people have managed to evacuate in time. For those who chose to stay, and for those who have left their belongings behind, my sympathies, hope, and prayers go out to you in the hopes that you will be safe. Here’s also hoping that the aftermath of this storm is not the kind of chaotic disaster that the country witnessed three years ago, and that it is not used for political purposes during the revving-up political season.

In short: be safe, and here’s hoping that this storm will strike as lightly and as quickly as possible so that all of you can rebuild your lives. Our thoughts are with you.

Tags: Gulf coast, Gustav, hurricane, Katrina, Louisiana, message, New Orleans, prayers, storm, sympathy

George W. Bush goes head to head with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on this really funny parody of everyone’s favorite game show that aired on Jay Leno. Thanks to Chris24 for tweeting about this video!

Tags: Barack Obama, funny, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Jay Leno, Jeopardy, parody, The Tonight Show, Video, YouTube

Yesterday, I wrote my review of 1Password, the OS X application, but I didn’t go into detail about some of Agile Web Solutions’ other offerings that help make 1Password even better. One example is my1Password, a service that AWS will provide (either for free or at cost, unknown at this point) that ties in with 1Password. my1Password is currently in private beta, and the only reason that I have access is because everyone who bought the January 2008 MacHeist Bundle got an invite. However, I have been trying it out for quite awhile, and so here is my review.
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Tags: 1Password, Agile Web Solutions, my1Password, online, passwords, review, security, service

The other day, I was showing off 1Password, one of the apps that I use most frequently on OS X, to a friend. I was subsequently surprised to discover that I’ve apparently never actually reviewed it on my blog. Well, actually, that’s partially true: I reviewed it back in 2006, when it was still called 1Passwd and wasn’t that good, but that post no longer appears on here (since I recently cleared out my fairly lame old posts from before January 2007). In fact, the only real mention that I have of it on this blog was its awesome iPhone/iPod touch app I reviewed a month ago. However, 1Password has gone through revolutionary changes since I reviewed it in 2006, and now I’ve been using the app for almost a year, and it’s been getting better and better. And so today, I’m going to make things right by reviewing 1Password, the application, today, and tomorrow, I’ll be reviewing a new 1Password service that I have invite-only access to and have been playing around with.
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Tags: 1Password, Agile Web Solutions, applications, identities, keychain, Mac, passwords, review, security, wallet

Unless you’ve been in some kind of isolated, underground cave for the past two weeks, you’re aware that the Olympics are currently taking place in Beijing, China. You’ll also recall that I had a chance to be there and do a lot of tourism there on a school trip two and a half months ago. So last week, when The Daily Show sent one of its correspondents to Beijing, it was quite interesting to watch and see some of the sights through their cameras that I was able to see through my own eyes. This is a cleverly funny clip that gives a rather, um, interesting tour through this interesting city.

Tags: Beijing, China, Olympics, Rob Riggle, sights, The Daily Show, tour, Video

Well, today is August 18th, and that means that for me, today is the first day of my senior year. The first day of my last year in high school. The first day of my last year where I will get a free, quality education unless some sort of unlikely education reform system is adopted offering a free post-K-12 education system. As the quotation goes, today is the first day of the rest of my life. (Actually, I have no idea who said that quote, so bonus points for the first person who correctly identifies it in the comments.) And so, the same way I did last year and the year before that, it’s time for me to review my summer break here on my blog as I prepare to set foot into the year ahead.
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Tags: 2008, goals, Personal, review, School, senior, summer

They say that the third time’s the charm, but I don’t know if I would apply that to the third WordCamp conference in San Francisco that took place today. While it may partially have been that maybe I’ve gotten a little bit used to it, now that I’ve been there a few times, a lot of changes happened this year that I didn’t really think were that much for the better. And so my analysis and recap of this year’s WordPress event begins…
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Tags: 2008, Automattic, BarCAmp, Blogging, conference, event, rant, San Francisco, WordCamp, WordPress

I’m at WordCamp 2008 today in San Francisco, and I’m looking forward to having an interesting but relaxing time. I have no video camera this year and no podcast interviews that I’m going to be doing today, which means that this year I actually plan to enjoy the conference.

I’m volunteering at the T-shirt counter today until 11:00, after which I’ll be free to go out an enjoy the conference. I’ll also be taking pictures and putting them on my Flickr photostream today, so you can keep an eye there.

If you’re visiting my blog as a WordCamper, I hope you enjoy my blog and are interested in subscribing. I’m also interested in finding people interested in guest blogging on my blog in the near future, so if you would be interested, please leave a comment to this post and I’ll get in touch with you!

WordCampers last year may remember when one Dr. David Klein went around WordCamp taking pictures of people and then making caricatures of them. Well, this year, he’s doing something different; he’s getting a whole bunch of WordCamp bloggers to do little mini-games on their blog. I’m going to be doing one on this blog starting at 2:15 PM, lasting for about 15 minutes, and is exclusively for WordCamp visitors to participate in (and win a prize, possibly), so check back at 2:15 as defined by the handy clock on the top of my blog.

So now, on to WordCamp!

Tags: 2008, Blogging, conference, event, San Francisco, WordCamp, WordPress

Okay, it’s my turn to participate in the WordCamp Games, sponsored by one Dr. David Klein of San Diego Chiropractic. So, without further ado, here’s the game:

Come up with new words for “comment.”

Comment is turning into one of those somewhat overused words, not only on blogs, but on forums and many, many other places. This challenge is to come up with as many new words for “comment” as you can think of–the person with the most words that can be verified by dictionary.com and make some amount of sense (in other words, “asparagus” is not a word that would be much of a replacement for “comment”) will be the winner of this contest.

You have until 2:30 PM PDT (as defined by the handy-dandy little clock on the front page of my blog) to leave a comment here with your list of words, at which point the comments will be closed. I will post the winner here shortly thereafter once I have verified that all of their words qualify, and you’ll get instructions on how to claim your prize from Dr. David.

Note to DK: I’m providing five extra minutes since this game is in the middle of Matt’s State of the Word and is a little bit harder–sorry to keep you waiting. I’ll try to have the winner listed here by 2:40-2:45.

So what are you waiting for! Hie thee hence to the comments section and share your suggestions for what they should be called instead!

The winner: is Dr. David Klein, the only one who submitted anything before time ran out.

Tags: comments, game, San Francisco, WordCamp

This past week has been my last week of summer; I will be returning to school on Monday to start my senior year. It’s taken a full summer, but I’ve finally adjusted to the fact that I’m actually going to be a senior–nevertheless, my first days as a freshman from three years ago still feels like just a few months ago. Interestingly enough, though, I’ve spent more time this past week doing school stuff than anything else.

On Monday afternoon, I arranged for this year’s new Peace Club officers to get together at Starbucks in order to discuss stuff for the new year–goals, procedures, etc. I was actually there as an outgoing officer because I’m no longer the president of the club (though I still hold claim to the title of founding the club almost three years ago, not to mention that I’ll continue to be a member). The club has a new president who has a lot of new ideas, and it’s my hope that the club will keep going even after I graduate.

I am, however, a member of my school’s Leadership class this year. I probably should have joined the class a year or two ago, but my busy class schedule kind of prevented that from happening. This year I’m in the class, and even though my run for the slot of Student Body President last spring was unsuccessful, I’m still in and have jobs to do. They’ve actually given me a few responsibilities: I’m their representative to Aragon’s parent organization (which is no longer a PTSA, but since I still know the people and am familiar with the territory, I’m probably the best pick), one of their representatives to UASB (a group of representatives from the student bodies of all seven high schools in our district), and also going to be in charge of maintaining the new website that they want to put together this year. Leadership met twice this week–first for a few hours on Tuesday morning when we found out our responsibilities and did some getting to know each other activities, etc., and then on Wednesday morning, which was our school’s Freshman Orientation. In addition to helping to put on the orientation, we all got to lead tour groups throughout the school and answer other questions from the freshmen.

Yesterday, Thursday, ended up having me more involved in planning for the school year than I would have anticipated. You see, at this point, I’ve pretty much completed all of the math offered at my school. I did my first year of Algebra in 7th grade, Geometry in 8th grade, second year of Algebra in 9th grade, Pre-Calculus and AP Statistics simultaneously in 10th grade, and AP Calculus BC in 11th grade. I’ve got 40 math credits already on my transcript and no more math available at my school, so I was planning to take Calculus III, a semester continuation of Calculus, at the College of San Mateo in the morning for first semester only, and then transit down to Aragon for the rest of my classes the rest of the day. My classes would be Orchestra, AP Government/Economics, English, Biotech, Law & Society/Psychology, and Leadership.
However, my counselor called me up yesterday morning to give me some bad news: my schedule was impossible to put together. This was mostly due to the fact that so many of my classes were only available during single periods: my CSM math class had to be first period, Orchestra has to be second period, Leadership has to be fifth period, and Law & Society/Psychology has to be sixth period. That left third, fourth, and seventh periods for the other three classes, and none of them were offered during seventh. And so, after doing a lot of debate with myself and my parents, I ended up dropping that math class at CSM (after confirming that I could return the $125 textbook to the CSM Bookstore for a full refund), since in terms of its importance to my grade, my graduating credits, and my personal interests, it was probably the lowest priority. After all, I’ve already got 40 credits worth of math stashed up from the past three years, more than enough to graduate. It does completely change my plans for this school year, but unfortunately, that’s what you have to take when life throws it at you.

So hopefully the fact that I’ve been going through all this school stuff this past week means that my first week of school, next week, will be better and more painless than it has been in prior years.

Tags: CSM, freshmen, Leadership, math, meeting, orientation, Peace Club, Personal, schedule, School, summer