Lianna and I went to Canada and Germany this Christmas and I finally got around to uploading some of the photos from my camera. There's more pictures on my iPhone that I'll have to upload as well but here's the first batch:
It's funny how when I innocently took a picture of a little kitty and uploaded it to Twitpic over 3 years ago, Twitpic's URL generator automatically assigned me Sex as the URL. There's a bunch of comments on there and probably even more hits from probably from a bunch of disappointed visitors looking for a cheap thrill.
I was recently featured in an article for Mobile Marketer about current Mobile efforts and some of the things I see happening in Mobile. I actually wrote quite a bit more than they ended up using and also made a few edits but overall it's a good quote to see on an article.
Check the article out here:
What do brands expect from mobile this year?
I needed to Base62 encode a URL for a project I was working on and I ended up reading and learning about the details of bijective functions in this Stackoverflow answer. The answer really outlined it nicely and I ended up porting another person's Ruby bijective encode function to JavaScript for use in my project..
(I started taking flight lessons in April of 2011 and took some notes after each of the early lessons. Expect to see some bloggings about that on this blog...)
We started off with Ponce, my 'CFI' (Certified Flight Instructor in "aviation talk"), giving me a brief overview of what we're going to be doing in the lesson and how the flight would go and what I should start studying and memorizing.
Next we walked out to the plane and Ponce showed me how to do a preflight check using the checklists for the plane.
We took off and it was the first time since I was 12 that I had taken off in such a small plane and definitely was a new sensation and feeling. We flew around the "practice area", an area near the airport behind the mountains that is designated for flight training, making some turns and did some slow flight it was a bit nervous and exhilarating at the same time.
After a few more turns, we headed back while Ponce handled all the Air traffic controls, I was flying the plane and I had a really great landing. Even Ponce said "Wow, I've never seen that before, such a good landing on a you're first lesson!" I remember thinking all during the landing that Ponce was going to take over but he never did and all I did was hold the stick back slowly. This wasn't a foreshadowing of what was to come because I struggled with landings later in my flight training.
Earlier in 2011, the good folks at Lullabot invited us (Zappos) to speak at the Do It With Drupal conference in Brooklyn, New York. They thought it'd be interesting for other Drupal users to see how Zappos uses Drupal and how we got there.
Although I head up the Mobile team now and before that the User Experience team, it was still relevant for me to talk about Drupal because when we first started using Drupal, I was heading up Front-End Development and made the decision to go with Drupal.
Instead of having 1 speaker talk for the super long time of 1 hour and 15 minutes, we opted to split the talk into quarters History & Early evaluation (my part), Technical, Platform Development and Support and have 4 speakers. I think the talk went well and feedback after the conference was positive. Here's the slideshare and link to the video hosted at Drupalize.me (requires a subscription).
I recently did a video interview together with Ian for Rob Woodbridge from Untether.tv. We discussed Zappos Mobile and overall it was a fun experience and break from the craziness that happens during the holidays working for an e-commerce company. Here’s the video of the whole thing.