I’ve posted some videos before of the amazing Danny MacAskill showing off on his trials mountain bike, but check out this video of similar tricks and stunts being done by him and two others on a $20,000 road bike!
My Next Chapter At Automattic: VaultPress
When I first joined Automattic, I was a member of the VIP Team which is in charge of helping our enterprise clients host their large websites on our platform. After doing that for three and a half years, I got a bit burned out and was given the opportunity to switch to our Janitorial team. Janitorial is the name of the team that handles all of our internal tools and other things that slip between the cracks at Automattic.
Now it’s once again time for something else. As of tomorrow, I’ll be joining the VaultPress team who are in charge of our backup and security product for self-hosted installs. I will be helping both with development as well as any technical issues that arise from our support requests. It should be quite interesting and exciting — I’m looking forward to it!
LaFerrari Unveil
I was lucky enough to get to see the 1.3 million dollar latest Ferrari supercar earlier this week. What an amazing car! Here’s some photos I took:
I also took some video of it revving (forgive the momentary sideways video):
If you want to see even more photos, here’s some from better photographers:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/122085736@N06/sets/72157651309345995/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/the_stig63/sets/72157651340170995/
Five (And Three Quarters) Years At Automattic
Yesterday, March 8th, was my official fifth year anniversary of being hired at Automattic. I say official because I actually started my trial the previous June and by that fall was doing fulltime regular duties. However no one at the company except perhaps HR realized that I hadn’t been hired on fulltime. I just kept submitting invoices and doing my job. Automattic was a lot more unorganized back then, both with trials and the onboarding process!
It’s been a wild ride and I have no plans whatsoever to go anywhere else. I’m here for the long term and I absolutely love it. It really is a dream job for me. Did I mention we’re hiring? 🙂
Here’s to the next five years!
Lastly for fun, here’s a photo from the first Grand Meetup that I attended with 40 of my coworkers:
Compare that to the latest Grand Meetup last fall when we had about 260 people there! We’re up to 306 as of this post.
New Viper Tires
After 24,000 miles, my front tires wore out due to the camber that my car has (the tires are tilted slightly). $522 for the two mounted and installed. Ouch.
Spectacular Jet Fighter Videos
The first video has about 30 seconds of black and white bomb footage from Afghanistan. If you’d rather not see that, skip to 2:10.
Ken Block’s Gymkhana Seven
Ken Block has released another video in his Gymkhana series, this time set in Los Angeles. Pretty cool!
My Office View For The Week (Estes Park, CO)
My WordPress-Branded MacBook Pro
After four years at Automattic, you are given an awesome MacBook that has been customized by ColorWare to have a glowing WordPress logo instead of an Apple logo as well as being painted any color you wish.
My four year anniversary of being officially hired was last March (I was also on contract for 9 months) but as one of the handful of Windows users in the company, I originally opted to pass on the custom MacBook and stick with normal Windows laptops. I’ve used Windows for 20 years now and my primary machine is a very powerful desktop computer that I’ve built for gaming.
However I recently tried to use a Mac for something and realized that I had absolutely no clue how to use it. I didn’t even know about Finder! Yeah, pretty bad.
Additionally I saw some very cool looking customized MacBooks at my company’s annual full company meetup that made me want one too.
So I decided to get one after all and I’m super happy I did! It’s absolutely beautiful and I can install Windows on it so that I can use both operating systems.
Specs:
- 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina screen
- 3.0GHz Dual-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz
- 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
- 1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage
Here’s how they do the custom logo:
If You Aren’t Watching “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”, You Should Be
John Oliver of The Daily Show fame has been hosting his new show on HBO for a little over five months now. If you haven’t been watching it, you really should be.
While The Daily Show often covers important topics, it doesn’t have the opportunity to do so in depth because it’s hampered by the fact that there are commercials and guests cutting into the air time.
John Oliver however dives deep into just one or two subjects to make a much stronger point about the subject being covered. He has no guests or commercials.
For example his latest episode had a really striking piece about asset civil forfeiture by police. While that sounds dry and boring, he makes the subject matter compelling and tops it off with a bit of comedy to bring it home. Trust me — it’s worth watching this video until the end.
The outtakes are worth watching too.