I just read over on O’Reilly’s Linux blog that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad has a blog but is spreading malware with it, albeit only to IP addresses that come from Israel. Amazing, but guarantees that Silicon Valley will continue gaining a steady stream of good developers and technical folks from Iran. The Iranian community here is quite large and very influential.

Update: turns out this story was false. Sorry for passing along a hoax.

OK, I just purchased a Mac. A 17-inch MacBook Pro. I was forced into this by HD and wide-screen video formats. Windows Movie Maker doesn’t do it (it does on Windows Vista, but I can’t use beta software to run my business). Apple’s software does do HD today. I don’t even need to wait (there’s a reason why Microsoft’s Channel 9 and On10.net aren’t wide-screen or HD and it’s spelled Movie Maker). And, anyway, most of the video community here uses Macs (I learned a lot from watching Eddie and Ryanne edit their videos about FinalCut Pro). So, I’m going along for the ride. So, why am I posting this? Cause I just read about Dave Winer’s crashy experiences with his Mac.

Last week on the way home from Montana Ryanne was editing her video on her Mac. The app just suddenly disappeared from screen. In my book that’s called a crash. I found that to be very strange cause the hype on Macs is that they never crash. But, those commercials are so strong. The hype is so strong. That I believe that the Mac is perfect.

Ahhh, are the Mac faithful is Patrick Scoble ready for me getting a Mac? We’ll find out. Irina started calling him “lemming” because all he would do is talk about how cool Apple is all week. It does get tiresome, doesn’t it Irina? Maybe I’ll join Guy Kawasaki’s evangelistic hoardes.

Don’t worry, this post was typed on a Tablet PC. All is not lost for the Windows faithful.

I’m on the phone with Rod Edwards and he’s the sole person involved in BlockRocker. This is a cool mashup — all based on geotagging, which is the use of location data. For instance, I could stick my photo on a map by using geotags. I like how he built some cool tools for people who want to add geotags to their posts, it’s really easy. You just find your location on a Google Map that he’s embedded in his page and it spits out the HTML code that lets you geotag your posts. Here, his tool created this HTML code:

See this post’s geographical context.

I just copied and pasted that right into Wordpress and have an instant geotagged post.

Anyway, Rod is the kind of guy I like to get calls from. Passionate about doing something cool on the Web and builds tools to help other people get into his world. That’s great evangelism.

OK, OK, I’ll take the bullet for the Google lawyers. They aren’t evil.

TDavid doesn’t understand their behavior this week, though.

Oh, T, They just live in an alternate universe to the one most of us humans live in.

See, in a courtroom things happen differently than they would on a street corner. On a street corner if someone tried to steal my name I’d just hit them over the head with my Bogen monopod (trust me, that’d hurt).

But in a courtroom a judge will ask “did you defend your trademark?”

If you didn’t defend your trademark it could legally be used. To a judge “defend” means “did you send threatening letters out to anyone who used your trademark improperly and can you prove that they were sent?”

Imagine a world where Bill Gates would be allowed to call his search engine “Microsoft Google.” Now you can start to understand why lawyers for brands like Google, Xerox, or Kleenex have to defend their trademarks.

Every journalism school student, though, learns that the lawyers are generally just going to email badass sounding letters out, but aren’t willing to make the PR mess of taking you to court (not to mention that it’s expensive and most of the time they just need the copies of the letters to convince the judge they are defending, not a full-blown trial). I got a bunch of those cease-and-desist letters for using things like the word “Kleenex” in my stories in without capitalizing it or putting the usual “TM” after the word (we never did that, mostly cause we were too lazy to look up the symbol inside QuarkXPress).

Translation: cut the lawyers some slack. If they weren’t sending out stupid letters like this they’d be doing something far more evil with their time.

I notice a general trend looking through blogs, TechMeme, and Digg. There aren’t many coders anymore.

Five years ago the discussions were far more technical and geeky. Even insiderish. When compared to the hype and news of today.

It makes me pine for ye old RSS vs. Atom geek flamefests.

Anyone else notice this trend?

Anyway, thanks to Mike Gunderloy for helping keep technical blogs around.

What brought this on? Last week at OffTheGrid we had a “language war” that spontaneously broke out. I filmed part of it. Not sure I learned much that I didn’t already know, but it was fun to hear some of that old developer passion break out in a fun way.

Anyway, tonight over on Digg I see that Pirillo and Laporte are bringing back TechTV. Hey, wait a second! You wanna bring back TechTV but you want ME to do all the work? I didn’t sign up for THAT! Heheh.

Elsehere on the blogs, yes, I did tell On10.net at BlogHer that Maryam was my #1 Maryam. But it helps that she’s #1 on Google too.

But, back to geeks. Jason Perlow, contributing editor of Linux Magazine is one and gives PodTech a preview of LinuxWorld, going on this week in SF.

Oh, and Richard Stallman who is almost as geeky as Shelley Powers is on the decidedly not geeky geekentertainment.tv talking about borscht. I love how Irina gives him some heck. You know, sometimes people gave us Microsofties crud cause Steve Ballmer would say or do some outlandish things (developers, developers, developers!) but if I still worked at Microsoft I’d just send Richard’s video to everyone and say “this guy makes Ballmer sound normal.”

On our trip we watched a ton of Ze Frank. We even sang a few of his songs. Some of which included the word “duckie.” Which is why I took a picture of this sign in Livingston, Montana. I stopped the van and said “I’m taking this one for Ze.”

Speaking of Ze, I’m not afraid, but I am terrorized. Terrorized that they’ll take away my electronic equipment on flights. Gosh, what will I need to do? Read a book? Next someone will figure out how to turn paper into some sort of weapon.

And people wonder why we drove to Montana.

Oh, Jeff Sandquist reminded me of how bad travel can get (and how being a Microsoft employee sure makes it nicer) with his posts from India.

Anyway, Ze, I wish I had your talent. While I try to acquire such (not blinking is HARD damn it!) you’ll just have to put up with my lame photo of a rubber ducky river rental sign.

Sorry.

It seems like Matt Mullenweg and team are adding features every few hours lately. For those of you who are on Wordpress.com, check out the “Dashboard.”

Since I went off the grid I noticed a new “Tag Surfer” and “My Comments” features. Tag surfer is cool — it shows me posts other people have made using the same tags I use. Very likely that we’ll have content that’s similar to each other. I can add new tags too and subscribe to content from other Wordpress.com users.

Next to that is “My Comments.” It lists comment threads I’ve participated in. This is very interesting, but I wish I had the ability to pull out spam I see here. Some spam has gotten through Wordpress’ excellent filters (the best in the industry — by far) but it’s old, so pulling it out takes too many steps. For those who have no clue what I mean, if you are inside Wordpress there’s a “Manage” page, where I can look at my current comments. On that page I can kill spam with one click. It’s awesome. Makes it like playing a video game.

Some things. Both of these show that Wordpress.com is becoming a community. Spam, for instance, doesn’t look like that, but if I kill spam on my blog it’ll kill it on yours too (if I prove to be a good spam killer).

I don’t want to talk too much about how Matt is using the community to kill spam cause I’m scared that the spammers will get smarter as a result (they will anyway, but might as well not help them along the path they’ll find) but it is interesting what he’s doing.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to the Wordpress folks. I’m definitely not regretting my decision tonight to join up.

It’ll be interesting to compare it to Windows Live Spaces and to Six Apart’s new Vox service (I’m getting tons of email from people joining that service so know it’s gaining in popularity very quickly).

But, the short of it is that Wordpress.com is going to pick up steam once new users see these features.

I came home to find 3,569 spams removed for me by Wordpress.com’s spam filter. It is so superior to other blog comment engines that I’ve tried it isn’t funny. At least in my own experiences. It’ll be interesting to watch how good Vox is.

Nice list of ways to get a top Technorati blogger to link to you. Be warned, though, it’ll piss off Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart, who, at BlogHer, told us to please stop making lists. But, no need to beg for a link from a jerk like me who has gotten too self important to read all his email. No, just leave your URL in the comments here along with a good sentence explaining why your blog is worth checking out.

Or, you could always invite Maryam and me to speak at your conference like ConvergeSouth just did (October 13-14 in Greensboro, North Carolina).

Click to Visit the Video’s page.

Ahh, the joys of owning a low-cost videocamera. Anyway, I bring you along to the Boiling River inside Yellowstone National Park. It’s an experience that I can’t quite explain to you other than to say my butt was freezing and my legs were burning when I shot this on my Sanyo Xacti HD1. Nice camera, by the way — stores videos on a SD card instead of tape, which makes it a lot easier to put up on Blip.TV, albeit the quality isn’t even close to the Sony. It’s also a lot smaller and a lot less expensive (about $700 at B&H).

On the video you’ll see Christian Long, CEO of DesignShare. He was a high-school teacher who now helps design schools around the world.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by scobleizer with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

There are a few things I learned at Microsoft that required me to really bite my lip cause of my NDA. This is one of them. And, yes, Fred, I totally agree that this is a game changer.

But the thing I’m keeping my eye on is the fact that my Xbox brings me new videos every few hours.

Now THAT has the potential to change everything from ABC news on down to YouTube.

Why?

Did I mention that Comcast in Half Moon Bay (only a handful of miles from Silicon Valley) does NOT have HDTV yet on its cable lineup? Isn’t that lame?

But Comcast DOES bring Internet access to my Xbox 360. I smell a route-around here. Media Center and BitTorrent, here I come!

Oh, speaking of HDTV. We bought a couple of Sony HVRZ1U’s. They cost about $4,000 over on B&H. But I wasn’t prepared for how stunning an image they produce when hooked up to my 60-inch Sony TV. Wow. Almost as good as the Discovery Channel (most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference unless two images were put side-by-side).

I SSSSOOOOO want to show you the videos we did in Yellowstone. But all the video services like Google Video, Youtube, and Blip.TV compress the video all to heck to make it economical to distribute.

I wish the big video distribution networks would make HD capable by using something like RedSwoosh.

In the meantime, I gotta put my videos on Blip.TV.

OK, this is annoying. Someone is copying my blog at crazyfactor.com. That’s annoying enough. But his tools is pinging back blogs I link to. Look at Shelley Powers’ blog’s comments (I’ll bet that Shelley removes the double trackback soon, but it was there at 7:15 p.m.) My post is linked there twice. Once from me. Once from the annoying jerk at crazyfactor.

Come and see what we found in my mom’s basement after she died in May. No, we didn’t eat any of that food and thankfully World War III didn’t happen last week. Sometimes it seemed like it was possible, though.

Hey, I wonder if Make Magazine can find something to do with all of that? Maybe I’ll truck it to the next Maker Faire. Phillip Torrone, got any ideas (he’s the editor there and always comes up with unique ideas)?

Geoff Jones wonders why I haven’t written about the two big Microsoft announcements. Well, cause, I thought they were already covered to death.

But, I’m using Live Writer. I would have had a chance to use it all weekend long, I just learned from my email, but I was off the grid all weekend long (no wifi at my new house yet and my Verizon card isn’t working either — I think we didn’t pay the bill, gotta call about that tomorrow).

Anyway, if you’re one of the three people who didn’t see the announcement, Windows Live Writer is an editor for blogging. I like it very much and am using it now full time. I’ll have a review on the editors on my show next month sometime. Works just fine with Wordpress.com. More pro and cons from tons of different bloggers over on TechMeme.

I find I’m agreeing with Shelley Powers and not with Guy Kawasaki. Resumes are so 1990s anyway. Just do a damn blog. And lest you think that only works for A listers, you’re nuts. I still remember interviewing at NEC. They had printed out a ream of my blogs and had highlighted a bunch of parts to ask me about. Far better than a resume.

The question is, how would I hire Shelley Powers? Now wouldn’t THAT be an interesting office?

Nancy Folsom (among others, including Shelley) took Maryam to task for saying that women can’t be geeks. Those of you who don’t know Nancy should know that she knows how to code and has been hanging out in various programming communities since the early 1990s.

I think Maryam tapped into a source of emotionalism usually only held by Mac users.

I’m looking over my posts for the past six weeks, though, and I’ve turned into one of those lame bloggers who doesn’t say much. Sorry. Life is chaos right now.

But, it sure is good to be back at a job full time now and in a new house.

Oh, speaking of work. Finding a name and a URL is damn difficult. Everytime I find a name that Maryam and my coworkers like the URL is gone. Now I know why so many companies come up with lame names. Like, well, yelp.

Yes, Yelp. WTF? But, today, we used Yelp to find a place to eat lunch and a car wash to clean out my boss’ van. It’s a review site that’s popular with the 20-year-olds in the valley. Instead of a stupid name like “yourgeektv.com” (yes, I +did+ register that one, but it was killed last week when everyone at the Off-the-Grid camp said it was super lame) maybe I should just hold a contest. The problem is that any good name that comes up would be registered by the time I got around to it.

Maybe I should just tell you to stick it in your geektubes.com. Heheh.

Maryam’s tips on names? Has to be easy to say. Catchy. Represent what it’s about.

It’s a show for geeks. Help, find me a name that doesn’t suck.

Update: regarding resumes, Jonathan Jesse says that resumes are still valid in “the real world.” Oh, Jesse, of course they are! I’m just pulling your leg a little bit. But, Guy Kawasaki was talking about Silicon Valley and the jobs I’ll be hiring for require you to be a good videoblogger. Or, a good writer. Or a good developer. Or a good interviewer. Or a good blogger (not always the same thing as a good writer, by the way). Or a good podcaster. Now, how can I tell whether you have the skills to do ANY of those things from your resume? I can’t, expecially since I’ve learned from Guy that many people pull MY leg on their resumes.

So, I’ll stick to Googling you, thank you very much! Oh, and, yes, I did that just to get Google’s legal department mad at me. Heheh. Oh, don’t worry, I probably got Apple’s legal department mad at me too. Afterall, my new company’s name has the word “pod” in it.

If I keep pissing off legal departments I’ll never get an interview with Mark Lucovsky or Steve Jobs. Sigh.

I hate moving.

When we got back from the off the grid camp on Friday night Maryam said “hope you’re not planning to use your computer this weekend.”

Then I saw all the boxes. “Oh, no.” I think I muttered.

Anyway, it was a fun weekend of unpacking boxes. Throwing out junk.

Well, enough of my boring life, Ryanne Hodson put together a really great video of last week in Montana. Oh, that’s the edited one. She put up a whole lot more video here.

Anyway, I’m now at PodTech. Posting will be slow this week as I catch up on email from the past six weeks.

OK, you have to picture this. A resort in the middle of nowhere that’s been here for 100 years (Theodore Roosevelt stopped here when he was planning the first national park). How weird is this resort? Well, its front driveway is a landing strip.

Now, look at the front porch. There’s nine geeks all on laptops checking their email, blogging, uploading videos, or watching the keynote from yesterday.

Yeah, Herschel Horton, that’s exactly where we are (he found an image on Google Earth of my mom’s house)

Eddie has first photos.

Laura Moncur has video from the Salt Lake brunch we had on the way here.

Anyway, the mix of people here is just perfect. There are a couple of families. A professor. A couple of CEOs. A couple of hard core geeks (one wrote the software for Microsoft’s wheel mouse). A few video bloggers. A few locals. A few eccentrics.

It’s Blogher meets Gnomedex. With no agenda other than to get to Chico, go swimming, and get on Wifi. Anyway, having fun in the sun.

30 people is a perfect size for a campout. That’s enough so that you get enough diversity and you get enough time with each person to really have a good conversation. We stayed up last night until about 3 a.m. just talking.

Richard White, founder of KikoCalendar and SlimTimer, which got a nice writeup in TechCrunch, was here and he was suprised to find some users of his product here.

John Masterson, founder of GrupThink brought his homebrew beer, which we’ll start consuming soon. Grupthink is lots of fun to browse through. It’s a site where you can get your questions answered.

Thanks to Jan McLaughlin for the photo. We just couldn’t stay off the grid. But, now it’s “jump in the pool” time. More later.

This is my equivilent of a Pay per Post post. It’s payback for my brother being a cool, well, brother.

He’s having a moving sale in Portland, Oregon, trying to sell a TV and other stuff.

Niall Kennedy leaves Microsoft, he announced today on his blog. That’s a bummer. Microsoft needs more Web natives, not fewer. Reading his blog today I’m left saddened, especially since Niall was hired to make an RSS synchronization platform. Good news for NewsGator, though, since NewsGator already has a decent synchronization platform.

Yesterday’s announcements by Apple went over like a lead balloon here at Off the Grid Camp (Patrick was totally not excited and even this morning after he got to hear all the news was not as Apple frenzied as usual).

I was lead to believe (by multiple sources that I can’t name for obvious reasons) that there’d be a lot more interesting stuff released yesterday than there actually was. I can’t go into why I was lead to believe that, but I had my reasons and I screwed up by getting overly excited. As Nick Douglas at Valleywag says, I was blabbing. And I got burned.

That said, I still believe the folks who got my excitement levels to rise. As Michael Markman reports Steve Jobs says there’s still a lot of stuff coming. Hinting that they didn’t announce some stuff that they were planning on putting on stage yesterday.

The stock market reacted much like those here at Off the Grid did. Yawn.

My speculation? Apple didn’t pull the trigger because they didn’t want to screw up their back-to-school sales. Let’s say they announced a new portable device or new iPod right now but wouldn’t be able to ship in quantity for, say, four weeks, they would totally freeze out the market for back to school (Patrick, for instance, goes back to school in three weeks). That would be stupid to do, so it’s probably smart to wait a few more weeks until kids are back in school before announcing cool new stuff.

Update: Wired’s Leander Kahney asks “Has Steve Jobs Lost His Magic?”

Update 2: TechMeme has a lot more reaction to the keynote.

Why am I not linking to Dave Winer’s podcast where he had Steve Gillmor and Jason Calacanis and Doc Searls on? Cause I heard there might be a lawsuit involved. Heheh.

Well, that’s enough from the front porch of Chico Hot Springs where there’s a cool band playing. I gotta call out to Bridget Cavanaugh too. She keeps showing up at every event I’m at in Montana. I think she’s stalking me. Seriously, she’s in PR here and she gets invited to the coolest stuff (and told us about this party tonight at Chico which is working out pretty well).