I’d like to thank Tony for giving me the opportunity to write there – it’s been a great experience the whole time!

First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

During this time, I’ve learned a few things about the guys (and girl) of b5. For instance, we discovered that Chad really loves Facebook (and made us all use it), that Darcie tells great stories even when she’s drunk, and that Darren has a photography blog! Who would’ve thunk?!

See also posts from other participants of these events:

• Technosailor
• Ensight

I started the family tree by simply adding myself and my parents. My father later on added a handful of people, including his siblings and his own parents, and then the family tree started gaining traction. Of course, some of my relatives don’t understand how to use the interface, but some of them are lucky enough to have someone in their household that is a technorati to help them out . Within a few weeks, we hit the hundred mark pretty quickly. Geni is extremely intelligent, in that the website itself is very viral. When someone in your family receives an email which says that they have been added to the family tree, then they have the choice of visiting the website with the link provided and add more relatives. The people that they add are usually those that are directly related to that person (i.e. parents, siblings, children, and spouse’s family!). This makes the growth of the site to be fairly exponential (there is still the fact that a large number of the people receiving the emails will be non-technically savvy, though, unlike more typical social networking sites.)

Fast forward one month later (to today), and I came upon reading a post by Michael Arrington (the author of the aforementioned TechCrunch), and he stated that his family was really getting into Geni. After some mindless browsing, I found myself upon the Geni blog, and I came upon a particular post that was made today, showing anonymous statistics of how many family members each family tree had. Well, it turns out that I’m in the top 100! My family tree currently has 763 people, so we’re on the very brink of the top 100 (the 100th largest family has 746), but I’m pretty sure that once we dig a bit deeper into our history, we’ll be adding more and more very soon

Ah, yes, I’ve got good memories of last year’s inaugural conference. It was actually during that time that I finally decided to start a blog and keep it for at least a month; my first posts are in fact, about the conference itself!

So far, only the keynote speakers have been announced on the website, which include such industry heavyweights like Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame, Jim Buckmaster from craigslist, and a returning speaker from last year, Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com. It will be very interesting to see the rest of the schedule fleshed out over the next few months leading up to the event itself; I can’t wait! It would also be interesting to see another ‘15 minutes of fame‘ segment, like the one that existed last year and that I was included in (thanks again, mesh guys!) Or maybe hold a panel focused on how today’s teenagers have a growing influence on some of the largest websites on the web, including YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook? This would then be similar to what I spoke about at last year’s conference; I consider my little spiel at mesh 2006 to be foreshadowing the ‘Google buys YouTube‘ news!

I can’t imagine why most websites would want to be fixed; most people I know have their browser windows maximized (whether they want to or not, since it’s the default setting I believe) and so the site could use all that valuable screen real estate that is usually filled with whitespace. I know that switching from a fixed to flexible width comes with some headaches regarding CSS, depending on how many divs you’ve got going, but for most sites, it seems well worth it (especially for ‘content’ sites, where there are articles and other large bodies of writing that populate the website.)

So if you’re reading this post in a feed reader, please come check out the new layout and let me know what you think! I’m sure the new design will divide a lot of readers on both sides of the fence; some will like it, some will hate it. I’d rather have a change in the layout than not at all, though!

P.S.
Cross-browser compatibility was a pain in the ass for this, so let me know if something has gone awry in a non-Firefox browser.

UPDATE: Sorry about that comments box goof; the comments input box was at the very bottom of every page, so a lot of people didn’t know it was still there. It’s fixed now!

It would’ve been nice if iTunes had at least had an icon showing that would appear whenever the Alarm was enabled – it’s all that I ask!

There’s that Mac Mini that I have…

I have a Mac Mini that I haven’t touched since obtaining my MacBook Pro, and it’s just been sitting on my table, collecting dust. I had thought of using it as an ‘entertainment hub’ for my home for some time, since it has built-in wifi.

The synergy of the Wii and the Mini is a great thing

I thought of purchasing an infrared receiver for my Mac Mini so that my Apple Remote which came with my MacBook Pro could be used for it. My eyes then laid upon my Wii Remote, with its simplified-yet-useful set of buttons, and inside of it, its built-in motion sensor… and I thought, why can’t I use that as a remote for my Mac Mini? Well, it turns out that I can, with the help of DarwiinRemote! I installed the application immediately, and lo-and-behold, I’m now using my Wii Remote as a remote for both my Nintendo Wii AND my Mac Mini. The Wii Remote works with my Mac Mini because both devices have Bluetooth enabled. I’m now deciding upon which media center program to use; my options include Front Row, MediaCentral, and CenterStage, among others.

At this point, the Nintendo Wii is used for gaming purposes, which the Mac Mini can also be used for – but primarily, the Mac Mini is used for viewing media, such as movies or TV. I’m also thinking of also integrating my Tivo box into the equation to include time-shifting abilities, but that’ll be a project for the future.

• Gmail
  • Inbox: 1 unread
  • Starred: 4 emails
• Google Calendar
  • 17 events or to-do items for today
• Google Reader
  • 3 unread items
  • 23 starred items
• ListMixer
  • 50 items

Slow over time, this stuff piles up, even though the oldest item out of all of these containers is from less than a week ago!

Starring items to give them priority

Out of the four of these containers, both Gmail and Google Reader gives me the ability to ‘star’ certain items, allowing me to save them for future referral, or to remind me to read them the next time I open up my account. This is great when using it in combination with keyboard shortcuts, because then I can quickly sift through the items and marking those that I want to return back to with a star. Also, in essence, ListMixer is like starring a website for me to look over again as well.

Using labels to give context

In Gmail, I also used the labels feature to label my email. But, for emails that required immediate or daily attention, I gave them a special label that was all in uppercase text, such as B5MEDIA or EBAY PURCHASES, to remind me to look at them at least once a day. I also sometimes use Google Calendar as my to-do list, as the ability to quickly drag events from one date to another is very useful for chronic procrastinators who often delay that ‘clean the xyz’ item for far too many times, but when I need a really accessible to-do list that takes no time at all to call up, I turn to High Priority, which is a great to-do manager for the Mac which sits in your menu bar (that thing that sits at the top of your screen.)

Checking my containers

I checked my containers for items that I starred whenever I remembered to do so, which ended up being not that often – so I often ended up with at least several dozen items starred, waiting to be read and followed up on by me – until now. It’s a simple solution, but it works great for people, like me, who likes to procrastinate things that seem less important than those that are obviously important, such as work-related tasks.

Emptying out containers, one-by-one

Now, instead of slowly cleaning out my containers little by little, but never having them completely empty, I set a weekly deadline for me to empty them out completely. At the end of every Friday night, I’ll go through each container and act on actionable items, and discard anything that isn’t needed.

I’ve created a folder in my Firefox bookmarks called ‘perpetual’, which contains bookmarks for all 4 of the containers that I listed above – Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and ListMixer – so that they’re all grouped together like that. I don’t like having ‘orphaned’ data just sitting somewhere in one of my accounts in an online to-do list manager like Ta-da List, and I forgot about it a few days later, letting it linger there indefinitely. It could’ve been a great business idea! Which is why I also use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to store that kind of data, but which I check less often since I tend to use it less (damn – my life really does seem to revolve around Google a lot these days!)

It’s the little things like this that really puts everything back in motion and it gives a nice sense of accomplishment at least once a week, because now I have a reason to clean out my containers – I want to make my own deadline!

If you have any other tools that you use to temporarily store information for near-future retrieval, please post them in the comments. I prefer to have a minimal number of tools to use so that I don’t have to refer to as many of them, but I’m sure this differs for others.

Like the CEO of b5media says, I am the newest addition to the b5media team! I really look forward to working with everyone there, and I intend to learn a lot during my employment.

Now, first off, here’s a bit of background information and other spiel on b5media, straight from its website:

b5media (www.b5media.com) is a global new media network featuring more than 150 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology and sports. With content written by passionate people from all over the world and visited by more than two million unique visitors a month, b5media is among the world’s largest online new media networks. b5media is based in Toronto.

Since I am making this post a few days after my first day of work, I’m going to also talk a little bit about my experience so far at the company – if it even deserves a label that’s colder than b5 really is. I’d call it more of a… family of people who… have never met… and love working with each other? Yeah, that sounds about right! There hasn’t been much work required in integrating me into this tight-knit group of people, and so, since Monday, it’s been a great ride thus far!

Waiting for my first day of work at b5media to arrive felt like waiting for New Year’s Day. It very much felt like it was going to be a big milestone in my life, and I still feel that it is. It’s basically MY New Year’s Day – a fresh start, a new mindset, and exciting, brand-new challenges await me! Of course, the weather apparently agrees with me, because I had the ‘privilege’ to walk, bus, and ride the subway (underneath) the blanket of snow that hit Toronto the very same Monday that I started work.

To be perfectly honest, out of all of the existing blog networks out there, I was much more familiar with Weblogs Inc. and Gawker than with b5media, so a little pitch was required from Jeremy in order to convince me – but only a little, because his vision for the company really clicked with me once he started talking. Of course, once I actually became a part of the company, I, then, REALLY began to start seeing where this company was heading. And now, I’m excited. VERY excited. I hope that this will be an awesome ride for me – in fact, I’m certain of it.

The number of subscribers that my blog has every day is clearly displayed in the right sidebar on my website – it’s no secret, and it usually fluctuates around 20 to 25 subscribers each day. The following image is a bar graph that shows the number of subscribers that I’ve had in the past month.

On a side note, I’m almost at 6,000 views for my Flickr account!

Anyways, that’s all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for some more stuff! Also, thanks to everyone who acknowledged my birthday!