Author Archives: Ryan Markel

Generosity

In a normal day working as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic, I probably help a couple of hundred people with their WordPress.com sites. I enjoy doing this to a ridiculous level and I’m happy to be assisting people with learning to use WordPress and making sure their experience goes as smoothly as possible.

Quite often, I receive very nice responses, thanking me for my time and complimenting both myself and my colleagues. (Saying “thank you” to a support person can make their day, in case you didn’t know.) But last week, I received the most amazing response to a support request from Stephanie. No one has ever offered to do something so out-of-the-blue kind and appreciative in response to my help before. I asked her if I could share this publicly, and thankfully she said yes. I wanted to share it with you:

Thank you Ryan. You [have] actually taken the time to help me solve this problem. I really appreciate it. What is your favorite charitable organization? I’d like to donate some money in appreciation of the help you have given me. I know I can’t send you money, so I’ll give it to a cause that is close to your heart.

This made my week. (Seriously.)

In case you are wondering, I asked her to make the donation to Autism Speaks, for reasons that are close to me. I’ve also decided to put together a short list of the charities that I personally support, so if I’ve ever made your day, you can feel free to give a gift matching your gratitude to one of those organizations.

Spinnin’ it Seaside-Style

Last month, I gathered in Seaside, Florida with my Automattic colleagues for the company yearly meetup, which ended up being a week of awesome working together, fun, and a lot of getting to know my coworkers even better still. I love working with a distributed company, but it’s amazing the different things you learn and pick up on when you are in the same place as the people you work with every day.

(Who, by the way, are the very fine people you see in the image above.)

On the final night, we of course gathered as many of us as possible into one location, which very much crowded one of the houses we were staying in—having been christened earlier that week as the VaultPress Discotheque. Naturally, this was accompanied by much music, starting at first with some sweet beats and moving at one point in the evening into classic rock and awesome impromptu-karaoke tracks for everyone to enjoy.

It was a during that part that I took over for the music selection and dare I say we continued to rock the night.

A few people have since asked me what the list was that I worked from, and here’s what iTunes says was played to round out the evening:

Title Artist Album
Just What I Needed The Cars The Cars
Never Gonna Give You Up Rick Astley Whenever You Need Somebody
Blue Monday (’88) New Order (The Best Of) New Order
More Than a Feeling Boston Boston
Alex Chilton (LP Version) The Replacements Pleased to Meet Me
Message in a Bottle The Police Regatta de Blanc
Bohemian Rhapsody Queen A Night at the Opera
Baba O’Riley The Who Who’s Next
I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) The Proclaimers The Best of The Proclaimers
Go Your Own Way Fleetwood Mac Rumours
Africa Toto The Essential Toto
Shout Tears for Fears Shout – The Very Best of Tears for Fears
Brian Wilson Barenaked Ladies Gordon
Stand R.E.M. Green
Sledgehammer Peter Gabriel So
Thriller Michael Jackson Thriller
Canned Heat Jamiroquai Synkronized
Simply Irresistible Robert Palmer Heavy Nova
Wanted Dead or Alive Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet
Next to You The Police Outlandos D’Amour
Who Are You (Single Edit Version) The Who My Generation: The Very Best of The Who
Any Way You Want It Journey Journey – Greatest Hits
Back in the USSR The Beatles The Beatles
Unbelievable EMF Schubert Dip
To Be with You Mr. Big Lean into It
Free Fallin’ Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Anthology – Through the Years

Anything required you think I missed? Feel free to add tracks you think should have been in here, or vehemently disagree with musical selection or taste.

In a future entry, you’ll hear the story of how a video game brought me to respect and understand the classics of rock—and how you can get started playing it, too.

My #newtwitter

I like.

Canon Camera Terms of Use and Open Video Standards

Petter Reinholdtsen:

A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of buying a new digital camera, a Canon IXUS 130. It was instructive and very disturbing to be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera. Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences without asking for permissions that is at risk.

[…]

In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used.

This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to read “Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA” by Eugenia Loli-Queru and “H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters” by Simon Phipps to learn more about the issue. The solution is to support the free and open standards for video, like Ogg Theora, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.

If people seriously want everyone to start using a fully-open-source video standard, here’s what’s necessary:

  1. Get the software companies to support encoding in it.
  2. Get a hardware manufacturer to begin making hardware solutions for devices to use it.
  3. Create one that (unlike Theora) doesn’t suck.

Until those things happen, we’re stuck with h.264 and other “kind of free” standards.

(via Petter Reinholdtsen: Terms of use for video produced by a Canon IXUS 130 digital camera.)

Thorsten and Me – IN A LIMO

Getting back to the airport with style.