On Saturday I had another fairly decent experience at this year’s WordCamp, which took place in Boulder.  I was a little disappointed in the lack of knowledge gained from last year’s WordCamp, and the same is true again for this year.  The one session that I looked forward to the most, was definitely the most informational and in my opinion the best of the entire day.  This was titled Caching in WordPress and was presented by Chris Scott and Sean O’Shaughnessy from Voce Communications.  The information presented by these two easily beat out all other presenters at the conference combined.  The only other session that was even close was WordPress Development by Alex King and Shawn Parker of Crowd Favorite, which featured on the fly sidebar widget development from a crowd suggested list of features.

I pretty much stuck to the more technical sessions the entire day.  I thought that the SEO Techniques session was pretty much common knowledge, or at least stuff that I was already fairly aware of.  However the room was packed for this session, so I guess others may not be as knowledgeable.  If nothing else, the session was very entertaining.  The DIY Usability Testing session was also entertaining.  Steve Martin from Clever Cubed was the presenter and though the crowd was a little smaller than earlier presentations, the information provided was focused and intelligent.  I don’t think it applies to my work very much, but there were a small number of people in attendance that were very interested in the subject.

Finally I sat in on Jane Wells’ presentation on What’s Next for WordPress.  She is the user experience lead for WordPress and is very knowledgeable on all things WordPress.  Though she didn’t talk much about what’s actually next for WordPress, she did highlight new features from the recently released version 3.0 as well as answer question after question from the audience.  Before the presentation I wasn’t aware of the new menu functionality in this release of WordPress and that is something that I definitely plan to utilize in the future.  Otherwise, her presentation was good and she helped many in the crowd with all kinds of varying problems.

With all of that said, it is really hard to beat the cheap price of admission ($45) that included a $10 gift certificate to local venues for lunch as well as a nice t-shirt.  After these tickets were sold out, the organizers announced $25 tickets that didn’t include lunch or a shirt, and I wish they would have offered that from the beginning.  I don’t really need anymore t-shirts in my closet.

This weekend I will be attending my second WordCamp.  You may recall that I attended WordCamp in Denver last year, and though afterward I wasn’t sure if I would attend another, I decided to give it another try this year.  I figured that even though I wasn’t completely satisfied last year that it deserved another chance, especially since last year was the first ever in the area.  I’m hoping to learn a little more about WordPress, but also hope to be entertained by some of the presentations like last year, and even do a little networking.  Currently I’m planning to attend the following sessions: Caching in WordPress, WordPress Development, and DIY Usability Testing.  I’m also considering Design Panel and SEO Techniques, which are at the same time, and leaning towards What’s Next for WordPress over From URL to SQL to HTML.  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, will be there this year.  His presentation last year was very memorable.

I previously reported that I hadn’t found any issues with the new iOS4 on my iPhone 3GS, but I have recently discovered an issue.  Emails that are generated from applications other than the email app do not automatically send.  Instead they sit in the outbox and I have to go in and manually send each of them from there.  This is not how email behaved before the upgrade.  I finally found a post on the Apple Support forums but there has yet to be a successful solution posted.  This isn’t a serious bug, just a minor inconvenience, but I do hope it is fixed soon.

I’ve been using the latest version of the iPhone software (iOS 4) for a few days now on my 3GS. The backgrounding feature is pretty cool, though I’ve only really seen it useful for listening to things like Pandora while doing something else on the phone.  I haven’t really found any other good use for it yet, though the quick switching between applications is cool.  I just wish that nearly all applications didn’t stay running all the time, making it optional would be nice.  Maybe there is an option that I just haven’t found yet.  I haven’t given it too much time.

Another thing that is great is being able to group apps into folders.  Before this I had maybe seven or eight pages of apps, which made it difficult to find what I wanted.  I did try to keep them all alphabetized, but now I have only two pages of apps.  The first page has a couple of folders but other than that it has my most commonly used applications.  The second page is all folders of various categories with the remaining apps fitting into one of them.  This really helps to keep things organized.  Of course all folders now have the apps inside them alphabetized for even quicker use.

Those are the biggest changes I’ve noticed so far.  I did download iBooks and a couple of free books.  I doubt I will ever buy a book as I prefer to get them from the library, but I’m hoping I can sync some library ebooks up to iBooks in the future.  I’ve noticed the threaded mailbox, but haven’t much time to use it.  The same is true with the 5x zoom that is now available on the camera, and places stored in the photos.  So far I’ve been impressed with the new features and look forward to getting more familiar with them.  Anyone considering the upgrade should absolutely do so if you are running the 3GS.  I’ve heard the upgrade can slow down the 3G, but I haven’t noticed anything like that on the 3GS.

The day has finally arrived! I have my very own laptop for the first time. Sure it is a work laptop, but I am excited nonetheless. Being a self-diagnosed computer addict, it may come as a surprise that I’ve never owned a laptop before, but I have multiple desktop machines to make up for it. I’ve wanted a laptop for some time, but always talked myself out of it. When the opportunity for a new work machine came, I was happy to go the laptop route, especially in my new position where we are constantly moving from cubes, to laps, and to meeting rooms. This machine, a Dell Precision M4500, is a monster and will be great to work with. It features an Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processor, Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics card, and 4 GB RAM!

Another busy day at work.  I did manage to squeak in a little personal time to follow the launch of space shuttle Atlantis.  This is the 32nd mission for Atlantis, and will be the last one unless there are some unplanned changes.  That leaves only two more launches in the history of the space shuttle program.  My brother’s friend, Nick Volpenhein, finally got to see a space shuttle launch live in person.  Over the past few days, he participated in the NASA Tweetup with around 150 other users of Twitter and fans of NASA.  From all that I can tell, his trip was well worth it and he is pretty much speechless at this point.  It’s always nice to fulfill a lifelong dream.

In addition to my curling addiction, I’ve tried to keep up with as much of the Olympic hockey action as I possibly can. Fortunately, nbcolympics.com has a very nice Silverlight player that is available for streaming lots of live events, especially hockey and curling. I was able to follow along with the USA hockey game this afternoon, even if I only listened to the audio most of the time. The really cool thing is that the video player seems to automatically adjust the quality based on your connection. So rather than dropping out and buffering the video, it can simply display a lower bit-rate and then automatically switch to a higher one when the connection improves. I’m not really too familiar with Silverlight, but this feature seems really desirable compared to current flash video players.

I think I’m many years behind in saying this, but I’ve created my first flash animation.  I’ve had Adobe ImageReady installed on my computer for a while, since it is installed with Photoshop, but I’ve never really used it.  I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not that big of a fan of flash-based websites, especially with the increased use of mobile browsers and their lack of flash support, but I feel that it can be useful in moderation on websites.  Anyway, to create a simple flash animation, I created individual slides in Photoshop and then transferred them into ImageReady and used the built-in Tween command to automatically transition between slides.  The result is pretty smooth, and I was able to save the animation directly into flash from inside of ImageReady.

I actually had a very positive experience with Comcast support on Friday.  Early that day I had noticed an increase in the frequent outages I was having with my Internet service over the last week or so.  I complained about it on twitter and was nearly immediately contacted by a member of Comcast’s support team (@ComcastDoug).  Through some back and forth messages on twitter, he determined that there were some issues and my report was escalated up to the local tech team in Denver.

Later that afternoon someone on their support team called and setup an appointment for a tech to come out between three and five.  That tech arrived promptly around four and immediately got to work.  He tested the line at the modem first, and then I showed him to all the splits and connections around the house.  He also spent some time out on the lines outside and later told me that he made some fixes there.  He also provided me with an updated cable modem and even threw in an improved remote control for the TV.  I was really impressed with his service, and so far today I haven’t seen any outages.

Recently I read on kottke.org about the research a few websites have done that show the increased use in Mac computers. I wouldn’t disagree with their findings, but decided to look at the numbers from my own website to see if I could notice as big a difference as they had seen. Below are the percentages for each operating system that has hit the site during a month in half year intervals.

As the numbers show, I’m not seeing the large increase in Mac usage that other have seen.  While I do see the drop in percentage of users using Windows systems, the only gains I see are for those using Linux and the iPhone operating system.  Below are the percentages broken out for web browsers using the same time periods.

From this chart you can easily see the large decrease in users of Internet Explorer.  Firefox has been fairly consistent, with a peak around a year ago.  Safari has also been consistent, but has shown some growth recently.  I’d contribute that growth the large increase in iPhone usage, as the primary web browser on the phone is Safari.  Opera is another browser that has been fairly consistent, and often not talked about very much.  You can see that it still has yet to peak much over 1% of the user share.  And finally there is Chrome, which is the relatively new browser from Google, which is perhaps stealing a little bit from all other browsers as it slowly makes its debut.

I’m curious to see where the trends go from here, so perhaps I will post more updated statistics in another six months or so.