I've spent the last few weeks working on a small video featuring my World of Warcraft guild. I know, I know, the most nerdiest thing ever, right? You feel ashamed to be reading my blog right now, don't you. Shuddie!

Truth be told a lot of it had to do with the fact that the world there is so visually appealing and full of such drama that it was hard to not compile a movie out of it. I'm sure that if I owned a video camera, there'd be a lot of strange live footage films coming out from Catspaw Film Productions.

When life gives you lemons, make movies about lemons. When life gives you no artistic talent whatsoever, make movies about badly drawn stickpeople. And when life gives you Warcraft, make nerdy guild promo films.

As it is, it may involve elves and dragons, but I'm still proud of how it turned out.

Low-Res Google Video | High-Res Direct Download (36MB)

I find it hard not to be completely transfixed by this video.

It's a guy taking a single photo of himself every day for 6 years.

What really strikes me is how much the background changes, his clothing changes, his hair style changes, and even the shape of his face changes, but his eyes never change. They're always the same eyes staring back at you.

And yet you can almost detect the times in his life that are happier and the times in his life that were stressful.

Something about the music and his unchanging eyes and everything else blurred around him, something about the mixture of these things, makes this video completely transfixing for me.

How have you changed in the last 6 years? How are you going to change in the next 6 years?

If you ever wanted to freak yourself out, turn on Google's search history and check out what you search for. It may not necessarily involve a lot of raptors, but it probably looks pretty darn strange out of context nonetheless.

The photo on the left was taken by Slogs at the Exploratorium here at SF. The exhibit displays a number of books which are banned somewhere. (Click for closeup!)

Welcome to Banned Books Week!


Nearly half of Radcliffe Publishing Course's "top 100 novels of the 20th century" were banned at some point. This is not an occurrence from distant history. This is still happening today.

This week Google is promoting the American Library Association's "Celebrate your Freedom to Read" campaign against banning books.

So take part, or just pick up a book that is banned or was banned or is being threatened of being banned, and enjoy an awesome story that someone doesn't want you to know.

Although I've been here for nearly four months now, in many ways it still feels like a novelty to have landed at the ground zero of the internet age. There are so many cool people within arm's reach, and the number of conferences are insane. One of the biggest most recent conferences of course was The Future of Web Apps. Just look at the speakers list below!
That's quite a spread of big names and talent. I believe my exact words when I saw the speaker's list were "wow, nice!"

Big company names, big name people representing the big company names. And great as speakers, I hear. What more could you possibly ask for?

Chris Messina (factoryjoe), however, looked at the speaker's list and noticed something else. The Future of Web Apps was essentially a white boy's club:
So Chris blogged about this ...

We can and must choose to make diversity a top priority, one that's up there with attracting quality talent and quality attendees; it will not simply happen on its own and truly, its everyone's responsibility.

... and while many people thanked him for doing so, there was also an amazing backlash.

This isn't a matter of exclusion. This is a matter of interest. If people of other ethnicities aren't interested in developing Web 2.0 apps, why should we say "We need to be diverse. - Garfield

If somewhere some female-authored blog becomes the next Techcrunch - great, I want to listen to what she has to say. If, however, you end up hearing Mike Arrington instead, I guess I'm not that interested in hearing people whine about it. - Aaron Weyenberg

This is a problem that keeps coming up again and again, and often getting the same results. Last month at Office 2.0 there were 53 speakers and 1 was female. Wow.

As Greg Wilson and I have written before, this is more than just about getting surface-level diversity on a panel. I think that this problem is just a symptom of a bigger problem involving diversity, cliques, open mindedness, respect, obsessiveness vs balanced lives, and such; a very real and tangible problem in this community. And though it's presenting itself on the surface as panel after panel of white males, the problem goes much deeper than that, and it's nearly impossible to imagine that it doesn't affect us in ways that go way beyond just who is sitting in the front of that room.

After Office 2.0, Suw posted an excellent piece containing very concrete things that both women and conference organizers can do to try to make steps towards fixing this problem. She says women should basically make it impossible for the "but there are no women in tech!" argument to continue in these debates by making ourselves blatantly obvious as potential speakers. So here you go!

Topics I have experience speaking about to a variety of media, professional, amateur and academic audiences:

• Internet censorship
• Internet censorship circumvention
• Social engineering
• Manual data mining for social engineering
• Gaming
• Gaming and Gender
• Python web application frameworks
• Collaborative learning environments (like MOOs)
• Collaborative editors (like SubEthaEdit)
• Basic cryptography
• How man-in-the-middle attacks work
• Common system compromising techniques
• Gender issues in open source
• Advantages in open source adoption
• Common problems in open source communities
• Minorities in computer science
• Testing code, unit testing
• ...and yes, even more.

If you find yourself sitting on a conference committee and that ol' "brainstorming a list speakers" activity starts, and it starts to look like another Office 2.0 or The Future of Web Apps list, my recommendation would be to request that the meeting is postponed. Send everyone home to do research for all of the ten minutes it would take to find talented (and appropriate!) speakers who aren't white males and make sure some of them are included too.

It's not that they aren't out there; they are. You're just responsible for doing a little bit of research to find them.

In case it's been a while since you've brushed up on your pirate speak, here's an instructional video brought to you by the fine folks at LoadingReadyRun.

Yesterday Anoushesh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, called Google from the International Space Station. A crowd of Googlers packed into a few rooms as Larry took the call. He was grinning broadly, clearly excited about talking to someone who was currently floating around in space.

A call from space. How wild is that?

We listened as she told us that the most fun in space was flying from one end of the Space Station to the other -- trying to do so without hitting any walls.


And as she described what it was like to watch the Earth rotate for the first time, I think that everyone in the room smiled a little wistfully. Who hasn't dreamt of such things?

"Explore the boundaries", she said. "Be free-thinkers and use your imaginations. Learn from your environment, your teachers, your books -- but then go beyond your knowledge. I always wanted to go to space, although I didn't wind up working for NASA. I detoured to different areas, but finally I found a way to make it happen."

It's highly unlikely that any of us will ever join her (except maybe Larry :) ), but the pin-drop silence in the room as we listened to someone who was currently up there, ... the whole thing was pretty spectacular.

When you say the word "videogame", most people picture a first person shooter, or something that resembles the first Mario game, or virtual tennis.

What most people don't picture is a large group of people sitting around a campfire, listening to stories and dancing.


A few weeks ago on WoW, we gathered in darkened woods to hear the story of Nefarian. It's a little known story from the legends in the history of WoW. Yesterday Akma suggested that the story I told would make an awesome graphic novel, so I grabbed word-for-word the story of Nefarian and slapped it onto some screenshots and created the graphic novel of the story of Nefarian. The fact that there's enough content out there that I can create something like this in a few hours is absolutely amazing.

I've now been four months without a cellphone since I switched countries. What's more, I now live in the land of cellphones. Everyone stops to admire each other's phones as part of a typical social gathering. Strange.

So I need a phone. And a phone plan.

I have yet to figure out which phone companies here are evil (though I can guess), which is where relying on the collective wisdom of the internet kicks in. What phone and phone plan should I get?

My priorities are probably something like:

1. Pretty (what's the point of a cell if it's not pretty?)
2. Can receive calls
3. Can make calls
4. I don't have to sign a 90 year agreement with an evil company
5. Texting capabilities
6. Other fun features I wasn't aware that I needed but six months from now I won't know how I survived without them

Got all that? Okay. What do I want?