Blog

The office of the San Francisco mayor has switched to WordPress.

My fortune cookie from tonight’s Chinese take out:

There are no tinfoil hats around my house, but I did recently look into the mobile phone radiation issue. My daughter just turned 13, and she was apparently one of the only kids in her grade without a cell phone. This is one of the reasons why:

It’s from a University of Utah study (pdf) and shows how the human head absorbs electromagnetic radiation from a cell phone held up to the ear. Given that kids absorb a lot more of this radiation and that no one seems to be 100% certain what it’s doing to our brains and bodies (especially the brains of kids which have more rapid cell division than adults and might therefore be more susceptible to radiation), I’ve felt that it might be best to hold off on getting cell phones for my kids. That argument worked for the last few years, but it wasn’t going to work forever. So the other day we did get our daughter her first phone – with the following “better safe than sorry” rules:
– Get a low radiation phone
– Use wired headphones to make calls
– Put the phone in your bag (instead of wearing it on your body)

Oh, and it turns out that my iPhone is quite the fountain of radiation, so I’m going to follow rules 2 & 3 as well…

We recently held our biennial Green Street block party. We block off our street, bring out lots of food, bikes, and jumpies and get to know our neighbors. The Russian consulate is on our block and they treat everyone to blinis with caviar and iced Vodka. This year they added a translator which helped greatly in advancing intra-block relations.

It’s been too long since the last car made an appearance on this blog. Here are a couple that I’ve recently enjoyed:

Automattic has acquired a cool new service called After the Deadline. Raphael and Matt have the story.

On August 27 I’ll be speaking in Zurich about my Silicon Valley startup and VC experiences. Thank you to Myke at Doodle and the Swiss Open Systems User Group for organizing and inviting me.

Very excited that Paul Kim will be joining us at Automattic. He did great work for Mozilla and Firefox, and I’m looking forward to working with him on our many projects and services.

On Bandcamp, albums outsell tracks 2 to 1.

My favorite book so far this summer: Shop Class as Soulcraft.

WordPress news: WordPress 2.8 was released last night and iThemes is now offering their paid WordPress themes under the GPL license.

I like this picture that my daughter took the other day:

My normally very calm and collected wife almost went postal at an Apple store yesterday (having to do with trying to get her iPhone fixed at the annoyingly named genius bar). I can relate.

The New York Times covered the Story of Stuff today:

Thomas Benkö recently interviewed me for a Swiss newspaper.