While not blogging nearly as much as I should of late, I do still read voraciously online. I read blogs on everything from webcomics to tech to social media to screenwriting to skeptics to the inability to punctuate long lists of items in sentences to self-referential references^*.

I’ve always lacked a good way to share the cool things I’ve found. I tried Friendfeed, Shared Google RSS items, and other methods, but they never seem to really work across the board.  So now I’m giving Posterous a try.

From the Using It Wrong department, Posterous is intended to be a central syndication point for content, with the ability to publish to many different streams. I’m just using it’s quick clip/post feature to grab articles and put them online. I’m also going to try and always add a comment, as if I’m sharing something I find interesting it seems like I should at least be taking a moment to explain why.

If you want to follow my stream of shared items, you can find it at my jmoriarty Posterous site, or subscribe to the main Posterous RSS feed.

If you just want to follow the social media items I find interesting, you can follow my social media Posterous items, or subscribe to just my social media Posterous feed.

Hope you like them, and let me know if I miss anything spiffy.

* I want to formally apologize for this sentence. It falls well below my normal standards of butchering the English language.

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1. Back to Basics

Image by hradcanska via Flickr

Last week while I was at the Taser International offices, they said they would be willing to tase me if I wanted to know what it was like. I knew right away I had to try this out, and a quick poll on Twitter confirmed this should happen.

None of my coworkers were willing to give it a try, so I was doing it solo. They were very willing to take pictures and the video below. I was nervous, which they didn’t help by informing me they would be using their top of the line law enforcement X26 model taser. This thing looks all business, and fires two unfriendly looking probes into the target to transmit the electricity. Lucky me, I was gonna get the full show.

I took off my dress shirt so it wouldn’t get punctured by the probes, and put on mandatory protective eyewear just in case a probe went wild. Two people held my arms to lower me down, and one of their certified trainers got ready behind me. That leads into…

Given how some people handle being tasered, I think I did rather well. Not much I can add about the experience that isn’t in the video – very intense, like a massive charlie horse across your entire body.

Image by Moriartys via Flickr

The coin they gave me is pretty slick, and I kept the cartridge with the probes. It really didn’t bother me that much when they yanked them out, but it’s probably a good thing I didn’t look at them too closely beforehand. They look like little harpoons.

Why would you get tased?

After it was over they asked if I was an adrenaline junkie since I didn’t really scream or swear. I’m not addicted to adrenaline, but I am addicted to trying new things and having new experiences. Here was a chance to try something everyone knows about but few people have experienced, in about the safest way possible.  Painful, sure, but now I know things about tasers (and myself) that I didn’t know before.

Why did you want to do this?  I can think of a lot of things to do for the experience instead of that.  But that’s my boy.
~ from my mother after seeing the video

I believe life is meant to be lived and explored in all the strange ways you can find it. I love problems that I haven’t solved, and things I haven’t done. I don’t always have an end goal, and often the exploration itself is enough. About the only thing I’m really scared of is losing that interest, and no longer wanting to try anything new.

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Ignite Phoenix 7 wrapped up, and I’m in that lull where I’m excited by how well it went, and partially relieved to not have it looming for another few months.  This Ignite was by far bigger and more complicated than any we’ve tried before. It was the first time with a theme (Art Of…), first time at the Phoenix Art Museum, biggest audience (600), a live band, catered food, an ATM, and geeze… I don’t even know all what else.  In the course of this process we managed vendors we’ve never had to before for chairs, projection systems, a stage, pipe & drape, bartenders, security, and that danged ATM.  We also had out whole site nuked to some malware, took on new sponsors, participated in a design contest, and drank a whole crapload of coffee.

It’s quite possible we’ve lost our collective minds on this, and the post-mortem was definitely a high-energy meeting, but overall the event was just incredible. That happens as a result of many great groups of people coming together – the presenters, our sponsors, the audience, and of course the team that puts it all together. We start months in advance ot get everything going, and by the time Ignite happens we’re meeting weekly to keep on top of things. It’s a huge commitment and effort, and I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge some of these kick-ass people:

• Michael Barber – In spite of picking to run an Ignite at least twice the size of the past two combined, he knocked it out of the park. He kept a ton of moving parts from colliding or stalling and did whatever necessary to make things come together. He also is some sort of doughnut zombie, and if if your ever hear him grunt out “Loooong jooooohnnnzzz…” get the heck out of his way.
• Brian Carson – The man, the myth, the coaching machine. He doesn’t get rolling until the presenters are selected, then we all dive for cover.  I don’t think many people realize how much he works with the presenters in a ton of personal and technical ways to help often novice presenters step up their game. From his coaching sessions to whipping together the final videos, he helps makes the presenters shine and their message get heard.
• Oden Hughes – The Grand Taskmistress kept track of all the things needing doing, and there were plenty! From organizing our meeting locations to smoothing out our event project plan, she kept it all aligned. As wrapper-upper of our event post-mortem she is often one of the first in and last out of every event.
• Jana Knapp – Not only did she make sure we had enough funds to pull this nutty thing off, but also helped coordinate our great shirt contest with the PHX Design Community and put together our incredible programs. Her Scotch consumption likely tripled during this event, but she never wavered.
• Matthew Petro – Communication and blog machine! This guy kept all the info flowing and people up to date, and single handedly had more bandwidth in motion than AT&T. This was also his first Ignite rodeo, but you would not have been able to tell the way he rode – and dealt with – the bull.
• Dannie Moriarty – My poor, long suffering wife handled the budget, venue items, and a whole lot of ticketing. How she manages to do all this and not stab me through the eye as I grumble and churn over each event is a mystery to everyone who knows her.
• Alan Dayley – If there is a job this guy won’t step up to do, quietly and without complain, I have yet to see it. Even the horrible Ticketing Role cannot slay him. He is a voice of reason in a lot of what we do, and a great balance to the team whose contributions are a lot more significant than he gives himself credit for.
• Andy Woodward – A close friend for the past millenium, he grabbed technical issues, video grunt work, layout coordination, and stage managed with an incredible finesse and a Checklist of Destruction that keeps everything rolling seamlessly.
• Fred von Graf –  Our video maestro, he juggles and maintains our video process with a level of determination that also disappears behind the scenes sometimes. This has been an area of considerable challenge for us with the past few events, but Fred is always there with ideas, solutions, and a way to make things work.
• Brandon Franklin – Though I think we often drive the guy crazy, our ticketing wizard ran one of the most infuriatingly complicated parts of the event – getting people to their tickets and into their seats. If you think that sounds trivial, I highly, highly suggest you do not say that to his face. You may feel the business end of of a Taiko drumstick.

This group of people collectively kicked ass with one foot, because with their other feet they were doing things like putting on music shows, helping raise money for epilepsy, supporting mini-Ignites, launching acting careers, starting families of their own, creating energy guides, teaching training classeses, running non-profit groups, putting together conferences, organizing meet-ups, having full time jobs, and I’ve truly lost track of all what else.

So many great companies, presenters, and volunteers go into making Ignite Phoenix happen that this is in no way meant to be an exclusive list. Just a bit of a fan letter to some really great people who I consider myself priveleged to know, work with, and learn from.

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3. Changes of Season

One of my gifts is the ability to completely and utterly think myself into a corner. I’m like the WOPR playing Tic-Tac-Toe with itself in the movie WarGames.

It creeps up on me most times. A big portion comes from over-commiting myself to projects (another gift of mine). A dash comes from trying to make too many people happy. A smidge comes from prioritizing too highly the things I Must Do entirely over the things I Want To Do. Frost it all with my insatiable need to be forever trying new things, and you get a Cake of Unbelievable Paralysis.

I realized I was baking another one of these a few weeks back when I discovered I’d nearly lost my desire to talk on Twitter and Facebook with people I dearly admire and value. Every time I’d go to type something into Twitter, Facebook, or any of my blogs, I ask if this is relevant? Is it too snarky? Will someone misinterpret it? What am I trying to say here? Who will it piss off?  So I post nothing and it goes nowhere. Just dumb.

I draw some solace from the fact that this happens to others. It is my form of what the most wonderful Havi calls being in need of destuckification. This knowledge helps because it is a fiercely frustrating state of mind for me, and being aware others go through it keeps me sane(ish) while I work it through.

This Memorial Day weekend I’m hoping to put some of this to rest. Zen Habits has a nice article on the top habit(s) of highly creative people.  The first is Solitude – spending time with yourself and your thoughts. The second is Participation – connecting with other for energy and inspiration. I’m way too skewed to the second at the moment and it is contributing to my burnout. I think a little time with myself may start helping me get back into alignment.

In the end, you have to be true to yourself and let others choose their own paths based on that.  The world has a tendency to make unreasonable demands, there will forever be things clamoring for your attention, and there will always be someone unhappy with what you’ve done or failed to do. Trying to make everyone else happy is a strange game.

The only winning move is not to play.

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Image by B Tal via Flickr

If you run a WordPress blog, drop everything and go check your blog security!  Wait… I mean drop everything except reading this blog.  Read, then drop.  Right, hope that is sorted out now.

The point is that there is apparently a security hole in WordPress that is A) a serious pain in the ass, and B) nobody is quite sure how it is spreading.  We were his with this on the Ignite Phoenix blog, and it took us the better part of a day to get back on our feet.

What It Is

We saw the problem when people visiting any of our pages were redirected to malware installation sites.  People using Chrome were getting errors immediately, and it was triggering anti-virus software from AVG to Norton’s.  After some research and help from Chuck Reynolds, we determined he had a variant of this Cloaking Hack. Originally just adding keywords to the infected site, the new version we had put the redirect into every page on our site.

We tried to scrub it from our files and database (yes, it messes with your database) but we kept getting re-infected.  We finally ended up having to move to a whole new host and reinstall everything from the ground up.  This was tricky since we could not reliably do an export from the previous site.

If you get it

Huge thanks to WP blogger’s cloaking hack post for getting us started down the road to repair. If you’re hit, I suggest starting here.  This bugger also hit Chris Pearson, the developer of the Thesis Theme, who made a great post on diagnosing and repairing the pharma hack (our problem was a variation of this).  The two of these are great resources and point to other places you can look to if you’re hit.

Secure your blog!

Do not want! Trust me, take the time and do what you can to avoid this.

• Remove any old plugins and themes you’re not using.  Some hosting providers install a ton of themese by default. Get rid of them.
• Use strong passwords. Don’t use something simple and easy to guess, or even common terms. This is good advice in general, but is is amazing how often it is ignored.
• Keep up to date on software versions. Don’t let your plugins in or core installation lag behind.
• Run a database backup plug-in, like WP DB Backup. You can have it back up your database and email it to you every day/week. We had to use one of our backups to restore to when we rebuilt the site.
• Follow these WordPress security tips if possible.  Some of these may be tricky for some people to do, but try all you can.  #4 should be simple for everyone, and an absolute must.
• There are other good posts on WordPress security if you want to get deeper, including some recommended WordPress security plug-ins.

Take the time to review your site(s) and tighten them down. If one good things comes from our meltdown, let it be that we can help stop it from happening to someone else.

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Through an odd series of events over the past two years I ended up involved in the crazy, passionate, chaotic world of Phoenix non-profit groups and events. I’ve been constantly impressed by the amazing things going on locally on an independent level, and constantly horrified at how difficult it is to get just the basic funding needed for great ideas to take off.  People work their butts off on a shoestring, while big investments often go towards established entities with so much overhead they can’t execute.  It’s maddening.

So when I was asked to be part of a board looking towards sharing grant money with locally based non-profits, I was torn. I needed another commitment like I need an extension to the Chunnel plowed through my head, but I liked the idea and figured I could put my network to good use and help get the word out.  Specifically, I want to try and reach a lot of the local, community-level groups that are online and actively leveraging all these social tools to try and move forward.  They’re groups that this grant process may not normally reach, and I want to get them into the application stack.

The grant program is called Sharing The Prize Seed, and the $25,000 “Sharing the Prize Seed” grant program is sponsored by the law firm of Jaburg & Wilk and the Jaburg & Wilk Foundation.  The “Sharing the Prize Seed” grant has at its root the story of a farmer whose crop won top awards every year. Upon receiving his annual honors, the farmer would distribute some of his prize seed with neighboring farmers to plant in their own fields. As the growing season progressed and his neighbors’ fields began to flourish, the wind would blow pollen from field to field, and the cross-pollination assured that all the crops were strong.

Qualified candidates will put forward a proposed community improvement project that requires at least two Valley of the Sun 501(c) 3 non-profit organizations to work together to improve the condition of Valley education, children, at-risk programs and other community-based efforts identified through the Sharing the Prize Seed Giving Areas.  Grant applications are being accepted until Monday, April 19, 2010.  Grant details and the grant application are available here.

Grant applications are being reviewed by the Sharing the Prize Seed Advisory Board, of which I’m a member.  The public will make the final decision through an online voting competition at sharingtheprizeseed.org of the ten finalists selected by the Advisory Board. The winning project proposal will be announced in May.

If you know a qualified Maricopa County 501(c) 3 non-profits organization please send them this info. You do not need to send them to me – just get them the application details and information.

Short Version

If you know great non-profits based in Maricopa county, send them this info and have them submit this application.

Please help me share, Tweet, Facebook, and (Latest Tool Thingy) this info as much as possible. Click the little tabs at the bottom of this post. I really want to spread this info as far as possible among online groups who may not have heard about this opportunity yet.

There are some amazing things going on in the Valley, and thank you for helping support them!

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Image by See-ming Lee ??? SML via Flickr

After having an hour of productive time disappear after getting sidetracked in some Wikipedia articles, I tweeted out “It’s official – in the Seven Deadly Sins they’re replacing “Sloth” with “Dicking Around On The Internet”".  It was retweeted enough I thought I’d try my hand at updating the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins for the internet age.  As I am well acquainted with most forms of sin, I consider myself credentialed enough for this scholarly undertaking.

There’s the main Seven. I won’t do the Advanced Set of Sins yet as those are tricky to explain without graphics. If you can improve on any of my updated definitions, let me know.

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oob_pics on Flickr

I’m a long time Improv fan, being a former member of the most excellent Oxymoron’Z Troupe, and a founding member of the Jester’Z Troupe here in the Valley. I haven’t performed in ages, but the topic still nibbles at me, which is what led to my interest in Improv + Social Media.  So I was flattered when I was invited to be a Guest Monologuist for the wonderful Galapagos Improv Troupe’s this coming Saturday.

Galapagos does long form/Harold type improv, so I’ll be riffing on some things from my past and right in front of your eyes they’ll be bringing it to scary, scary life. My improv skills are rusty as hell, but not having any idea what I’m doing rarely slows me down. So if you want to catch some great local comedy, support an awesome local theater, or just want to see me get made fun of for an evening, come check it out!

Where: The Trunk Space – 1506 NW Grand Ave. Phoenix, AZ (map)
When: Saturday, March 6th, 8:00pm
Cost: $5
Evening of Laughter: Priceless
Reusing Old MasterCard Joke: Cliche
Final Item In This List: Thank God

Hope to see you Saturday!

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Jenn B and Jenn M at the kickoff show

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of being the first guest on the first episode of a new live, local, interactive web show called Locals Only: Phoenix. Jennifer Maggiore and Jenn Burgess (“The Jenns”) host the show every Sunday at 5:00pm at a different location around town. They stream it out and take questions and input from the audience.  The did a fantastic job of keeping things rolling along, interacting with everyone, and popping out valuable info and tidbits.

I was talking about the stuff I’m usually rambling about: Ignite Phoenix, ImprovAZ, communities, passion, and the many uses for a really thick dictionary.  They had a bottle of wine ready to go, and any show where you can imbibe while pontificating is a plus on my scorecard. It was also my first trip down to the Phoenix Public Market, which I really enjoyed and plan to visit again soon. Sadly, the first episode suffered a technical issue and wasn’t recorded.  It is now lost to the ages like some of the early Beatles TV appearances, which makes one more trait I share with John Lennon, I guess. But The Jenns have promised to have me on again so I’d stop crying.

I love the fact that they’re building this whole show using just online tools, and showcasing the great people and events going on in the Valley of the Sun. So follow them on Twitter, tune in to their UStream channel on a Sunday evening, and help spread the word.

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Image via Wikipedia

I’m headed to South By Southwest this March, and one thing I learned last year was to be prepared for mass amounts of personal device power consumption. Not that AT&T is likely to have their towers actually serving up a usable signal when the hordes descend upon Austin, but it is conceivable I may find some wifi.  Thus I wanted to do some research on a device to take with to keep my electrons topped off.

My main use is a charger for my iPhone, but USB charging has some appeal. I was very impressed with the Tekken myPower that Steve Paine used last year. It is bulkier than the other options, but can charge a much wider range of devices. It’s also interesting to try and quickly compare these things, as some measure in terms of extra talk time, while others talk in terms of number of full recharges to a typical device.  I am sure I could dig into the tech specs around mAh to sort it out, but that’s more than the consumer-level review I wanted to make.

The chargers I looked at seemed to fall into three general categories: iPhone only, USB devices, and Full Batteries.  The USB device chargers work for a wider range of devices like Pre’s and Kindles, while the Full Batteries (like Tekkeon) charge laptops, netbooks, cameras, etc.  One sad discovery is that apparently Apple is not licensing its MagSafe technology connector for newer Macbooks, so I didn’t see any options at all for battery charging there. They should still work well for my camera, netbook, etc.

I’m not trying to build a comprehensive guide, but here is the list of device suggestions I received on Twitter. If I got anything wrong below, you can fill in any blanks, or there is a different option not listed here please let me know.

I haven’t made a decision yet, but will post again when I sort it out. And by way of disclaimer, I work at Sitewire, which does work for iGo, but I’m after the best bang for the buck so am looking at them all levelly.

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