Bring David Hicks home

Bring David Hicks home
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

It's way beyond a farce now. Get one of these great billboards for your own front yard FREE from
getup and lets send John Howard a message that says "tie a yellow ribbon around this, ya bastards!"

Another two entries in pseudodictionary

Another two entries in pseudodictionary

My geek biorhythms must be at their peak - this week pseudodictionary.com accepted two of my submissions: "ex-cel" and wifeframe.

Don't spend too much time wondering why both words refer to failed relationships - I was inspired by an IM conversation with a friend having relationship troubles.

Honest!

Nerds FC cast in St Leonards!

Nerds FC cast in st leonards!
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Left my wife and son at the dinner table to go worship at the awesomely talented feet of a subset of my favourite geek soccer heroes from Nerds FC.

They were very unaffected despite their near-legendary status. At no point were we mobbed by attractive women. Eventually I realised what a nob I was making of myself and went back to dinner. They were very patient with me.

Go Nerds!

STIRR Sydney a stirring success

Sydney's largest Web 2.0 gathering?
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Marty, Mick and the Tangler team pulled together the first Sydney chapter of STIRR last night at the Hippo, in Ultimo.

In true Tangler style it was a hot, loud, casual, friendly, shouty kind of evening in which some of Sydney's most interesting Web 2.0 people and their potential backers and partners mingled and played some fun party games, including a cool 'pin the tail on the valuation' game, and an episode of 'half-baked' where thrown-together teams of people take a random two words from a keyword list (like 'sausage' and 'cowboy', make it a domain name (like 'sausagecowboy.com') and then come up with a business plan, marketing plan, logo and (crucially) a revenue model (users build their own custom sausage recipe from sausage.com's list of ingredients, get their custom sausages shipped to them, then share their recipes in a sausage-related social network, where popular recipe writers get a share of sausage sales revenue.)

Emily and Omar of www.rememberthemilk.com were runaway winners of the demo competition, where audience members were given green 'funny money' ($1m denomination notes printed with the ugly mugs of Cam Reilly and Mike Arrington) to 'invest' as they saw fit in the startups showing off their products in the demo area.

Audience members loved the shy, slouchy seriousness of Emily and Omar, and how that contrasts with their dynamic, innovative task manager app that integrates with Google Calendar and Google Maps.

Personally, Remember The Milk scores points from me for having a toy monkey, Bob T. Monkey on their team. But nobody could dislike their humble, quiet, serious intent on building a better Web 2.0 app.

I was there demoing, illustrating clearly and irrefutably how in the future, every 15-25 year old in the world will use Bluepulse.com on their mobile phone every day. Bluepulse CEO Ben Keighran was there briefly to deliver some of the last of our Bluepulse tee-shirts before returning home to pack for his relocation to the Bay Area this Friday.

Paul McCarney and Peter Crowe from Quotify.com.au were demonstrating how to save a heap of time and money when getting quotes from tradespeople of various kinds.

Jahangir Shagaev and the lads from Studentface.com.au were also there, showing how Australia needs a Facebook-style social network focusing on Australian youth. I didn't get enough time to get a good look at their product, but I'll check it out in the next few days.

This morning, I'm tired, hoarse, wrung-out, and smiling. I'd say the inaugural STIRR Sydney event was a stirring success.

Meanwhile, Bluepulse 2.0 goes off!

Wow, serves me right for going to the gym this morning without checking my email first. When I went to bed last night Oliver at Mobilecrunch hadn't yet run with the news of the Bluepulse 2.0 launch and everything was quiet. Then Oliver ran his news item, with a headline including "...may be the ultimate mobile media platform", it got mentioned on Techcrunch by Natali and with that dynamic duo of power-packed blogging exposure, everything pretty much went nuts.

Thanks for your long-standing faith in the platform and your support of the team at Bluepulse, Oliver, you rock!

Digg dug us, Technorati rated us, and by the time I was done staving off the beer gut for another day, lots of people were downloading bluepulse to their phones.


And then, when even more people started trying to download it, we hit overload. Think: servers making grinding noises, green lights on panels turning amber and then orange, a wisp of steam escaping from a rattling waste pipe, the smell of hot metal and burning cable ties... I'm exaggerating, of course - these days when machinery gets overloaded, it's disappointingly quiet. In reality, the only action to be seen is Ben and the dev boys flipping from terminal to terminal, shaking fists in the air, slapping foreheads against monitors, and begging for more capacity.

It's not like we didn't anticipate significantly more demand than usual - we added many times more capacity than we'd had prior to the 2.0 launch. But it was not enough. Everybody wants to try Bluepulse!

The scramble is on now to add additional capacity, and already things are starting to smooth out a little. If you've experienced delays getting through to http://get.bluepulse.com in the last 12 hours, please go back and try again, as you should be able to reach it now.

If you're still having trouble, here's one possible cause: when you go to type the URL into your mobile browser, before you type in "get.bluepulse.com" make sure you delete any "www." that your browser has automatically inserted at the beginning of the URL. There's no "www.get.bluepulse.com" only a "http://get.bluepulse.com". Delete the "www." and you should be fine.

The next challenge: shipping Ben and about half the office over to the San Francisco bay area at the end of this week to begin setting up our US operations. In the midst of our biggest-ever product launch. Just before Christmas. All we're now missing from the Top 10 Stress-Inducing Events is a divorce, a health crisis, an alien invasion and a continent-cracking earthquake.

(Actually, about the health crisis, there was the Bluepulse Christmas party we held last Friday night at Zachary's, home of the Bluepulse-themed 'pulsator'. Who knew absinthe shots were that toxic? You're supposed to dilute it one-in-five? You're supposed to sip it through a sugary spoon? That explains why my head still hurts. I hope the Bay Area is ready for Bluepulse...)

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