Chris Pirillo » ignite

The Making of Where the Hell is Matt?

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:12:34 +0000

The Making of Where the Hell is Matt? is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Matt Harding is an American video game developer and Internet celebrity known as Dancing Matt for his viral videos that show him dancing in front of landmarks and street scenes in various international locations. Harding has since achieved fame through widespread coverage of his travel exploits in major print and broadcast media outlets. He came to Gnomedex to discuss with us how exactly this entire thing got its start.

Matt has gotten 2,387 people to dance with him all over the World. Well, he’s guessing at the number, but it’s probably a good guess. Basically what he does is to dance… badly… in different places all over the World. He now has a sponsor, thanks to having over 30 million views on his viral videos. In Rwanda, he danced with a bunch of kids for no apparent reason. Him dancing by himself wasn’t as interesting, but dancing with random people doing random things was very interesting.

Matt looked at thousands of emails from people all over the World, who all wanted to know why he hadn’t danced in their area. He sent out emails to all of them, telling them to sign up to receive information about when he would be dancing in their area. About 25,000 people signed up! He and his girlfriend then began to organize everything, and break it down by country and location. They would then organize events and send out email invitations.

Not so surprisingly, people would show up. And… they would dance! They’ve had 40 of these events, in cities all over the World. Sometimes they had five people, other times nearly 200 dancers would show up. But, they always had an amazing time.

At the end of Matt’s talk, his music began to play. What an amazing and emotional few moments we had when nearly all attendees at Gnomedex jumped up on the stage to dance with Matt. It’s nearly impossible to describe on ‘paper’, other than to say you had to be there to understand. For just a few moments, we put aside our disagreements, our debates and the differences between us. For those seconds in time, we were all just people, hanging out and dancing badly.

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How to Buy a Car for Under $1000

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:46:35 +0000

How to Buy a Car for Under $1000 is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Kevin Fox is a community developer at Vidoop. His passions are cars and computers and anything that combines the two. Interested in one day getting paid to drive cars ala Jeremy Clarkson he is starting his career out by helping you buy a car for under $1,000.

According to Kevin, it’s very easy to purchase a running vehicle for less than a grand. Many of you think about what you want in a car, such as a nice paint job. He knows you’re thinking you won’t be able to get anything decent for under a thousand dollars. Where can you get one of these? Try Craigslist and even eBay. Look for mini vans. They are really reliable, and run for a long time. Also with today’s economy, you may want to look for a small box-sized car.

Here are some of the keywords Kevin wants to warn you about:

Easy project car – This means the car is totally disassembled, and you should bring several boxes to haul it home in.
Minor rust – The car has major rust in places you cannot see.
Only 59,000 miles – The car actually has 359,000 miles on it.
Rare model – This indicates it’s one of 500,000 made.
Must sell – Yeah, sell it quickly, before the law catches up with the seller.
Only driven on Sundays – You do know that Sunday is Race Day, right?
Family owned – This car was driven by six teenagers.
Leaks a little oil – It only leaks a few quarts a day, honestly!

There are two basic rules to help you buy a vehicle for under $1000.00.

Search by price – Don’t go over $1000.
Car must run without maintenance – The point is to drive it away when you purchase it.

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The 3 Rules of Mountain Biking

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:23:50 +0000

The 3 Rules of Mountain Biking is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Eric Lin, a longtime fixture in the San Francisco tech scene has recently made his home in Seattle to work with HTC. Long before he found a way to turn his lust for technology into a job, he worked in bike shops and outdoor outfitters. This really was just an excuse to play with more affordable gadgets, and get paid to spend time outdoors. Now, Eric is more likely to be found riding one of his many bikes through the city streets rather than mountain trails. He has also shifted his athletic interests to less gadgety sports like kickboxing, crossfit and urban mischief.

Eric’s story started in a park. His friend was supposed to just point his mountain bike down a small hill, and ride. He was completely afraid, and panicked. He also landed in the bushes. As soon as he stopped laughing, he knew what had happened. Mountain biking is a lot of little movements. However, if you tell them one thing, they will usually remember it. Their first mantra was “Fear is the biggest mind killer” from the movie Dune. It’s big and bold, but it doesn’t explain anything about mountain biking. So, they went back to the drawing board.

Next, they decided to try “You will go where you look”. Point your eyes to where you want to go, and that’s where you’ll end up. Watch where your points of opportunity are, not where your obstacles are. This can also be applied to business. The first thing you learn to do when you’re learning to riding is not to look down, or you will crash. Another thing is not spending too much time looking where everyone else is going. You’ll end up going down their path, instead of our own.

“You will do what you believe” is a positive version of “Fear is the biggest mind killer”. Really, mountain biking is about committing to your actions. There were a lot of speakers at Gnomedex who didn’t know what would happen, but they took a leap of faith that their endeavors would work out. You have to believe the entire time. A lot of people panic freak out in the middle, and have the worst accidents of their lives.

Relax, dammit! When you tell people to relax, it’s the one thing they don’t do. If you say to them “relax, dammit!”, it turns into a joke and makes them actually follow what you’re saying. Remember that what you’re doing is supposed to be fun, not just an effort. Keep your wheels rolling. Let up, keep yourself moving. Stay on your course, even if it’s a little bit scary.

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The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:09:27 +0000

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Sara Davies was one of the Ignite speakers recently at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle. Her talk, “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth”, received some of the best feedback from our live chatters out of all speakers. Her talk was funny, insightful and left us wanting more. Here, written by Sara herself, is the transcript of her talk.

This presentation is dedicated to the Public Domain. It may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
So, last week I donated $8.34 some guy running for state congress in Kansas. I’ve never been to Kansas. I don’t much care about what happens in Kansas, but this guy, Sean Tevis made a webcomic that got carried on a blog that I read. You might have heard of it. It’s called BoingBoing. When I read the comic, I knew that it could only have been made by a geek; it was clear that Sean Tevis and I shared common sacred knowledge as citizens of cyberspace. I knew he must be part of my tribe, and if he shares the values of my tribe, then by god, that man is qualified to fix Kansas. Sean Tevis raised nearly $100,000 from more than 5,000 people (only about 6,000 people voted in his district last year). And this made me think that we as geeks need to own our buying power, we need to own our political and technological power, and we need to take over the world.
We must employ Tevisian economics throughout the square states and the bible belt, infiltrating decision-making bodies nationwide with our gold-farming, youtube making kin. The economic power of the tech-savvy coasts will woo the votes of the advertising-addicted drones in the middle states. It is common geek knowledge that lotteries are merely a tax on those who can’t do math. So once we have a geek majority firmly in place, we must repeal all gambling laws and drain the wallets of all statistics challenged Americans, of whom I have been informed there are a large number. This will provide a huge budget surplus for our new geektatorship, our glorious geekocracy. With these enormous piles of cash, we will wage a global battle, an epic game of risk, pitting luddite against linux programmer, corn farmer against gold farmer. Human casualties are a very serious matter, so the first step in the plan is to pick select non-geeky cities across the globe and send in an army of remote controlled lego robots. Each robot will have a spy cam and gps for remote navigation, as well as multiple processor-motor nodes throughout their body, so that even if they are dismantled, the individual parts can still be controlled autonomously.
Toward the end of this phase, we are basically expecting a swarm of various robot parts, which even if unarmed, will be able to climb to tall heights and then land on unsuspecting and now unconscious passers-by. We are confident that this will cause all people incapable of reprogramming the robots to flee for their lives. With the people gone, we will need to clear a large flat area. This can be accomplished by printing out thousands of copies of the DMCA and using them as kindling to burn down the city. This has the added benefit of obscuring our location in smoke. Infrared googles will be provided.
Once we have cleared a secure a base, we’ll bring in Jimmy Wales to build wiki-barracks that can be quickly put up and taken down. Any buildings not considered “notable” or suspected of being built based on original research will have to be demolished. Communications between bases must be dual key encrypted. Public keys will be projected onto the copious clouds of smoke via big green lasers. Disclosure of private keys will be punishable by a 24-hour suspension from both Twitter and GMail, certainly not something to be attempted by the faint of heart. We will need Adrian from the RepRap project to create self replicating wifi routers which will spread themselves over the earth, providing infinite high bandwidth internet. We’ll have to lock down the network of course, SSID:fabulousbitches password:pwning your town.
Dan Kaminsky will be a double agent, pretending to secure enemy networks while in actuality causing all of their DNS information to point to a fail whale.Then it’s time for the attack! Ariana Huffington will swing into the enemy camp from the north on a cat5 cable and blog to death as many enemy combatants as possible, but we’ll need some diversions so they don’t see her coming. To the east will be a text-message coordinated flashmob of cosplayers, to the south will be Randall Monroe publicly performing acts from his mistranslated Kama Sutra, and to the west will be Sarah Lacy in hot pants.
Now if this mission should fail because someone is too busy flirting with Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Stevens will be on hand to lead us through the underground tubes. At the end of the tubes will be Ron Paul’s blimp. It should have sufficient fuel on board, but in an emergency, we can fill it with Michael Arrington’s ego and escape unharmed. There are always casualties associated with battle, and death from over-blogging is tragic. To ease the trauma, we will have chaplains available from the church of Richard Stallman. Burial expenses will be covered, or the family may opt to have a sculpture created from the ashes in the shape of Wil Wheaton’s head. Compensation for bereaved loved ones will consist of free passes to Foo Camp and a linkback from Slashdot. You may not voluntarily sacrifice family members. You may however, sacrifice yourself for the pagerank of others. Once we have captured the enemy, we will place them in a humane Matrix-like environment, where they will be under the impression that they have a larger SUV than all their neighbors. And THEN the geeks will inherit the earth.

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How Can We Save the Planet from Ecological Destruction?

Chris — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:40:27 +0000

How Can We Save the Planet from Ecological Destruction? is a post from Chris Pirillo

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Ignite! had a big presence at Gnomedex 8.0 this month. There were many amazing talks, including this one by Alex Steffen. He shared with us his opinion on how we can save the World from Ecological destruction.

Alex Steffen has been the Executive Editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organization in 2003, as the next phase in a lifetime of work exploring ways of building a better future. In a very short time, Worldchanging has become the most widely-read sustainability-related publication on the Internet, with an archive of over 7,000 articles by leading thinkers around the world. It’s played an important role in revealing formerly obscure innovations and groundbreaking ideas, thereby pushing forward the sustainability movement and assisting in the growth of its network. Worldchanging has also been integral in garnering major support for important causes, such as the post-Tsunami relief effort, for which Worldchanging raised $150,000 in partnership with Architecture for Humanity. The critically-acclaimed site won the Utne Independent Press Award in 2004, and was nominated for Webby’s (the Oscars of the Net) for Best Blog and Best Magazine, as well as for Bloggies for Best Writing and Best Group Weblog.

According to Alex, we live in a very finite sphere of resources. We’re already exceeding the bio-capacity of the Earth. This means we are using more stuff than the Earth can sustain on a regular basis. The rate at which we’re exceeding it is astounding. The result of this is that there less and less planet for each of us. The bio-capacity per person is going down.

The United States is responsible for creating over 1/3 of the World’s CO2. There are measurements of how big our impact is. One of those is your ecological footprint. If you measure this footprint, you will land on a chart that has to do with degree of development, and level of impact. We know that wealth and waste are not matched. Californians, for example, are the wealthiest people by state in this country… and they have the lowest energy usage as well.

All sorts of aspect in our lives have to change. It’s not just about recycling. We need to look deep into the systems that created the stuff we use. Try out an online Life Cycle calculator. It will lay out for you the impact that the things you use and buy will have on the World in the future.

Alex feels we’re headed towards an era of transparency, allowing us to make better changes. We’re driving the market towards sustainability, which will come full circle and allow us to help keep the planet itself sustainable.

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Ignite Seattle! Gnomedex, 2007

Chris — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:19:13 +0000

Ignite Seattle! Gnomedex, 2007 is a post from Chris Pirillo

http://live.pirillo.com – Ignite is a series of geek nights in Seattle. It is hosted by Brady Forrest of OReilly Radar and Bre Pettis of Make. The nights combine a Make contest and a series of fast-paced, short-form tech talks.

Ignite Seattle presented a few of their talks at Gnomedex. These included the following:

Make Art Not Content – Scotto Moore
Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! – Dave McClure
Stop Yelling, Start Weaving – Deborah Schultz
Is 2008 the year the “Third Screen” takes center stage? – Beth Goza
Venture Capital Term Sheets – Leo Dirac
An embarrassment of riches – the story of Noonhat – Brian Dorsey
LIFE: if you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong – Elan Lee

Formats Available: MPEG4 Video (.mp4) Flash Video (.flv) MP3 Audio (.mp3)

How to Handle Remote Tech Support

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:30:00 GMT

Using GoToAssist is the easiest way to view and control another person's computer online. Use it to provide instant technical support to family, friends and customers. Start a session with just one click, and instantly connect with the other party.

Network Tools for Windows

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

You need these network tools, no matter which operating systems and networks you have to support. SolarWinds ipMonitor: Affordable Network Monitoring for SMBs. Get turnkey network, server and application availability monitoring with SolarWinds ipMonitor v9.0. This easy-to-use, reliable solution for SMBs delivers out-of-the-box availability monitoring so you always know exactly what's up with Active Directory, DNS, Exchange, FTP, Web, IMAP, MS SQL Server, and SMTP. Download your free trial today. Or, try their totally free tools! And, through 2/29, save 20% when you purchase ipMonitor 9.0.

Get Your Own Web Site

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

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VMware and Parallels for Virtual Machines

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:30:00 GMT

It doesn't matter if you're running on Windows or Mac OS X - every power user needs either Parallels or VMware (or both). There's never been an easier way to test software without destroying your primary operating system's stability. Think of how many times you wish you could press a 'reverse' button on your computer. Plus, there's no easier way to try new Linux distributions - see what all the fuss is about. Run Windows in OS X, run Linux in Windows, but the best way to do either is with VMware and/or Parallels.

Coupons for Online Shopping

chris@lockergnome.com (Chris Pirillo) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:56:13 GMT

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