Has it really been two years already?
Me at SXSW
Apparently I only speak at SXSW during even-numbered years: I'll be on a panel with Marc Canter and Jon Lebkowsky talking about "How to develop for (convergent) personal devices." I'm not a developer, so I guess I'm there to offer the consumer's perspective, or something like that. The action kicks off Saturday, March 11th, at 5pm in Room 15 at the Convention Center. Try and contain your excitement.Anyway, if you're going to SXSW Interactive or are just kicking around Austin that weekend and know of anything interesting going on (or just want to meet up to chat), drop me a line.
The rumors are true
J.C. let the dogs out: It's been a looooong time since I've had a personal blog -- over four years -- and I'm not even sure I know how to write a blog post that's not about gadgets anymore, but yeah it's true. Just don't expect me to come anywhere close to topping the 5900 or so posts I've written for Engadget, ok? Why now? Well, mainly because I finally got my hands on a sweet URL. After years and years of waiting, www.roj.as finally came available (that's American Samoa, but you probably already knew that). Roj.as is home to my bio and resume, while peter.roj.as is the subdomain for this blog.
Straight to the top of the charts
Without a doubt it's an honor to debut at the top of The Blog 50, a new chart ranking bloggers by, well, some sort of metric that isn't exactly clear, but as we all know, there's only place to go from there and that's down, baby!
When you know you've made it
You know you've made it when your hometown paper profiles you, right? I managed to score a little write-up in the Merced Sun-Star, the newspaper of record in the small town in Central California where I grew up (and where my parents still live). I'll cut Carol Reiter, the author of the piece, some slack, since she did chat with me over a cellphone, but just for the record, I wasn't kicked out of my apartment when I lost my job as a writer at Red Herring, I just couldn't afford the massive rent anymore and so broke the lease and moved out. All I told Carol was that I knew what it was like to not have enough money for rent and to have to move out. Also, while I did say that lots of rich people here in New York don't own cars, though the part about them also wearing jeans baffles me since I definitely didn't say that. What is true is the part where they quote my dad about how I used to write letters to the governor. I was probably the only 8-year-old in the US who regularly petitioned the government to change the school year (I didn't like going to school on winter days when it was so freaking cold) or to send me a free geiger counter so I could measure radiation levels in case of a nuclear catastrophe (see, I dug gadgets even then!).