Matthew Gifford

I haven’t had much luck with this so far. But I’ll try again. Architecture in Helsinki will be playing at Berbati’s Pan on September 23rd. Anyone interested in going to this show with me?

Chris Pirillo says that there are plans for two Gnomedex conferences in 2006. I have to say that I’m a little disappointed. I assume that each of the two will cost at least as much as this year’s conference. As someone who could barely justify spending the money to attend this year’s Gnomedex, I doubt I’ll be able to go to both. If so, how do I choose which one to attend? Do I choose the one that has the most speakers that interest me? Or do I choose the one that has attendees that I’d like to speak with? (The latter, in my opinion, is the wiser criterion to use.)

Sure, they could kind of deal with this problem by making one more technical and one more business-oriented. But that would take away one of the big attractions to this year’s Gnomedex, which was that the attendees were exposed to a lot of ideas that they would not have been if the conference were more focused.

Regardless of which direction they go, people who can only afford one conference are going to miss out on stuff. That’s the price of success, I guess.

In June, I was feeling frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to get Vim working correctly on my machine.

In July, a reader sent me a file that made it work.

Now it seems that I have a new problem with Vim. Whenever I try to open a file with it, I get an empty buffer. I think I found a clue about what’s going on. When I try to save this empty buffer, I get this:

E203: Autocommands deleted or unloaded buffer to be written

I have no idea what to do about this, though. Anyone have ideas?

TechCrunch has a short review (via The Social Software Weblog) of Flock, a social web browser based on Firefox. I first heard about this a couple weeks ago, but didn’t say anything because details were scarce. This looks very cool.

Does anyone have a copy of the whole 50 States song by Sufjan Stevens? Does anyone even know what its real title is?

Here it is. No Mac or Linux clients. Again. This is very disappointing, Google.

The Beastie Boys have made the vocal track to some of their songs available for download (via Make). Time to fire up GarageBand. This should be fun.

The Google Talk server appears to be up (via Slashdot). I’m logged into it right now. Send a message to mgifford@gmail.com if you manage to get on.

This site will be moving to a new home (via Loud Thinking) on Friday. Textdrive is changing their hosting arrangement, which should lessen the amount of downtime the site has been experiencing.

A couple days ago, I downloaded all the free tracks at Insound (via Marusin). I finally got around to listening to them tonight. So far, my favorite is Holiday Machine by Bottom of the Hudson. After looking around a bit, I found an incredible song of theirs called Overengineered. You can download it from this page.