Senior QA Engineer Jacky Zhang now with Genologics

I had lunch with the very talented and personably Jacky Zhang today. It was nice catching up with him after many, many months since we have had a good face to face chat. Earlier this month Jacky left Flock and is now working for Victoria’s Genologics.

Although, having an amazing experience with Flock this position with Genologics sounds like a natural next step in his career. He is working as an integrated member of a small development team on life sciences research solutions developed using Java and Oracle DB. It is a very technical role and his responsibilities include unit and integration testing.

Congratulations Jacky and Genologics!

The $475 you gave to foolswisdom.com

As it says on the About page any money made by me on foolswisdom.com is donated to registered humanitarian charities.

The term “fundraising” in Toni’s article title “Automattic fundraising” reminded me that it was time to donate the money you gave by clicking on the ads here in 2007.

In 2007 that was $475 USD from Google Adsense and nothing from anything else.

$100 was already donated to my uni friend Microserf Nicole Steinbok‘s Great Lake Walk to raise money for Canadian Cancer Society. My $100 donation actually became $400 for the Canadian Cancer Society as I let Nicole donate it in her name so that Microsoft would match her, and her Microserf husband Jeff Steinbok generously matched donations, which Microsoft also matched. I like to stretch my donation dollar. Nicole raised $6301 and walked 49 km!

Just now I donated the rest of the money, $400 to Sami Barker and Esquimalt High friends’ Helping build a playground for youth in San Pancho through GiveMeaning.

San Pancho is a small developing fishing village just north of PV. My Aunt, a resident of the village, has two young boys. She has a close connection with the school, and says the town would benefit from a playground at the elementary school. A group of twelve students from Esquimalt High are participating in a fundraising event to buy supplies. Under the direction of Mr. Ken Henderson, the students will visit the town in March where they will live with the locals, study spanish and hopefully get to help out with the playground’s construction

Thank you for your support ;-)

Dollars, Forex, Stocks, Gambling

The US dollar is down again since yesterday relative to the Canadian dollar. I hope this is a temporary pause before it continues its “correction” from the painful-for-me long time lows. I don’t know why I let myself continue to be surprised that investing is just a more sophisticated and dignified form of gambling.

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CMSWire: WordPress dominates the Technorati’s Top 100

John Conroy of CMSWire wrote “Results: Most Popular CMS in Technorati’s Top 100” which finds “WordPress dominates the list” and “[WordPress is used on] a whopping 34 percent of the 100 blogs on Technorati’s Top 100″.

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We Raised $29.5 Million!

Matt, now Ma.tt, and Toni have respectively written “Act Two” and “Automattic fundraising” about us, Automattic, raising a $29.5 million USD round of financing today. Our friend Om has a head start on journalistic coverage with “WordPress.com Creator Raises $29.5M“.

By “we” in the title, I mean I have absolutely nothing to do with the financial matters, so don’t ask.

This development is, of course, a little distracting at the moment, but that will quickly fade.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. We have good, popularly, highly regarded solutions to important, interesting problems. There are many challenges we want to continue to refine our solutions to and many areas we have just started to explore — so many things are too hard, and we know we can help. Most importantly we will stay focused on relationships between real people and being dynamic to your needs — which is really what the web and particularly blogging are all about.

I’m as excited to working for Automattic today as the day I started. Has it really only been just over a year? My job description, like all job descriptions, has changed a lot in this short, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve.

I now spend about half my time working with Raanan, Barry, and Michael and the “major media organization, from the NY Times, WSJ, CNN, Fox, Time, People, and more…” the emerging ones like Giga Omni, Gawker Media’s Gizmodo Live, Blog Talk Radio, Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios and I Can Has Cheezburger.

The rest of my time is focused on participating in WordPress.org.

I love the diversity of challenges my roles expose me to. I love that WordPress is a near universal solution for online publishing, empowering the personal publishers and the major media organizations.

But most of all I love the people. Bloggers and open source participants are the among the most wonderful people I have ever met!

But along the way you still have to feel with some stinker technical challenges and personal conflicts, and that is where my favorite Automattic part comes into play. Every member of the Automattic team I learn from every day and every one of them I would love to call friend.

2luo.com YouTube Phishing? I Hope Not

I just noticed that I tried to login with my YouTube account information at www.2luo.com . I hope it isn’t a phishing or other form of malicious site, but to be safe I changed my password there and on sites where I used a related pattern.

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Movable Type 200% Open Source!

Where 100% and fully are not quite the definitions I’m used to.

Yes, Movable Type Open Source should be celebrated! It is awesome that it already includes everything that was released as Movable Type 4.0 and more. As I understand it there should soon be a stable release. But I am confused by the conversations I read and concerned by the phrases used to describe this “version”.

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My Favorite Photo Of Julia & I

Lloyd & Julia sleeping @ langpad

This photo was taken by our friend Dani September, 2005 soon after we arrived in San Francisco to live there. We slept on her couch for the the first while. She took it without us knowing while we slept.

I like this photo so much because of how genuine and innocent it is.

In a few short months Julia and I will have our baby to watch over while he or she sleeps.