Holly and I started Shiny New Toy in early 2008.  At the time, we had both moved on from working together at NASA.  Holly found a great opportunity working with Hot Studio in downtown San Francisco.  I left NASA when Stanford University came calling.  And I was preparing for life with a second child.  There were a number of reasons we created Shiny New Toy.  First (and most importantly), Holly and I missed working on things together.  Our skills, cultural sensitivities, and work habits complement each other perfectly.  Second, we are often approached with opportunities outside of our day jobs.  Shiny New Toy became a mechanism by which would could easily assess those opportunities and chose the ones that we wanted work on.  Third, we’re always coming up with new (often silly) ideas that we quickly wanted to execute.  Shiny New Toy could be a banner for various skunkworks that we wanted to crank out.

We’ve had ups and downs in momentum over the last couple of years.  Over the past year, we’ve been pretty quiet about what we’re up to.  Last summer, I started working full time at a startup.  That was pretty much all consuming.  Doing that with a one year old and three year old at home was practically suicidal.  Meanwhile, Holly continued to crank out work for high visibility clients over at Hot Studio.  And a few months, the circle completed for me as I returned to a role at NASA.

Concurrent to all that activity, the WordPress niche which were pretty invested in began to change.  Simply put, the landscape of WordPress resources out there is pretty saturated now and forced us to reassess our focus.  In response to that we tried some different things including attempting to work on projects for pure company equity.  Not so great results with that on first attempt.

Essentially, we realized that Shiny New Toy was meant to complement our existing professional lives (for now) not be the centerpiece of it.  We’ve become self aware and comfortable with what Shiny New Toy (see previous paragraph).  Ideally, we’d pick three projects a year to work on and going forward that will be the metric we will seek to achieve. 

No, we don’t have anything big to announce today.  So stop holding your breath and exhale.  But something needed to break the silence here.  For a couple months, I started wondering what would be the tipping point to break the ice.  And last week, I think the spark that we needed was lit with the Thesis/WordPress cage match.  It got Holly and I riffing again.  Stay tuned for more thoughts on that. 

JJ and I are proud to announce our first official desktop wallpaper. I jokingly made this for JJ yesterday and we figured why not just offer it up. It’s inspired by a ridiculous term we’ve been joking about for months…

Dynamism: Keep web sites “fresh” by periodically adding new material and features, and by updating information regularly. A dynamic site will draw more repeat visitors and garner good press coverage.

Enjoy! 1440×900,  1920×1200

Note: If you are looking for more sizes, just let me know and maybe I will just add them to the list.

But wait.  The Google Chrome OS may give that old PC a second life.  Google is claiming that the Google Chrome OS is being built to target the netbook monitor, but that should mean it should help infuse new energy into any old Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP or even Windows 2000. 

And that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing with an Windows XP system I recently built.  It has decent specs.  A Pentium 4 2.25 GHz Processor with 1 GB of RAM.  I originally purchased it around 2002, then put it into a closet when I bought a new Vista capable desktop.  Just recently, I dusted it off, reinstalled the operating system and put it into use in an office where I’m doing some contract work.  Two big things I’ve found out in the past month:

First, even Firefox tends to bog the machine down.  Sure I’ve got a lot of extensions running, but its pretty clear that much of today’s software wasn’t built with older processors in mind. 

Second, I’ve yet to install Microsoft Office on it.  It’s been a month and to be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it this far without having to cave in and load up Office.  In fact, the Office DVD is currently sitting within my eyesight.  Collecting dust on the corner of my desk.  Instead I’ve been easily getting by with Google Docs.

Go I’m fairly certain I can get by with GMail and Google Docs; Meebo.com for IM; Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix Watch Instantly for entertainment; and the other 500+ bookmarks in my browser. 

I’m with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:

The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

I’ve agreed with that sentiment for a long time.  It’s one of the reason’s I pursued a career in web development.

Now, I disagree with the ridiculous statements that many blogs are making. The Google Chrome OS is not a stake to the heart of Microsoft’s business.  This is a very cool possible step forward for technology.  But not a groundbreaking move that will make a big dent in Microsoft’s OS business.  I think Fake Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping things in proper perspective.

You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?

Now Fake Steve’s post is rich in comedy and snark, but he’s right.  Mainstream America is not using Chrome simply as a browser.  There’s no way their going to flock to a Google Chrome Operating System.

But me?  I’ve got another reason to keep my old PC’s around. 

Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.

So if the younger generation is indeed leaving Facebook, the question is where are they going?  A return to MySpace seems pretty unlikely.  Just where are those 18-25 year old folks that advertisers love trying to run and hide to?

First of all, its a big “if”.  It’s very possible that the true problem is that 18-25 year olds simply are not indicating the high school or college that they attend or graduated from.  Since this is no longer a requirement like it was in Facebook’s earlier days, the numbers could easily shift over time.  Perhaps we are seeing that.

One of the most interesting possibilities is that they’re heading to the closed off world of email.  The most interesting comment on Marshall’s post was from a recent college graduate.

I, as a recent graduate, do not use Facebook anymore because of e-mail. I would say that most of high school, and college, students have not discovered e-mail yet, as email is used a lot in corporate America. Ever since I started working, where I had to use e-mail all the time, I switched to e-mailing friends instead of going to Facebook. A few of my friends have done the same thing.

That’s an amazing revelation, people being exposed to email for the first time and liking it so much that they’re getting off the Facebook boat.  Meanwhile almost everyone I know (I’m 38 years old) is trying do the opposite – break free from  these archaic, closed off systems like email and have conversations out in the open where they can be easily and efficiently discovered. 

In so doing, I left my Palm Treo 755p behind. And I’m now off the Palm platform for the first time in a decade.  As you might imagine, I had years of contacts and data building up on my Treo.  Critical data which I couldn’t afford to lose and that I had to move over to my new iPhone.  I was worried that this process was going to be full of gaseous pain, but it wasn’t so bad.  Here’s how I moved my data to my iPhone.

1. Sync the Treo with Palm Desktop.  This captures your contacts and calendar data off of the Treo.  In addition, it backups the memos, tasks, and photos.  Contacts and calendar are the most important elements so that’s what I’m going to focus on. 
2. I’m already a Gmail user.  I want to manage all my data with Google contacts and Google calendar.  So…download and install a trial version of CompanionLink for Google.  This will help you get your data from Palm Desktop into Google.  It’s available at http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html
3. Make some backups before you try the Palm Desktop sync.  Backup your Google contacts and also create .csv backup file of your Palm Desktop data
4. Configure Companion Link for Google for your GMail account, then synchronize.
5. Now that everything is in Google, configure your iPhone to use this data and then use Google Mobile Sync to sync over the air going forward.  Instructions on that are at at http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

That’s pretty much it!

And I just read a great post on 10 Free WordPress themes.  There’s some really appealing options in that list.  Despite the fact that we’ve been digging into Thesis lately – we’re using it to rebuild this very site and I recently built Ticketfly’s site with Thesis – and we’re liking it, Thesis is a premium theme that will cost you some dollars. Are those dollars worth it?  That depends. 

If there’s one free theme mentioned in that post that I would personally recommend, it would be Thematic.  Especially if you are building a WordPress site that will have a more traditional page and subpage information architecture instead of posts. 

Here’s I typically put together a post.  Or at least how I should.

It starts with an idea for a post and those often come while I’m driving for some reason.  To capture the idea, I’ll leave myself a voicemail.  Then when I’m at my desk listening to my voicemails, I’ll stick an item on my to do list in Remember the Milk with the label “Blog post – working title goes here”.

But sometimes it comes while I’m reading something online.  In that case I’ll bookmark it in Firefox in bookmark folder called “Blog post research – working title goes here”

(Hopefully you grasp the fact that I’m replacing the term working title goes here with the actual working title)

Then a couple things have to happen.  Sometimes in a linear order, sometimes in parallel.  I need a quick and dirty rough draft.  I open up Windows Live Writer on my netbook or desktop and crank out a quick outline or super fast draft.  I then do some web surfing to find reference materials, photos I might want to use, links to go into the post, and more and save into that Blog post research folder I created in Firefox.  I use the XMarks synchronization system so if I’m switching from my desktop to my netbook, my reference materials are there.

When I need a photo, I prefer to use some a picture that I’ve taken.  But since 85% of the pictures I take these days are of my children, that’s pretty rare.  So I use the Flickr photos search tool Compfight to find a photo with a usable Creative Commons license.

I then take my second pass at my post, expanding the outline into a decently constructed piece of writing while also adding in my photos, hyperlinks, and more. 

Then I walk away.  Or at least I should.  Two hours at a minimum.  Ideally at least a day.  When I return to the post its time for a last iterative read, while also making sure I have good spelling grammar.  To be honest, I don’t do this part of the cycle enough.  With two kids, I’m always amazed when I get anything done, so when I’m done with that second pass, I like to feel good about myself and hit publish.  That is a misatke.

Finally, it’s time to categorize the post, tag it…then hit publish.

Ideally, I perform the “one to four” routine on the post.  After publishing a single post, go leave 3 or 4 comments on other blogs.  There’s a lot of reasons for this.  If you want to know more about that strategy, you should check in with Dave Peck as he’s the one who shared it with me. 

There you go. My blog post writing workflow.  What’s yours?

This is an excellent addition and will help me make decisions on whether the account is legit or not and whether I should reciprocate with a follow.  

That’s where a utility like BigDump comes in handy.

BigDump will help you restore or move a large backup of a MySQL database be staggering the import process into chunks that can uploaded over http.

You can find BigDump at http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php