Author: Rick Klau

Steve Rubel and his client, Chris Sloop (CTO at WeatherBug) are talking about WeatherBug’s ongoing struggle to overcome a bad business decision 4 years ago (a distribution deal with Gator, a known spyware distributor). Jeff’s got CDs of WeatherBug Plus in the back (I just installed it, holy cow — it’s 96 degrees back home…

Julie Leung is giving a fascinating presentation about the boundaries of personal and professional writing, involving family without exposing them, maintaining balance between what’s hidden and what’s revealed. I love her technique of using photos to illustrate her points, rather than the standard three bullet slides. It’s powerful, and forces you to listen to what…

I’m two rows behind P.T. of Make Magazine, and his rotary cell phone is on the table next to him. It’s a funny, clever little hack. And it really works. I hear some people got copies of Make in their swag bag… which makes me wonder why I didn’t get one… I hear it’s a…

So it turns out that yesterday’s connectivity problems were due in part to someone sending a live video feed from their laptop. Good Lord.

Given the horrendous connectivity problems throughout the day, I chose not to do any real-time note-taking during the sessions. Some random observations: Dave’s OPML app is cool. I remember when I first “got” the outliner built into Radio a few years ago and getting really excited about it, and I documented how I managed my…

Spotty wifi is conspiring to force all of us in the room to (gasp!) pay attention. I feel bad for Dave, whose demo requires net access… memo to conference planners: get the speakers a wire. Don’t make them dependent on the stability of the wifi connection.

It’s raining men. If ever there were a need for gender equality, it’s this conference.

Just arrived at my hotel in Seattle for Gnomedex. On my flight out here, I realized this may be the first conference in at least a half dozen years where I’m here as an attendee, not as a speaker, a vendor or a sponsor. Ordinarily on the afternoon of arrival, I’m realizing how woefully under-prepared…

We’ve known about this latest bit of news since March, but with a number of miscarriages over the last several years, we weren’t going to start announcing Robin’s latest pregnancy until we felt confident that things were progressing well. I’m happy to report that the Klau family is set to get larger by one sometime…

Yesterday we took a day trip up to the Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin, just under a 3 hour drive from Naperville. Robin read about the area — which sits on the Wisconsin River and is just east of the Mississippi River — in the Tribune last month, and we decided it would…