It boggles my mind that the only understanding Liberals have of Citizens United is that it allows “massive infusions of cash and unlimited contributions to a candidate.” True to form, my generally Liberal friends have an aversion to the mixture of money and politics. I can’t say “I don’t understand” why they think this way, because I do. Sadly, many see the world as a conflict between laborers and the people who employ them. Too many believe that the State has a vested interest in igniting this conflict, that the State may gain control of the means of Production.

What they won’t acknowledge is the diametrically opposed world view that the State is a necessary evil that exists with every bureaucratic breath to control people, including the corporations they form. The State simultaneously enslaves and represents people. The difference between Liberals and Conservatives when it comes to the role of the State is how much benefit of the doubt is afforded to it.

I have little patience for the incuriosity they’ve exhibited towards Citizens United. They hear the words “corporation,” “money” and “contributions” and their ears turn to tin; their blood turns to steam. A “corporation” in the context of this ruling is nothing more than the legal entity that represents a collection of human beings. Citizens United extends the right of free speech to this collection of people, to spend their money to speak about a particular candidate.

Political speech is more free now, but not unlimited. Defamation, libel and slander laws have not changed. The reputation of a corporation is also at play. If a corporation, great or small, wants to campaign for or against a candidate, they risk facing the wrath, or receiving the love, of their clientele. They have to balance their budget used for campaigning, or else they can lose their entire business. What the SCOTUS did in this ruling is to force consequences through a more organic process.

Consider: if Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, or Bank Of America were to advertise against our current president, they risk alienating the remaining 35% of the population who lives in complete adulation of this man. A boycott is one of the most powerful influencers against a corporation, and consumers are free to spend their money elsewhere. If mom-and-pop falafel shop wants to advertise in favor of a pro-Israel candidate in their Congressional election, they can, too. They also risk raising the ire of those who would prefer the Arabs wipe Israel off the map and lose their business.

Journalistic corporations have faced the consequences of their politicking, all through the day of the election. It’s for this reason that large swathes of the news media are losing audiences while others gain. Before Citizens United, the only corporations that could spend unlimited amounts of cash through the day of the election are publications. This exemption has been abolished; instead the right to speak has been reinstated, not just for journalistic corporations, but for all institutions: labor unions, corporations, and other foundations. Isn’t free speech such a lovely, chaotic thing?

For the Liberals, it’s easy. He shed light on ACORN’s corruption. He made fools out of his targets, and his work helped lead Congress to withdraw funding (if but symbolically) for this organization. They have a vendetta.

For the Conservatives, it’s easy. We need to distance ourselves from this man for fear of guilt by association. Screams of “Louisiana Watergate” have left us quaking in our boots. “Shit,” we cry, as the momentum of the worst two weeks for Democrats comes to an abrupt, shrieking halt. We have reputations to protect.

Los Angeles Prosecutor Patterico knows something about jumping to conclusions:

Look: I wasn’t there and I therefore don’t know what happened. But O’Keefe has a history of goofy, humorous, over-the-top undercover stunts to make a political point. Wiretapping doesn’t seem like his style. And the facts in the affidavit — especially the lack of reference anywhere to any listening devices in the possession of anyone in the building — suggest to me that’s not what he was doing.

The Conservative handwringing is bullshit. So far I’m the third person I know who is giving James O’Keefe the benefit of the doubt. The second is an Althouse commenter. Volokh:

It’s one thing to pretend to be a pimp when interviewing ACORN employees. It’s quite another to pretend to be a telephone repairman to gain access to a U.S. Senate office and its telephone system.

It really is different. The way I see it, it’s actually better and more justifiable to bug a US Senator than it is to spycam an ACORN office. The corrupt ACORN employees are civilians, and they were being recorded by other civilians. Mary Landrieu is an elected official and an arm of the US government, and as such is a “public official” whose rights to privacy are more limited than your typical civilian.

This is different from Nixon’s Watergate Hotel break-ins because the bugging was at the behest of a public official, a person in power no less than the President, acting against an association of private individuals. Civilians have to have the power to resonably violate the privacy of elected officials* and especially their appointed underlings. It’s for this reason that the Office Of The POTUS releases correspondence with civilians as a matter of public record. It was this same problem that our current president faced when they had to wrest his BlackBerry from his grubby clutches.

Even from a Kantian standpoint of certain actions being truly immoral no matter the circumstances, the Conservatives’ despair because he “did something stupid.” Shit, we don’t even know exactly what he did! Secondly, it seems the only moral standard these whiny Conservatives is that it’s against the law. Have we forgotten that what is legal is not always moral; what is proscribed is not always evil? The repudiation from Conservatives is indicative of a lack of desire to fight on the side of one’s allies. Lastly, this is a pattern of behavior for a number of Conservative pundits. They all-too-quickly judge one of their own and distance themselves before all the facts are in.

Liberals have shown more faith in cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal than Conservatives shown this boy. They stood through thick and thin with the corrupt employees at ACORN and in so doing reduced O’Keefe’s victory to a symbolic one. It’s one thing to follow advice from one’s enemies. It’s another to learn a thing or two by observing them.

* – I understand the possibility of the shoe being on the other foot. My test of reasonability lies in the physical and mental territories around which politicans move. A home, a hacked email account or in the case of Mme. Palin, one broken into thanks to a weak password, do not really count as “reasonable” because these are not in the public purview. I also understand that this idea is extreme and unimplementible since Senators handle important national security information, the essence has to be that elected officials should be afraid of the public, not the other way around.

Composition and technique really aren’t all that exemplary, but they show practice. They capture what seems to be the intended qualities in each scene: the bustle of city life, the majesty of a palace, the tranquility of a lake. If one were to use the work alone as a means to look into the mind of this heretofore unidentified artist, what insights might we gain when studying this work?

Would you make the same insights when you learn that those paintings were made by none other than Adolf Hitler?

To a certain extent, art can be separated from the artist. Leni Riefenstahl’s anthropological photography of Africans is excellent work. However, at what point can art remain separate from the artist? Does it come with the knowledge of the artist’s identity? If I hawked these Hitler paintings as postcards in some community who have never heard of his art, what does that make me? Even harder, if I had no idea these hypothetical postcards featured Hitler’s art, what does that make me?

The appreciation of art is a multi-phase experience. Our feelings change based on what’s depicted, the artist itself, what we know and do not know. It’s truly fascinating.

• Virtue Ethics focuses on the intent and character of the doer.
• Deontology posits that there are moral duties towards a formal action, the deed itself, absent consideration of the consequences. Immanuel Kant is one of its most famous adherents, and (almost?) all religions are deontological by nature.
• Consequentialism judges the rightness or wrongness of an act based on the consequences produced. Its largest failing is that it doesn’t necessarily provide a guide as to what to do at the time of the dilemma itself.

I bring these definitions to the fore because political discussions too often unfortunately take on the nature of moral discussions. “Is it wrong or right to go to war?” “Is anything less comfortable than a hotel stay appropriate for enemy combatants?” “Under what, if any, circumstances can a pregnancy be ended, or a life ended by the state as consequence of a crime; and for that matter, what crime forfeits a person’s life?”

After years of reading, observing, studying, and participating in political discussions of this nature, I realize that disagreements over policy boil down to one party judging the other on a deontological standard while the other excuses its actions using good intentions (virtue ethics) and consequentialism. A fine example can be seen in Julian Sanchez’s The Spectre of Pacifism:

The conceptual mistake is to suppose that we’re faced with a binary choice between a pure consequentialism that just mechanically adds up all the yums and ouches or a kind of absolutist deontology that hews to a principled rule, and damn the consequences.  The point of invoking pacifism is to imply that if you want to consider any non-consequentialist moral properties of certain kinds of acts, you’re compelled by relentless logic to the most extreme possible position.  The thing is, pretty much nobody really thinks this way. Most people—the vast majority—will say it’s immoral to secretly chop up a healthy vagrant for organs to save five other people. We’re not just interchangeable tokens in some great social calculus, but individuals with individual rights that must be respected—rights that trump maximization of social welfare.  Except that if suddenly we’re sure we could save a thousand or ten thousand or ten million people by killing one innocent, most of us will at some point say, reluctantly, that it ought to be done after all.

Majority of political discussions play out this way. Pundits large and small judge each others’ quality as people based on which positions they would condone and condemn. This is also the root of the declaration that “there is no absolute morality,” in the sense that religious moral standards can fly against the face of reason. (Not to mention, of course, that different religions posit different moral judgments on certain actions.)

As another example, let’s take a look at the manufactured scandal over Scott Brown’s bikini-clad daughters. Liberal critics of this photo, as well as Scott Brown’s 1982 nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan hinge their arguments on the fact that Scott Brown and his daughters are Republican. The faulty logic goes like this:

1. Scott Brown and his daughters are Republicans.
2. “Republicans like to sell themselves as bastions of morality.”
3. Posing nude or sexy is immoral.
4. Therefore Scott Brown and his daughters are hypocrites.

The major fault in this line of reasoning is that Liberals focus on propositions 2 and 3. They exaggerate and caricature the definition of what it means to be Republican. Liberals would excuse the baring of such flesh by people with whom they agree because in their mind, these Liberal exhibitionists don’t hold themselves to a high moral standard. If Scott Brown were a Democrat, I fully expect Republicans to launch a similar line of attack, but I don’t think it would have been as effective, because Liberalism somehow reconciles with licentiousness. That Democrats would not hold Scott Brown to the standards they would hold for themselves is just one of those tactics from Saul Alinsky’s playbook. Hypocrites are, by and large, more repugnant than those who admit to, and even wallow in, their fallen nature.

The aim of a political attack based on morality is to invalidate the target’s reputation and credibility. They can be very effective, but can lead to a cheapening of the debate so much so that matters of actual policy lose priority. In the meantime, those in power continue to govern however the hell they like, to the detriment of us all.

The most annoying aspect of Philippine politics is that none of the political parties have a clearly defined platform that distinguishes one form the other. You have a central personality as the anchor of the party, and everyone else rides that person’s coattails. The promises of goodies at the expense of the taxpayer is de rigeur, and some days it feels like a choice between Engels or Marx.

So when I moved here, being the short-sighted, middle-class Liberal funded by my mother’s hard-earned money, the distinction between the political parties in terms of principle is like night and day. It was refreshing, and through a long process of unlearning ideas such as entitlement and hatred of producers, I became the Conservative that so many people know and love (or revile, depending on your beliefs).

The method by which the two monolothic parties build their coalitions, also differ like night and day. Democrats build coalitions by promising fulfillment of a group’s pet issue. This is why they nail the gay vote, the woman vote, votes from different ethnic groups, name it. Republicans, on the other hand, make one issue the defining issue of a campaign, and they pick off voters from the groups that agree with them.

This is how Scott Brown campaigned. He insisted on being the forty-first vote to prevent cloture (I’m a stickler for words, a topic I intend to write about soon enough). He made opposition to the Democrat-controlled healthcare reform his single, defining issue. He built his identity around that and the people came. They came for their own reasons, of course, but he didn’t spend his campaign promising goodies to groups. He found a case that he believed was enough to get people to sacrifice their pet issues and focus on something else.

These tactics also lead to each parties’ undoing. In this country, no single party stays in power for too long. Americans remain suspicious of absolute power and prefer to tip the balance the other way. Once the issue around which Republican voters coalesce is resolved, it is up to the incumbents to find another issue to rally around. If they fail, the infighting begins: people’s instincts start to take precedence. The same people who voted for Brown in opposition to Obamacare will be the same people who will oppose him on social issues, given that Brown leans pro-choice.

Democrats, on the other hand, lose votes when they fail to deliver on those many goodies they offer (gay marriage, anyone?). They also fail when they use the groups they court as weapons against the middle, such as when the current—and soon to be dead—version of Demcare exempts union members from the “Cadillac plan tax.” They fail because they realize these concessions are extreme and divisive and come at the expense of those whose money they want for contributions.

After stating these observations, what advice do I have for the Republican party? When the pendulum swings in your favor, it’s time to use it, or lose it. For the Democrats? I have a few thoughts, but the most prudent of politicos don’t take advice from their opponents anyway.

We are inundated with awareness campaigns. I don’t think there is one popular color out there that has not been co-opted for a cause, such as the dismal Product (RED) launched by the biggest number two in the world, Bono. We are so aware of every pet issue there is to be had that we don’t know where to send our money. Our money, time and effort are non-renewable resources that must be budgeted. When we donate a dollar to one cause, it’s one less dollar for another cause we like.

Unlike throwing money at the great kelptocracies of Africa or Asia, the situation in Haiti is critical, and if one has been desensitized to the emotional appeals to prosperity guilt we experience everyday, there is a utilitarian and rational reason to helping the victims of the Haiti quake. Matt Stinson tweeted: “Amazed that any Americans would thinking helping Haiti is a bad idea. We help now or we pay later in instability and refugee crises.”

Understand that Haiti shares the island with the Dominican Republic. Discouraging American assistance in Haiti proves a lack of understanding as to what an exodus would wreak upon the neighboring nations. An attempt at pilgrimage into the Dominican Republic will force the Dominicans to face scrutiny while they protect their land and resources, or strain those same resources in assiting refugees. A diaspora into the sea would lead to massive casualties and have them knocking on our doors. At that point, what are we to do?

We have the capacity to help. We also have the capacity to rebuild a nation into something better. There is a rationale, not just a rationalization, to help Haiti, and even from the cold calculus of long-term gain, we avoid a large long-term loss. There is nothing immoral to approaching this issue in a utilitarian fashion, and there’s plenty of deontological immorality associated with not doing anything. It’s up to us to help however we can.

I’m not a plugin developer, nor a theme developer, or a pure front-end designer. I honestly don’t know what to label the gestalt of my skills, but I do good work. Part of that good work is being able to select which plugins work for my project requirements. While I truly appreciate the good intentions of the WordPress leadership in bundling plugins together and endorsing them, but I have my fears on its effects on the plugin marketplace.

It’s libre in more ways than one. Let’s keep it that way.

The current state of the marketplace follows the standard distribution of players based on power laws. Right now, very good plugins with even better promotion and marketing dominate the marketplace. Is there a better plugin for a given application? Yes, but for reasons beyond the control of the WordPress leadership, they don’t get as much exposure. These reasons vary. The developer may be an asshole. Updates may not be frequent enough to keep up with WordPress’ own development cycle. The plugin may be very esoteric in application. Whatever the reason, this hypothetical “better” plugin lives and dies without the interference of the leadership. The only thing more American than the WordPress plugin and theme marketplace is apple pie.

Releasing canonical plugins and themes, while making it easy for end-users and new adopters, interferes with that dynamic. Today, If I were to release Richmond—the theme running this blog—into the wild, I will have to compete with the awesomeness of Studiopress and Woothemes. If the WordPress Project were to include a theme similar to mine, not only do I have to compete with everyone else, I’d have to compete with God Himself.

“Canonical” “anything” is a takeover of a market that doesn’t need it.

I’ve always defended the WordPress Project and especially Matt himself from accusations of others that he’d rather not let anyone else make money off of this. Mark Jaquith is proof positive that one can make plenty of hard-earned cash from playing within the rules of the open source game. However, these “official” add-ons are a deathblow to innovators, because WordPress’ expansion has evolved the market into a consumer one.

The bar to entry is low: it’s easy to set up a blog, find cheap hosting, map a domain name, etc. The users, however, have gotten lazy. When only 75% of users at a WordCamp are using the latest versions, we have a problem. Using a simple extrapolation—of course, not a statistically perfect method—of that number, assume 15% of the market is running outdated, insecure versions of the software. That’s a huge problem, considering the number of WordPres blogs out there. While I strongly believe that it’s one’s responsiblity to maintain and update a site, that assumed number is that of irresponsible blog-owners who present a danger not just to the reputation of the WordPress community but to the general online health of all online people.

These same lazy people are the ones who won’t be bothered to pick a plugin based on how it performs. They’ll reach for the closest solution accessible and go with it. In today’s plugin/theme marketplace, the market leaders may not be the best of best of the very darned best, but they come close. In tomorrow’s canonical marketplace, the majority of users won’t be bothered to move beyond that which is canonical. Why would they, when those selfsame plugins and themes carry not just the approval that a theme is safe, but that it’s endorsed by and is considered “official” by the WordPress leadership itself?

Leave us to squabble amongst ourselves.

God Himself limits the miracles He performs, because He has given us the ability to affect our world because of our will. The free market of plugins and themes is a beautiful thing. It forces the likes of Studiopress and Woothemes to innovate ahead of the market, or lose their edge. It forces me to refine my projects or lose relevance. The miracle of canonical plugins would end this. Perhaps not overnight, but it will. I implore the decision-makers at the WordPress Project: this is not change we need, nor is it change we can believe in. I understand that the opinions of end-users are important, but this still is a community-driven project, and a canonical marketplace—or better yet, a Command Economy—would have us fighting for the favor of the leadership, and not our clientele. That’s not a marketplace; that’s a clique.

Ma.tt responds:

Hey Jay! I’m always happy when you write about WordPress. 

First a disclaimer: I’m probably one of the biggest free market nuts you know. In fact in college I focused on economics and political science/philosophy.

That said, I didn’t finish, and let’s be honest I wasn’t the most studious guy in the world. Maybe I missed something important. Although I’ve thought about this issue endlessly, including most of the issues raised here, there are some things brought up in the comments that I haven’t thought about before. More importantly, you could be right.

That’s why we’re doing this whole thing as an experiment; not the Large Hadron Collider type that could potentially destroy the universe, but more incrementally with just three initial plugins.

The first, health check, is one that’s entirely new, a collaboration between some existing core folks and some new contributors. The second is existing core functionality, post by email, that we’re taking into a plugin to make core lighter, faster, and less bloated. Hopefully it will improve significantly too because we’ve got some really cool new code from it being donated from the WP.com side. The third, PodPress, is an existing plugin that is very popular in the community and provides important functionality but has effectively been abandoned, so we’re going to adopt it and modernize it so people who rely on that plugin aren’t stuck on old versions of WP.

Something new, something old, something borrowed… something blue? Yep: Kubrick. 

Now if in the course of working on these three plugins it looks like we’re going to cause the end of WordPress as we know it, we’ll change course. It’s not that big a deal, and we’ll figure something else out. The only dangerous course of action is doing nothing at all.

That’s a load of bullshit. First, on the matter of support, the GPL states:

15. Disclaimer of Warranty.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

You know what that means? That means that if you use this software and it’s not designed to cause damage but doesn’t work the way you want to, then you don’t have anyone to sue in court. It’s for this same reason that wars over GPL product are fought in the public sphere. In this field, the only currency is reputation.

It appears that as a FLOSS project grows, more people hate the developer, and to a greater degree.

As word of mouth increases the exposure and value of a GPL project, expectations grow to unwieldly proportions. The heart of any project is its community, and a project’s success hinges on the contributions of its members. More people with less knowledge about the full functionality and operational methods of the project are enjoined to use and benefit from the project, but these are the people with the largest expectations.

When they complain, they’re the same ones who speak the most hurtful words. They come only second to the competitors of the product in question. (On a side-note, I was guilty of this in earlier years when I had Movable Type in my crosshairs, and so are Habari advocates today.) Developers can be sensitive types. Hello? We’re people too. We produce projects that we believe solve a problem, and we take pride in the hours of voluntary service that we offer.

However, we, too, can be spread thin.

As expectations grow, so do the number of support tickets, and the many esoteric issues that appear in exotic situations that we are unable to predict. It’s even worse when we are unable to duplicate the problems. This is why, in front-end development, I have chosen to charge extra for IE6 consistency. For too long I’ve avoided PNG transparency to the detriment of my designs, just to make them “look the same in IE6.” No more. This is why, when setting up a site from the ground up, I charge extra for extended support and ensure that any issues with the hosting company are addressed to the right people.

When we’re spread thin, we start running out of time for those activities that make money for us. Designers and developers have a strong tendency for focus, and for that very same reason that most of us are dudes. Complaints are distracting, and being the exacting perfectionists that we can be (to a fault), sometimes we end up ignoring the projects that make us money. Then we get a little hungry, and start hating all of you.

A paywall is one of the best ways of diverting the flood.

Michael Torbert released All-In-One SEO Pack, and it’s become the most heavily downloaded plugin in the WordPress repository. It’s also one of the most misunderstood plugins in the world. No, it won’t make your site the number one result in Google for the word of your choice. It helps one manage keywords and titles and meta content in a way that WordPress by itself does not provide. For example, if I wanted to add a few keyphrases to the title attribute of this post without having a kilometric title in the post, AIOSEOP lets me do that. The expectations behind the plugin are some of the most unrealistic I have ever seen, and the complaints regarding the results and functionality have gone beyond the absurd. Too many questions asked at the forum are moronic, and many questions have been asked and answered.

The release of AIOSEOP Pro and the impending sunset for free support from Michael or myself have thrown a number of folks in a tizzy. The Pro version removes any advertising associated with the plugin, which can be seen in the plugin management screen. It also provides access to a support forum that will replace the free one. I have not advised Michael on any course of action. However, I understand completely why he’s doing this. The form fields for AIO are self-evident, and the installation is standard. The documentation exists. The paywall creates an agreement between him and the client, who sees value in the support that will be provided.

Value is perceived by the buyer

The grumbling is due to the fact that there is no extended or additional “functionality” associated with the pro version. The free version is supported by ads, but also works the same way as the pro version does. This is the same for the XML sitemap plugin (developed by someone else). This is the same case for a number of gratis iPhone applications and games. There is value in removing advertisement for a client project. There are people who will find this important. These are the people who will be willing to pay, and won’t spend the day complaining and calling the Pro version a “ripoff.”

Since I see no advantageous value in buying a car from Chrysler for the purposes of moving from point A to point B, I didn’t buy my first car from Chrysler. But I didn’t go complaining about how Chrysler is a rip because I see no benefit in having one. The most vocal of critics are doing this for two things: they want their freebies and/or they stand to gain from lambasting someone else.

These graceless little cockroaches are armed with the largest fucking bullhorns on the planet and get audiences that are disproportionate to their value as human beings. However, sunlight is a great disinfectant and the best way to deal with them is to shine a light on their stupidity. Hence, this post.

One of those activists is Sissy Willis, an OG political blogger. The faceless mystery woman from Massachusetts has thrown her weight into Scott Brown’s senatorial election efforts, and her ringing endorsement was picked up by Instapundit. This started a snowball effect that placed Sissy as the epicenter of an online movement to get the Republican elected into the seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy.

That it’s called “Ted Kennedy’s seat” long after he died is testament to a political dynasty that must be put to an end. Scott Brown has Sissy to thank for bringing national attention to the special election on January 19. If not for her and the attention that it got, Brown would not be where he is in the polls, which yesterday places him at 41% vs Coakley’s 50%.

All of this started long before the NRSC decided to join in supporting Brown. They’d be dismayed to know that Sissy has outcampaigned the NRSC in a winnable effort. Her effort may not be the first one to disintermediate the national party leadership and the campaign, but it may be the most effective so far. Because of her, many more people are watching, ready to call shenanigans on any efforts to steal an election that is both candidates’ to win.

If the mystery woman of the political blogosphere can bring down a 20-year career politician and have her working to get elected instead of coasting into “Ted Kennedy’s Seat,” so can we all affect our local political landscape and prevent what seems to be inevitable. Some of us may not be faceless, but we can all be kingmakers.

Before then, I was wary of attending blogger meetups. We learned about people based on what they were writing, a few email conversations and not much else. Maintaining a steady line of communication amongst locals was not easy, given that most bloggers in my area of interest—politics—live far apart. We also tend to look within ourselves, our at the world from within our windows. My participation in Twitter broke me out of my shell. So, a few highlights:

A springtime bus trip to NYC with my best friend, his sister and his girlfriend. For fear of attracting the worst of theives and muggers, I suggested against bringing our DSLRs. Bringing pocket cameras in their stead was the biggest regret of the trip.

May brought WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, which was the first conference I attended. Organized by Aaron Brazell, the event gave me a chance to meet long-time online friend Stephan Segraves, and WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith.

I also went to a number of local meetups organized through Twitter. Some of them in Baltimore, and I’ve gone to monthly meetups in Columbia, MD. The last big event of the year was TEDx MidAtlantic (recap).

The year in news is marred with a general sense of dissatisfaction. It’s led to a general sentiment of “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and in that respect, I agree. However, the past year was one of great personal growth and challenges for me. It was not one to forget.