John's Tumblr

I'm a partner at Greylock, former CEO of Mozilla, founder of Reactivity, dad, husband & nerd, among other things.

[staff]

[postitforward]

Hey Tumblr. You can save someone’s life by answering their texts.

You’ve already been sharing your stories with each other through Post It Forward, and you’ve built an amazing, supportive community around those stories. Now here’s your chance to put your empathy to work and master the skills it takes to be a crisis counselor. 

Dozens of Tumblr users are currently in training and Crisis Text Line is eager for more awesome volunteers to be a part of their 2015 Tumblr Corps, lending support to texters who are dealing with a wide range of issues. If you’ve got a computer and a kind heart, apply here. You must live in the United States and be over 18.

Deadline is Nov. 17! Don’t delay!  

[merlin]

’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.

David Foster Wallace (1996)

[parislemon]

Nailed it. “💀💀💀”

[nprfreshair]

Have a great weekend! 

[a-night-in-wonderland]

[letterstopresidentobama]

President Obama is traveling in Alaska to shine a spotlight on what Alaskans in particular have come to know: Climate change is one of the biggest threats we face; it is being driven by human activity, and it is disrupting Americans’ lives right now.

To follow along with the President, take a look back at Alaska’s history, and check out this letter to President Eisenhower on the question of Alaskan statehood in 1954.

[lilly]

This is amazing. And a good reminder that life is not static. Alaska has only been a state for a little over 50 years.

[obamawhitehouse]

“To see people gathered in an evening outside on a beautiful summer night, and to feel whole, and to feel accepted, and to feel that they had a right to love, that was pretty cool.” —President Obama on the lighting of the White House after the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage equality

[vintagecomputers]

Hayes Smartmodem

Hayes Microcomputer Products was a U.S.-based manufacturer of modems. They are particularly well known for their Smartmodem, designed by Dale Heatherington, which introduced the ability to control the modem through a simple command language, as opposed to manual operation through front-panel switches. This smart modem approach dramatically simplified operation, making modems a practical device for a much wider audience. Today almost all modems still use a variant of the Hayes command set introduced in the Smartmodem.

Hayes was a major brand in the modem market from the introduction of the original 300 bit/s Smartmodem in 1981, and was particularly well known for high quality. They remained a major vendor throughout the 1980s, periodically introducing models with higher throughput. In the early 1990s a number of greatly cost-reduced high-performance modems were released, notably the SupraFAXModem 14400, which eroded price points across the entire market. Hayes was never able to respond effectively, and the widespread introduction of ADSL and cable modems in the mid-1990s repeatedly drove the company in Chapter 11 protection before being liquidated in 1999.

At the time of its introduction, the modem market was fairly small, and competitors generally ignored the Smartmodem. But it was not long before hobbyists were able to combine the Smartmodem with new software to create the first real bulletin board systems (BBSes), which created significant market demand. The market grew rapidly in the mid-1980s, and as the Smartmodem was the only truly “universal” modem on the market, Hayes grew to take over much of the market. Heatherington retired from what was then a large company in 1984.

Smartmodem ad for dealers: [ VIDEO LINK ]

[lilly]

I've always been obsessed with getting connected online. I still remember these in 1981, when I was 10. Absolute magic.

[animal-factbook]

Excluding Tumblr’s CEO and founder david, every single one of Tumblr’s staff member are cats. Since the company’s inception in 2007, the number of cat employees have grown steadily over the years and today over 300 cats are working at Tumblr’s headquarter in New York City,

[david]

http://www.tumblr.com/jobs

[bijan]

Allow me to spare you the rest of the truths. But the short answer is simply that I could not find a good argument to tell Tamar we should wait any longer for us to grab our backpacks and hit the road — celebrate our last 25 years together by turning the page and enjoy a perfectly fine mid life crisis full of bliss and beauty, and leave the door open to serendipity for our next leadership opportunities, once our long list of travels and adventures is exhausted.

Patrick Pichette, Google CFO retirement blog post

Respect.

(via bijan)

[obamawhitehouse]

Tomorrow, President Obama will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery. Listen to the stories of those who marched, and share how you march on.

[lessig]

Imagine that when you plugged something into an electrical outlet, the outlet queried the device and demanded identification. Was it a Sony TV or Panasonic? Was it a Dell or an Apple? And then based on that identification, different levels of quality or reliability of electricity were served...

[point95-deactivated20190114]

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” -
Marshall McLuhan

[obamawhitehouse]

I know technology. This is how I’ll serve my country.

The United States Digital Service is transforming how the federal government works for the American people. If you’ve got coding or site design skills, they need your help. (via whitehouse)

[parislemon]

It’s a rare and remarkable thing to recognize what’s great about your personal culture and project that forward. Any great entrepreneur tells you what you want before you know you want it.

Anthony Bourdain, talking about restaurant entrepreneur Jason Wang and his Famous Foods empire, which Bourdain inadvertently helped launch. (via parislemon)

[obamawhitehouse]

Today is Big Block of Cheese Day, and it’s feta than ever! Ask your questions for Cabinet secretaries and White House staffers all day using #AskTheWH. 

[johnborthwick]

The deeper issue here is that the whole interaction model for smartphones is deeply unsettled. With smartphones we’ve moved away from the unifying model of the web browser plus Google, but haven’t reached stability in a new model - everything is still changing, including the questions. We don’t really know what it will mean to ‘find’, ‘discover’ and ‘install’ an ’app’ in a few years.

WhatsApp sails past SMS, but where does messaging go next? (via johnborthwick)