Happy Birthday to me. It amazes me how I can have the absolute worst luck in the world at the same time some things remain awesome.

I crashed my car (a ‘95 red Honda Civic hatchback) almost two weeks ago and the accident totaled the Red Sled. A couple of days later I bought a 1969 Austin-Healey Sprite Mark IV that needs work. I’m keeping track of the project on the fixer-upper over at My Sprite, a blog I set up just for that purpose. Big thanks to my big brother for making this possible; I don’t know anything about restoring cars, but he does. If you like that sort of thing, head over to the new blog; I post photo galleries whenever something happens.

Title refers to the song that Ryan can’t get out of his head this morning. I am sitting in a hotel lounge in Orlando with the WordPress core committers going through the trac 2.9 milestone in preparation for branch. If anyone has a patch that hasn’t been committed: get some community members to test it for you (wrangle them from IRC and wp-hackers); if you reported a bug, patch it if you can or see if you can find someone to tackle it. Thanks!

Andrew and Ryan

Peter, Matt, Mark

WordCamp NYC was awesome. I’ll be at FoWD all day today, but will start catching up on the post-WordCamp chores tomorrow. Also, back to UI stuff!

I’ve been with Automattic for a year and four months, according to LinkedIn. My title, Libation Engineer, is the result of mixing going-away cocktails with a firm stance on the negative impact of using words (like engineer) in a way that dilutes the traditional meaning. (Long story.) Anyway, my business cards say Libation Engineer (+user experience). The problem is that people either want to know the story behind it (see aforementioned ‘long story’ comment), or they think I’m a bartender (as my lawyer did). Since I’m about out of business cards, I asked Matt if I could change my title and he agreed.  I asked a handful of people for suggestions, and here are the top choices. If you think one is better than the others, please vote and help me pick my new title. You can also suggest something else, if you have any clever ideas.

My job description, such as it is, includes user experience design for the WordPress open source project and UX consulting on Automattic projects, some loose project management for the open source project, and working on community initiatives for both .org and .com. Oh, and I’m co-organizing WordCamp NYC, which will be super awesome, and you should come if you’re within a few hours. That probably shouldn’t affect your vote, though, since that’s something I’m mostly working on after hours, and after November 14-15, won’t be relevant anymore.

So vote:

Even Jessica Alba, named sexiest woman in the world more than once, isn't immune to retouching.

I, like many women, find the airbrushing of the female form in popular media to be, well, basically an evil plot by the patriarchal multinational media conglomerates to subjugate women into a reduced psychosocial status that requires them to buy into meaningless consumer-driven lifestyles of diet products, spanx, makeup and anti-cellulite creams in an attempt to match the media portrayals of women’s bodies, which are rarely realistic.

(Cough, sorry, flashback to my younger, more strident years.)

Still, it’s actually true. And it pisses me off even more when the original photo shows a genuinely well-proportioned (or even skinny) woman (see above). So I was blown away when I saw that a law is being proposed in France to require labeling of retouched body images.

The required warning would be needed in newspaper and magazine advertising, press photos, product packaging, political campaigns and art photography, according to the Telegraph. The language will reportedly be: “Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person’s physical appearance.”

via Photoshopping Illegal? France Set to Regulate Airbrushed Pics.

It seems unlikely to pass in France, and unlikely to ever be brought up in the U.S., but I think this would be great. In the same vein I also would like to see similar disclaimers on teen movies and TV shows: “The actors portraying 15-year-olds are in fact 28 years of age. You should not look, act, or dress like this is you are really 15;” and historical films/fiction: “Things didn’t really happen this way, but we don’t really care if you know the difference between fact and fiction, because if we say it’s based on true events, we get more cash.”

National health care, now this? If only I’d stayed in French class in college. Sadly, I didn’t get much past, “je suis un barreur.” (Ironically, I dropped the class because it conflicted with crew practice.)

I’ll be here all week, folks.

Portland WordPress users: I’ll be in town tonight through next Tuesday morning to attend WordCamp, and would like to do some usability testing with you lovely people while I’m around. I have time slots all day tomorrow (Thursday), a few on Friday, a couple before/during/after WordCamp (though those will mostly be very short), and a couple on Tuesday morning. If you’d like to participate and can spare 20-40 mintues to help improve the next version of WordPress, send me an email (you can use the contact form on this site) or send me a message on Twitter (@janeforshort).

I’ll be doing some usability testing of WordPress and the WordPress iPhone app (new beta version!) while I’m in Portland for WordCamp (9/16-22). I’ve got five beta tester slots being held for participants (we can only have a total of 100 beta testers). If you use WordPress on your iPhone and would like to try the new beta version (and will be attending WordCamp), let me know.

**Update: Due to high demand, I’ll be raffling off the slots. Send me an email, or @janeforshort on twitter by 9pm tonight pacific time to let me know you’re interested, and I’ll pick 4 beta testers at random (one slot was already promised when I realized there would be more demand than supply). If you don’t get picked, you can still help with testing… I’ll have my iPhone at the WordCamp, and will let people try the beta app that way as well.

Sitting in the ear doctor’s waiting room, waiting to get checked out before we head to Tybee tomorrow. My hands are stained purple from putting purple streaks in my niece Jamie’s hair this morning. End result shown below.