What Are They Using?
Nicco Mele was born in West Africa, has lived all over the world, speaks many languages, and produces, among many other things, the Junglecast podcasts.
He is also probably the only human -- and certainly the only geek -- who has worked for a full house of presidential candidates: Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. I first met Nicco in the server room of the Dean campaign in Burlington, Vermont, in the winter of 2004. The servers were running Linux. Geeks with laptops were flopped all over the place, hacking in Drupal and otherwise pioneering the political hackery now being leveraged in countless campaigns and political websites and services. Nicco ran that show.
Now he runs EchoDitto, an Internet strategy and consulting company with offices in New York, Washington D.C., and Cambridge, Mass, where we are neighbors and get to hang out. "At work we rely heavily on customized Drupal and Wordpress setups", he says. But what he'd rather talk about is his home tech life:
I'm a believer in open-source, well beyond just technology. For example, I strive for all of our home electronics to be open-source wherever possible.
This begins with the Man Cave. When my wife and I as newlyweds bought our first home about 9 months ago, my wife -- terrified of the proliferation of cables around our old apartment -- offered me the basement for all of my technological needs. And lo! -- the Man Cave was born. With a 110-inch screen, a hi-def projector and surround sound -- and completely darkness in the bright noon of day, the Man Cave is ideal for consuming Battlestar Galactica. Managing all this with open-source? Enter my MythTV box, recently upgraded thanks to the wonders of Woot! Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor with four cores on one chip. Two 320 GB 7200 RPM SATA drives for 640 gigs. Add some free software and I've got a DVR and media server that is so crazy exciting it's not funny. Now if only I could get a voice-activated remote... "Computer, increase volume!"
For more, start with nicco.org and follow links from there. There are many rich veins to mine.
- Doc Searls