My two week work induced hiatus is over. We went to New York(our home office) and kicked butt. Gave the presentation, and made all of the points we wanted to make. I think that it went as well as it possibly could. We essentially were introducing an Internet business model for the trade publishing business over the next five years.

So the decision on whether to proceed with this plan is now out of my hands. While that relieves me of a burden, it doesn't necessarily comfort me. We'll see how things play out. Without being dramatic, I think that I let this drag out too long.

All in all, it was great experience for me. We worked very hard to develop a long term plan, and I've never been in a situation where I was the one presenting to the CEO of a large corporation before. I learned a lot from the experience that I'm sure I'll use over the next twenty years.

I've always worked for smallish companies and this marks the first time that I really don't have access to the primary decision makers on a daily basis. It's definitely frustrating. It's really difficult to transfer your vision to someone in a two or three hour presentation.

MacAmp Lite 1.0 has been released by @Soft. It's shareware for $5 and worth every penny. They'll give you a five dollar discount off the full version when it is released too. I went over and bought it as soon as I found out. I really enjoy the whole MP3 thing. I just wish my RIO would work with my Macintosh too.

OK so I'm a dorky consumer and I ordered this Internet Time Watch from Swatch. It came today, and I think it's pretty cool. It keeps this Internet time in addition to regular time, includes a year 2000 countdown timer, and has a built in animation of a dog pissing on a lamp post. The band however is huge.

CNN is using Internet Time in their time stamp on their home page.

Bookmarklets are cool.(AND useful)

My Macintosh ftp client of choice, Transit, is now named Transmit , and has been updated to 1.2.

So I took today off, and I'm doing a lot of thinking. I have all sorts of new ideas, and I'm playing around with some software items.