My brother's band, Die Laughing, joined the MP3 revolution yesterday with the posting of two of their songs to MP3.com. These are really good and well worth checking out. I'm really proud of him for sticking with his dream, and for producing some really high quality work that is worthy of industry and fan recognition. Now if I could just finish a site for him that is worthy of his music...

I went to the MacWorld simulcast here in Atlanta this morning. Apple introduced the iBook , a consumer iMac-like portable. You can read more about it and see pictures on their Web site. I'm sure the usual Macintosh news sites will do a great job covering it.(You can find my recommendations in this area on the links page.) I want one of these to match the Blue Terror. Update: I am unable to reach the Apple Store to place my order:-).

As a part of the same announcement, Apple announced a product line that incorporates the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking standard called AirPort . pretty cool

More interesting is what they are doing with QuickTime . They are setting up the Quicktime player as a streaming media portal. I think it makes good sense, and I am thinking that Real Networks should be very concerned about this.

I listened and watched to the Allaire Spectra (the product formerly known as Tempest) webcast earlier. It looks like a strong product, perfect for a company like mine that is looking for strong customizable content management that works with a variety of existing database systems, LDAP directories, and other enterprise wide applications. Seems like this framework will be a good jumping off point for CF developers who want the basic functions it provides but are capable of extending it beyond that to suit their companies needs. This product will turn up the heat in this area quite a bit(plus it has features out of the box that other content management systems don't have.) and it is pretty cheap at $7500.00 a server. They are also trying to meet the needs of Business people that need things like realtime data reports that are customized.

Webcasts are a great resource. I like being to gather this industry knowledge from my office. I just wish that they worked better. With all of the congestion on the net, it dropped out of me about 50 times. (Despite the fact that I have 100 baseT access to a t-1) Seems like the reporting functionality of the product will be a huge selling point with our Business and Sales types.

Things at my office are changing really rapidly now. I'm having a hard time keeping a grip on it all. We really have launched ourselves as an Internet business unit so the next few months should be trying and interesting. I am having somewhat of a tough time dealing with non-technical folks being involved in our Internet business. It seems like this happens a lot in our business: one person spends a ton of time architecting a strategy and building a worhtwhile product, then a normal suit type comes along and gets to take credit for the profits from that hard work. In the meantime they manage to muck up the strategy so longer term accomplishments are watered down and more difficult. I've seen this happen over and over again, so I'm fighting it tooth and nail.