Four days and still cooking along on the not smoking thing. I'd like to thank everyone for all of the encouraging emails. It's helped me out quite a bit, in fact more than once I got them while I was craving a cigarette and they encouraged me to push on.

It's been a very focused week at work. We're pushing a project out the door early next week, and we have all been putting in extra effort to get the development done. One of the aspects of this project is an edit interface, and coding it made me appreciate Manila all that much more.

It had to happen I guess, John Rocker now works for AOL .

I don't know how many of the same readers we have, but does anyone else use a Netscape browser to access Scripting News ? I get blank pages about 90% of the time with either Communicator 4.7 for Mac or Windows. It just started happening recently. It's one of those sites that I read often enough that I find myself firing up Internet Exploder just to read it.

MacCentral has an article today on the USB Kritter Cam from iRez. I got one for Christmas to go with my iBook, and have been quite pleased with it so far. I still haven't decided if I want cam type pictures of me up on this site though.

I started down a better path today. I'm quitting smoking. It's a nasty disgusting habit, and I want to be rid of it once and for all. I'm using the NicoDerm CQ patch. A little background: in 1997 I quit smoking after almost eight years. I succeeded and remained smoke free until 1999 when I broke down slowly. I made the mistake of thinking I could have the occasional cigarette without breaking. I then slowly spiraled back into the life of a smoker. I put the patch on this morning(I started with the 21 mg version.), and the first thing that happens is a really itchey feeling where you put it on. Now I'm feeling a little spacey, probably because it's more nicotine than my body is used to. I'm not craving a butt now, but I will as the day goes on. It's a wrenching feeling as your body craves the substance it's addicted to. What the patch does is allow you to seperate the two different aspects of the addiction and break each down as a unique battle. I'll keep you informed of my progress. Feel free to encourage me.

The Slashdot interview with Steve Wozniak was posted today. He shares his very perceptive opinions on a variety of subjects.

I'm pretty close to 100% after a brutal bout with the flu. I hate being sick, but when I get better I am always more motivated and focused than I was before I was sick.

The FTC nailed this company with all manner of spam oriented offenses. Justice.

There's a hilarious net based matrix spoof going on at this site . He adds panels every day.

I found Apple's Internet strategy announcement's today a little disappointing. The new services they are providing are far from remarkable or unusual. The only thing they did that I think is neat was to integrate the free drive space on their servers directly with the Mac OS Desktop. Since I've got mac OS 9 going on here, I signed up for the free services tonight. The Kidsafe service takes a better approach to keeping things safe for kids than other similar packages have, and the free Web page doesn't seem to be available right now.

Here's the screenshot from yesterday's Amazon flub.

It's that special time of year again for Mac users. MacCentral has pictures from setup day at MacWorld SF. One of them makes me think we may see Internet Explorer 5.0 for the mac tommorrow.

Jane and Ted, the closest thing Atlanta has to a royal family, are separating .

Macintouch is reporting that SuSe will be demonstrating a version of their Linux distribution for the Power Macintosh at this week's MacWorld conference. It's interesting to me, because it won my recent five distribution face off as the easiest to install(on my hardware) for Intel. I'm running it on my fast Intel machine at home right now. It would also mark the first major Linux distribution to have a Power PC version.

Update: SuSE has this press release up on their site now.

As a huge fan of taking naps, I was quite pleased with this article in today's New York Times.(Registration required.)

Bill Parcells retires. Bad day for Jets fans. Probably a good day for Mr. Parcells though. He read a great poem to his team yesterday which is published in the article. It's a good read in the beginning of the new year.

If you look at this page , you can see(until they change it), that Amazon.com doesn't know how to subtract.(Look at the list price versus their price on the first two items.)

Feeling a bit better today, but not good enough to make it through a whole day of work. I came home early and took a nap. Perhaps I'll be 100% tommorrow.

I spied Twernt in my referrer log, and I like it quite a bit.

MSNBC's top ten gadgets of all time . I don't think the electric hand dryer really counts within my definition of a gadget.

Somehow I missed this, and it's huge(for me anyways). News about Ender's Game: The Movie

Jack has returned and redesigned his site in the process. Cool.

I'm really ill. Seems that our out of town visitors brought some flu type germs with them. My fever is currently over 100.5 F.

It's eight hours later and I can't sleep, so I did some of the housekeeping that was due on this site.

Well, here we are, safe and sound, power on, phones working. I was prepared for the worst.

My New Year's wish for everyone is self examination. Look at the date at the top of this entry. It looks strange, doesn't it? We are at the start of something new as a group. A chance to wipe the slate clean and begin again. Here's your chance to look at yourself, and change for the better. I have great hope for myself.