This Convergence thing from Stardock looks like it has a lot of potential to make things in the skinning department easier on all flavors of Windows.
Was Gates - forced out - of top job? If you are interested in all these doings with MSFT, this is a must read article. (via Scripting News)
I think I would like this shirt. (via Elegant Hack)
So I finally close on my house tomorrow. I don’t think I had any conception prior to this how tedious buying a house is. There’s this feeling in the pit of my stomach that something is going to go wrong at the last minute, so I keep checking and rechecking things to make sure that nothing goes wrong. It’s not the house I linked to from here a few weeks ago, but another house that I discovered later.
O’Reilly Network: Building a Simple Java Application in Mac OS X
Holding up the rear is a Salon piece that equates dot-com failure with the amount of Aeron chairs a company owned. This may be a symptom of a larger problem: cash management.
People who have been reading Bump for a while might remember my trying to quit smoking at least twice. One time, I even made it a whole year without smoking before regressing. Well, this time I am calling in the heavy artillery. I started taking ZYBAN this morning, which means I will be quitting ten days from now. Wish me luck.
Bob Patterson helped me, and maybe he can help you too. Bob Patterson Online
I took a couple of hours this morning when I woke up and read How to Be Good by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity). I really liked this book. It’s full of witty observational humor, some of which I’m sure was lost on me as it is set in Britain, and I don’t pretend to be familiar with the nuances of British life. It also asks some tough questions through the wit, and I will be thinking about those for the next few days. I’d say, without reservation, that it’s worth picking up and reading.
The narrator in the book is a woman, and I've always been amazed by authors who can switch sexes in narration believably. Her husband is sort of the main character, however, and he begins the book as a consumate angry guy, something I can relate to quite easily. I'll leave the plot of the book to your reading of it, but the transitions that he goes through struck a very personal chord with me.
I love the design feel of Fischler.org.
I’ve done some of the much needed housekeeping this site required. There are now permalinks from every entry, and I added archives for all of the content that is stored with Blogger. For the years of content before that, I haven’t decided what to do yet.
When great magazines have god awful Web sites: The Oxford American
BetaNews: Internet Explorer 6 in Final Stretches. The build they are talking about in the article is only four builds later than the one shipping with Windows XP RC2.
I’m now taking part in the maintenance of the blog section of webgraphics.
With everything going on with IIS and the Code Red worm, I was very surprised to see a measurable jump in IIS usage in this month’s Netcraft Survey at the expense of Apache.
TechTV | Judgment Call: Mac vs. PC My favorite quote from this piece?
"OS X is based on Unix and is probably more stable than Windows. Stability is an important feature that Windows just doesn't have. The average user can counter the instability by saving often."
Using Windows ME on my laptop currently, I watch in horror as my 384 Mb of RAM dwindles throughout my use. As the day goes on, the amount of free memory gets smaller and smaller regardless of what I am doing. Finally, I either blue screen or reboot. Since I switched to Mac OS X on my other laptop, the only time I ever reboot is when I have installed software. My Windows XP (now RC2) machine is a little better in the memory usage department. In fact, now that I have gotten past the hiccups I had, it has been downright stable.
Feeling better, but still coughing up a storm. Man, have I fallen behind this week because of my illness. I’m supposed to close on my house a week from today, so I’ve got a lot of personal stuff to deal with. Guess I’ll be working through the weekend.
This screenshot based listing of Weblogs is an interesting way to start the daily surf.
This quick article on the effectiveness of the pop under ad got me to really thinking about why they have become so popular so quickly when I know they don’t work and are a constant annoyance now. The answer is simple enough, people who generate their revenue from Internet advertising are desperate, grasping at anything that will make them money with no concern for the consequences. It’s clear that no one has figured this advertising on the Internet thing properly. It’s also clear to me that pop under ads are not the answer, nor are banner ads, or rich media advertising and I can’t see clearly what the solution is.
I spend hours a day on the Internet, surfing through content, news and reference materials. I can't ever remember, in the many years I have been doing this, looking at a banner ad and then clicking through to buy a product. To be frank, I don't even see the banner ads anymore, nor has making the ads larger and more intrusive increased my awareness of advertising in a positive way. Even on the page that the article appears on, I didn't acknowledge the ad in the middle of the article until I went back and looked for it. I can't really draw any conclusions beyond the fact that there is very clearly a void here, a business pain that is seeking a solution.