I was shopping last night at MicroCenter, and I didn’t find the firewire drive enclosure that I was looking for. I didn’t end up puchasing anything, which is rare for me. I was in the magazine and book section when my cell phone rang, and it was one of the programmers that I am currently working with (for the sake of amusement, we’ll refer to him as Baron Von Big Head.) Baron Von Big Head was at a Barnes and Noble here in Atlanta, and had picked up a book named We Blog. He asked if I had ever heard of the book and was quite excited to tell me that bump.net was not only mentioned in the book, but that, on page 62 of the book, there was even a screen capture of bump.net used as an example. Wow, that’s incredibly cool, and I’m not certain I’ve done anything to deserve it.. It’s especially cool because I have so much respect for Matt, Meg, and Paul. All three of them are impressive people, both online and in person. Thanks.
Johnny Unitas died yesterday of a heart attack while working out.
I migrated my TiBook over to Mac OS 10.2 last week. It took longer than normal because I wanted to reformat the hard drive and that meant backing everything up and then having to re-install everything. This was complicated by the fact that my MS Office V.X CD is AWOL, and I’m going to have to order another one I guess. I’m finding Jaguar to be faster in all the right places, and with so many improvements that I wouldn’t even try to go into them here. I’m also using the just released iCal, despite reports on the Web that it is buggy, and the complaints that they forgot to offer the Canadian holidays, I think it’s well done, especially for a first effort. Some of the data entry stuff is not as intuitive as I would normally expect. For instance, there is no way to attach any kind of note to a To Do task. Normally, my to do items need additional information with them in order for me to get them done, and I like putting that stuff together when I enter them.
Lottery oddness in New York yesterday. Strange ending to the S&P Futures index yesterday.
Remember
The return of regular season NFL football last night was a welcome diversion for me. Despite the fact that my Giants lost, the game gave me new hope that the squad will be better this year, especially with the addition of Jeremy Shockey. It definitely opened the door for the rest of the pass offense, and Amani Toomer’s numbers bear that out. I submit that the game was lost due to the calling of the prevent defense, and bad clock management in the fourth quarter. My co-worker argues that the Giants lost the game because they scored fewer points than the 49ers.
I have a huge Pecan tree in my backyard. Pecan trees bear nuts every other year, and over the last month it has been consistently dropping nuts. About half of them drop right onto the roof of my house, making quite a bit of noise in the process, and another quarter of them seem to find their way into my pool, which is a total pain in the ass. Unfortunately, the tree is a little too close to my house for comfort. Pecan trees have this habit of dropping limbs, and with the size of the tree, I’m concerned that this could cause some major damage to my domicile. So I’m now torn between finding a way to keep the old man around, and just removing the tree altogether. I guess we’ll find out this afternoon, when the tree expert comes out to have a look. It doesn’t look good for the old man though.
This trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie, Comedian, is just hilarious. (Thanks Nathan)
Ken Bereskin continues to provide excellent commentary on new Jaguar features on his Weblog.
Arstechnica reviews Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. I’ve really enjoyed reading their previous reviews of the Mac OS X releases, and this review is no exception. I found the section on Rendezvous especially informative.
Welcome to September. My Labor day weekend? Good, a bit shorter than I wanted it to be. When I wasn’t waiting forever to get my sushi order and watching my friends being insulted by a sushi chef after waiting too long, I was installing Jaguar, attending one day of Dragoncon and wondering where the summer months went to. Last night, I was eliminated from a game of Risk in record time due to a combination of bad rolling and poor strategy. Well, I know I owe this site a write up of my excellent adventures in Nova Scotia and Maine, and I hope to get to that as soon as I finish the massive job of clean installing all of my apps on my TiBook.
So I’m now back at work after a fantastic ten day trip to Maine and Nova Scotia. If you sent me an email or voice message over the last week, it may take me a day or two to get back to you. All I can say is that I loved Nova Scotia. It’s a great place to take a vacation and the countryside is beautiful and unmolested. There are plenty of great outdoor activities, and we did a bunch of them. I’ll write more about this later tonight, and I’ll be putting some pictures up as well. I loved Maine nearly as much, but it’s a bit more touristy and built up.
Today’s post is brought to you via a free Wi-Fi network in the hotel I am staying at in Portland, Maine. I’m having a great trip here in Maine so far. We spent the first two days at an inn by Poland Springs, and have now moved on to Portland for a couple of days. We went to see the local minor league baseball team, the Portland Sea Dogs, play this afternoon, and oddly the starting pitcher was named Nate Bump. Well, I’m off to dinner, but I thought I would throw something up here since I have the access.
Sleepy Sleepy. I’ve worked 20 of the last 24 hours in an effort to get the ERP module we have been working on out the door. As miserable as the lack of sleep makes me, I love this part of projects when the rubber meets the road and stuff finally gets finished. It’s a rush that is hard for me to explain, but it’s related to having built something and made it through the maze to get to the end.
There is some great content in Adaptive Path’s essay section.
The upcoming Georgia Web Developers Conference features Zeldman goodness, much Web Services discussion, and a solid mix of various technologies. The price is right too. So, even if you aren’t local here, you should at least consider visiting Atlanta in September, the weather here is beautiful then.
I haven’t seen anyone else link to Google catalogs yet, but it’s a great idea. I can now see what is in these catalogs without the junk mail in my mailbox. The ability to search through the catalog for references and items takes the whole thing to the next level.
One other thing that I have been thinking about today, in order to relieve the stress of my break in, involves super heroes and liability insurance. If you were a super hero, what kind of liability insurance would you need to carry? In fact, how could you even find a company that would insure you and what sort of huge premium would you have to pay? Imagine Superman fighting a villain in Metropolis, destroying buildings, homes, and city property in the process but putting the baddy away. He would then have to defend himself in all manner of lawsuits. In our society, he couldn’t count on the good will of the citizens of Metropolis, and that he was fighting for the common good, he would get sued regardless of this fact. It would almost make being a super hero not a worthwhile endeavor. You would spend ten times as much time settling all of the suits as you would fighting crime.
Sorry for the lack of posts. I actually have a backlog of things I want to put up here, but haven’t had the time to get to it over the last couple of weeks. I was reminded today that I live in an inner city neighborhood, I walked out my front door and discovered that someone had busted the passenger side window of my car and attempted to find something worth stealing within arm’s reach of the window. Of course, there was nothing there, at least as far as I remember. So I spent half my day today getting that fixed.
I went to see Branden Hall speak to our local Macromedia User’s Group last night. He talked about consuming Web Services with Flash, which is quite easy to set up, and also about the new Flash Communications Server, with which it is surprisingly easy to build applications. I really like the direction that Macromedia has taken with their Flash product line, but I sometimes feel like developers in the Flash community and Macromedia people, don’t get what they have with Cold Fusion. This is somewhat frustrating to me. One example of this is their plan to phase out the Cold Fusion specific developer tools in favor of Dreamweaver. I’m not saying that Dreamweaver is a bad tool, but a one size fits all approach to development tools rarely works, especially when you have an audience of developers with skill sets and needs as diverse as those that the Macromedia customer base now includes. I think all of this points to a cultural split inside of Macromedia that somewhat mirrors the two companies prior to the Allaire-Macromedia merger. I thought this after talking to some Macromedia folks at SXSW this year, and as time goes on, I think this more and more. Well, that’s just my observation for now.
Via Ogrady’s Powerpage, I found this picture of a metal sheet protector that fits over the top lid of a Powerbook Titanium. Apparently, it’s only available in Japan, of course, and I want one. Anyone know where I might be able to get one of these online?
I think I am an early riser who is trapped in the body of someone who likes to stay up late.
I hadn’t noticed, but the Oddpost development group has been maintaining a blog with Radio. It’s a great source of information on what they have been working on, and what they have fixed.
Between now and it’s release August 7th, Aimee Mann has her new CD, Lost in Space, available via streaming audio from her Web site. My initial listen leaves me quite happy, her last CD, Bachelor Number 2, is still one of my favorite listens. I’m not sure why you can only listen to one song at a time though, it is sort of annoying to have to keep clicking back over to the browser window and selecting the next song. Oh, and make sure you click around on the sky portion of the page, there are some bonus tracks hidden there which are also quite good.
Here’s the EFF’s list of connection(read Wi-Fi) sharing friendly ISP’s. I think we should, whenever possible, avoid the ISP’s that don’t allow this.