Mr. Gruber has a very well thought out and articulated essay about the whole Dashboard rips off Konfabulator debate. The essay does a fantastic job of putting things in a historical perspective. If you are a relative youngster to the whole Mac OS thing, I highly recommend you read this essay, you will learn something. I’ve been using Macs since 1987, and this essay jogged quite a few things in my memory that I had forgotten.

Dave Hyatt says “widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.” The interesting thing in this post, however, is the mention further down the post about Flash and Quicktime.

Atlanta Time Machine (via Kottke) “The Atlanta Time Machine website is dedicated to examining the history of Atlanta, Georgia  by comparing vintage photographs of Atlanta with much more contemporary images shot, more or less, from the same perspective of the original photographer.” This is really neat stuff, these are perspectives that I drive or see on a daily basis. The sheer number of them is incredible.

Apple Previews Mac OS X Server ‘Tiger’: “Weblog Server is fully compatible with Safari RSS in Mac OS X Tiger and makes publishing a weblog as simple as checking a box in Server Admin preferences. Weblog Server is based on the popular open source project ‘Blojsom’” You can find out more about Blojsom here.

Andy has some insightful comments about the design of the RSS Aggregator that Apple built into Safari 2.0. There is also an eWeek story on the subject, which explains that both Atom and RSS will be supported by Safari.

Bacardi buys Grey Goose. I find this stuff fascinating. I also find a Grey Goose and Tonic with lime quite delicious. Since I stopped smoking, I have been drinking less too.

I went to the supermarket tonight, I have a friend visiting from California this weekend, and I wanted to make sure I had Diet Coke, the beverage of choice, in the fridge. Oddly, when I got to the supermarket, they were completely out of Diet Coke. However, they had tons and tons of Coke’s new C2 mid-carb beverage. It made me wonder if they were trying to boost sales of C2 by making it the only choice available to people who would normally drink Diet Coke.

Same drill as every other time.

Steven Berlin Johnson: When Is A Golf Course Unfair? This is the best analysis of the myth of course unfairness at this year’s U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills that I have read. If you watched the tournament on Sunday, you should definitely read this post. Oh yeah, that’s where I have been, working the U.S. Open for our site, and attempting to recover from that working. It’s another busy week this week too, so updates are bound to be somewhat scarce.

Rafe is enamored with the GMail interface. “It’s worth pointing out that the one gig limit in Gmail is a nice marketing device, but it’s the user interface that sets Gmail apart from other webmail packages.” His post left me wondering if he has tried out Oddpost.

I’m thinking about having a community contest to design a new logo/identity for bump. Despite my best efforts and intentions, I am not a designer, and the sheer amount of effort and practice to make myself better at graphic design is just not something that I can invest in right now. I have a 2nd generation, 20Gb iPod that I am not using anymore, and haven’t sold yet. Do you folks think that it would be enough of a prize to inspire good entries? Is the “iPod as a contest prize” thing being done so much right now that people don’t even care anymore? What would be a better, but reasonable prize for such a contest? Am I better off just hiring qualified folks to do it for me? I mean this is a personal site, and I do already spend my hard earned money for the priviledge of having it.

Introducing Brady – The Macromedia IDE for Flex Looks, based on the screenshots, like it is based on the Dreamweaver codebase. I tried switching to Dreamweaver for my ColdFusion development on my Mac OS X machines, but it just gets in my way. I love the lean fast feeling of a text editor like BBEdit or Homesite. I continue to maintain that Macromedia would be well served to continue to develop Homesite. It’s a shame that, aside from Eclipse and the forthcoming E3, that there isn’t a lean text editor on the Mac OS X platform that supports syntax highlighting for ColdFusion. I looked into creating said syntax coloring for BBEdit, and was turned off by the now ancient method of creating said modules.

More gmail invites. Blah Blah Blah. Ask and ye shall receive, but beware, for ye may be then cursed with the task of giving out gmail invites thyself and a heavy burden it may become on thee.

zerocomments: “This post has zero comments.”

Five more invites, one already spoken for, so four to give away. Ask in the comments, make sure to give me your name and an email address. Thanks.

Despite being a lifelong Lakers fan, I enjoyed watching them get beat by a better, healthier Pistons team that played as a team. No bones about it, if they had played the series to 99 games, the Pistons would have won. Lots of commentary on the Web in the usual places today, and in some places one wouldn’t normally expect.(It is possible that Jason is not an objective analyst:-)

As far as I'm concerned, the most insightful post, by far, is Mark Cuban's. For those of you who don't know, Mark owns the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas NBA franchise. Amusingly, his team is constructed with the almost exact opposite philosophy to the one that the Detroit Pistons management, specifically Joe Dumars, used in building their team concept.

Just a reminder for those who don’t know, I have a linkblog named kungfumaster. It has an RSS feed too.

The three largest GSM carriers in the USA are being sued for locking handsets so that you cannot move handsets between carriers. This may seem like a really good thing, but I worry that this will mean, in the end, an end for the low prices we pay for phones “with new service activation.”

Wired News: Gmail Invitation Prices Crash. Well, it is quite clear we are getting close to launch, and that Google has started handing out a lot more invites. It’s a natural progression of the market for gmail accounts based on the supply, which I find funny. I mean a Gig is a lot of storage and Gmail sports a pretty nice Web based front end, but it’s no Oddpost or anything. People, in the end, just want what they can’t have, even if what they can’t have isn’t heads and shoulders better than other similar products on the market.

I have yet another 5 Gmail invitations to give away. Same drill, first five get them.

FOXNews reviews Fahrenheit 911. Here’s an example quote from the review. “It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.”

This review is interesting to me, kudos to FoxNews for being unbiased enough to give the film a good review despite all the partisan rhetoric that they are normally accused of spreading. For the last few weeks, but especially in the last few days, I have heard a litany of people either praising or trashing Michael Moore. They have had very strong opinions, one person even called him, in a room full of people at a party, a "piece of shit." Others have said things like, "I'm proud of him for standing up to the administration." The interesting thing about these people, and the difference between them and Fox, is that Roger Friedman actually saw the film before having an opinion about it. Everyone else seems to have purchased a "Jump to Conclusions" mat.

I have not seen the film. I may go see it in the theater, I will probably at least make an attempt to go see it. For all I know, I might walk out not so happy with Moore. However, one thing you will not read on bump.net tonight or any night until I see the film will be a review of a movie based on a guess.

The times in my life when I have had this "win at all costs" approach to an argument or issue, I may have won the argument more times than not. In every single one of these cases, without exception, I have paid the price for that approach. I could enumerate these mistakes here, but there is no point in exposing a litany of personal failures to make my point. We need to get to a healthier discourse. I would be interested in hearing others opinions about this, be they from the left, right, or moderates like myself.

I have three more gmail accounts to give away. Again, first come first served. Update: No more accounts to give out. Thanks.

A good friend took me to the yoga studio he belongs to, Yoga Samadhi, on Saturday. I was planning on returning today because the class felt fantastic. My body, on the other hand, had other plans for today. I can tell how out of balance my body has been from the soreness, and I guess that means I need the yoga that much more. I found the studio to be a warm, friendly, inviting environment, and reasonably priced. I don’t know too much about the various styles or schools of yoga, and I guess I will look into that subject this week. The studio I went to practices a sub-style of hatha yoga named Vinyasa. If you know anything about this stuff, I would love to hear about it.

Want a gmail account? I have some more invites to dispense. First come, first served.

If I had a copy of the new Beastie Boys CD, To the Five Boroughs, I would probably think that it was really good. Of course, since it hasn’t been released yet, I couldn’t possibly have a copy of it yet:-) Jason Zada also seems to have an opinion and stuff. Before writing anything about the cd, I listened to it five times, and I didn’t get tired of it.

It's a hip hop record. No instrumental goodness, no punk goodness, straight up, almost minimalistic, hip hop. The beats are mostly from the same school as Hello Nasty, the chop it up into loops and loop that sh*t up over and over, then throw some scratches on top of that, school. In some ways, after listening to the record the first time, I was thinking that I couldn't wait for the inevitable remixes to start dropping. Structurally, the vocal content would leave a remixer with a lot to work with. Overall, they didn't try to do too much with the beats, and it works just fine from where I stand. For those of you looking for the fourth major beat re-invention of the Beastie Boys, this is not that record. It is in some ways a couplet to Hello Nasty the way that Ill Communication was a couplet to Check Your Head.

As far as lyrics and rhyming goes, this record is different, very different, from what came before in a few ways. Although not as pervasive as I had feared, politics have crept into the lyrical content, and it gets especially bad in a couple of instances. I mean, to state the obvious, it is your record, and if that is what you want to talk about, be my guest. I, however, cringed a bit the first time I heard "It Takes Time to Build." There are some of the cultural references that we have come to rely on the Beastie Boys to provide, but the number is nowhere near what I had come to expect in the past. Stylistically, as hinted at by the first single, they branch out a bit more than they did on Hello Nasty. For instance, "Crawlspace" has Adrock laying down some different stuff. This I enjoyed quite a bit. One track that really stood out was "Rhyme the Rhyme Well" from both a beats and vocal standpoint.

Overall, I like this record quite a bit. I get the feeling, as with most of the Beasties work, that after another twenty-five listens, I will very attached to this record. It seems more subtle and minimalistic in some ways than the rest of their body of work, and while this might not bowl you over in the first couple of listens, it will undoubtedly insidiously creep into your consciousness and win you over.