How are you? I’m doing okay given the circumstances, and I truly hope you’re doing well at this crazy moment in history. I should mention that I am currently looking for a job in digital products and you can read more about my background on my LinkedIn profile. I’m long overdue for some sporadic blog posting, so here goes, here are some things I have enjoyed lately.

Something to Read: A great TechCrunch article by Darrell Etherington about improving your at-home videoconference setup on any budget. This article goes into a lot of detail and has excellent videos inline that help along the way. Even if you think you have a great setup, worth a read.

Something to Listen To: I really enjoyed the most recent episode of Switched on Pop, an excellent podcast about pop music. This episode, Why lo-fi is the perfect background music, covers the rise and origins of lo-fi music, including J Dilla’s influence on its origins and Adult Swim’s role in its popularity. I've been listening to a lot of this style of music for a long while, this was a lot of information that I didn't know, and was very interesting to learn.

Something to Listen On: I’m loving my $20 IKEA Frekvens Portable Speaker. It’s become the speaker that I take out to the backyard to work on some project or to the front porch to listen to something while I have a beer and relax. I don’t think you can order them online, but I highly recommend if you have a means of obtaining. The sound is really good for such a little speaker, and the device was created in conjunction with Teenage Engineering. You may have heard of them because of Playdate, but I’ve wanted an OP-1 since basically forever.

Something to Snack On: I discovered Honey Mama’s, I believe, through the Random Show, which is a podcast that Tim Ferris does with Kevin Rose. In any case, these bars, and I love love love the Mayan Spice flavor, are made with honey, instead of refined sugars, cocoa, and other ingredients depending on the flavor. The Mayan Spice are a little spicy and a little chocolatey, are a nice treat. I will say that these are not cheap, and take a little while to ship if you don’t have a store near you. Worth the price and wait, in my opinion, I just had one after lunch.

I’d aimed to have this done on Monday, but my energy levels have been all over the place the last few days, and I just never got to it. Small subtext is that I had a medical situation a couple of weeks ago, and am recovering from it, but slowly. The energy levels are really the last thing to get back to normal when you don’t eat for a few days. I won’t get more specific than that, I’m reluctant to post medical related information on the internet or social media.

Like most of the gaming world, I’ve really been enjoying Fortnite this week and for the last month or so. For those who aren’t gaming adjacent, it’s a “Battle Royale” style game that has skyrocketed in popularity. The game is available across a wide variety of platforms, but I play on PC. I am “bumpish” should you want to friend and play with me, but don’t set your expectations too high on what my level of skill might be. I’d love to play with you in any case. I’m only on a few times a week, and for a brief time, I don’t get much dedicated PC gaming in these days with family duties.

I’m also enjoying the rollover to the Year of the Raven in Hearthstone, which happened this week with the release of the Witchwood expansion. I exalt in the end of the mill deck era. There is one card, Shudderwock, which is totally broken and makes things less fun than they could be. Here’s a great video from Disguised Toast that elaborates on how broken, at least the animations, if not the whole mechanic are.

I did go to the Atlanta Pen Show for a couple of hours until I ran out of gas.  My new purchases were an “Aiken” pen from Carolina Pen Company, which is colored to look like the Northern Lights using the same material as this pen, and a Seed A5 case from my friends at Nock.

I did also buy some Gigante Note Cards from Nock while I had the chance in person. These folded over notecards are a favorite of mine, and I keep a couple in my pocket sheath with me all the time. They are essentially the smallest available notebook, with only 4 pages.

Top of mind for me on the music side is Black Moon Rising from the Black Pumas. There are listen links for a variety of music services on that page. At first I thought it was Cee-Lo Green, but it’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything else by them, they are from Austin, TX.

Last night we watched the first episode of the Pastry Chef season of Chef’s Table about Christina Tosi from Milk Bar.  If you have Netflix, I highly recommend this episode, I found it really inspiring. Be careful though, you can order just about anything in the episode from their web site. My cookies are on the way.

I’m thinking about getting a ReMarkable Tablet based on the recommendation of some folks online who swear by it.  Seems like it might either completely replace my work notebook, or it won’t work for me at all though, making the price tag a little tough to swallow. The iPad hasn’t really worked for me for this particular use case, and I love my e-ink Kindles, so the idea of the product might be in my sweet spot.

ttfn.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jose since 2006 or so. One of his songs was our first dance at our wedding. Lately, he’s been more focused on Junip, a band he is in, than his solo projects. Finally, after a few years, we have a new solo song that is a part of the Secret Life of Walter Mitty soundtrack.

A powerful rain and thunder storm will no doubt interrupt my work at any moment now with a power failure.  10:40:16 PM  

I absolutely respect Lane. Great site, great writing, and he seemed like a really nice intelligent guy in my too limited contact with him at SXSW.(Truth be known I was a little intimidated by the Deep Leap posse. They are a really talented bunch.) I do not, however, think that this site could be quantified as "the bare minimum of creativity." I, however, have been wrong about these things before.  8:28:35 PM  

Learning from Napster

"I am not here to argue for or against the use of Napster, but I will say that since getting on board the MP3 revolution I have purchased more music in the last seven months than in the past two decades, and maybe my entire life" - David Strom 

So I bought a Palm VII yesterday. I know what you are thinking: "But that has the same amount of RAM as your Palm V." I know, but I couldn't help myself. I charged up the transmitter last night and activated it. There are a lot more apps for it than I had originally thought, and there are ways to view live Web content despite the constricting "Web clipping" setup.

I'll let you know how I make out. 

I can already tell after just using it on a live site for about an hour that Blogger is only going to feed my blogging addiction. I can pound away and not worry about uploading and editing the raw HTML every time I want to add something to my site. I can tell that they have lots of other features to deploy that they haven't yet.  

I haven't forgotten about my SXSW pictures. I just got pulled away by the need to redesign here. 

brig dares to cross the 3000 word barrier with brig.nu 

Via harrumph!, Brix Builder Demo.(do not follow this link unless you have a few hours to play) 

I'm a huge Lakers fan. It comes out of growing up in a time when Magic, James Worthy and Kareem were a dominant team. Today they are playing my other favorite team, the Knicks. Is it wrong to be a fan of two teams? 

Here we go, new design in effect. A few hours of testing this thing out, and I'll be ready to go live.

So I installed Office 2000 Professional on my Windows 98 laptop. Here are some observations ane experiences. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them if you email me.

First, installation did not go smoothly. After about half an hour of installation had gone by, I got an exception error and the installer locked itself up. I tried a variety of things over the next two hours, and I eventually figured out that the installer was choking on a java .dll. After I deleted the .dll, installation proceeded without incident. I'll try to cover all of the applications at some point this week. So far, I have used Word and Outlook only.

Outlook: I use Outlook as my primary Windows email program. This is primarily because we use an Exchange server at the office and it makes managing that mail and my Internet email easier. I also sync my PalmPilot with it. Outlook 2000 is not substantially different from Outlook 98 on the surface. My settings and email migrated without issue. I added some contacts, appointments, and to do list items and then synched my Palm V. Everything worked as I would normally expect it to. The Outlook Today panel is more customizable, and it seems like everything is HTML based so creating custom interfaces for it should be quite easy. The main Outlook window also can act as a Web browser.(Not that I would ever use it as one). The enhancements to Outlook don't amount to much on a single user level.

Word: The application, as with Outlook, does not stray from 97 all that much. I was much more interested in looking at a document after it had been saved with the "Save as Web Page" command than basic operation, which I expect is very much the same as 97. I saved two documents that I had lying around and opened them with Allaire Homesite 4.0. While the HTML is more correct and less intrusive than the 97/98 converter, there are a lot of custom tags that aren't part of any spec. They have a modified version of CSS that they use too. Overall, I think it's better than the same feature in Word 97. I would, however, rather have had something that output strict HTML 4.0 or at least had that as an option. The document also contains meta-tags that a novice user might not be aware of. These give the users name, date of edit, and other information about the document. There is a copy of one document I saved this way here for your perusal. I tried out its self repairing option, which worked well, and also tried to use an option I hadn't installed. Word then prompted me and asked if I would like to install the option(in this case a file format filter) and installed it at my command. I liked this quite a bit.

Feedback:

I liked what I saw, but I am not certain that the average Office user will benefit substantially from this update. Most of the changes are of benefit to large scale users. Considering the update costs, I don't think anyone who doesn't need the new features for some reason should run out and buy the upgrade.

Allaire has updated HomeSite 4 to 4.01. Update info is here.

I went to see Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me . I liked it quite a bit, but I think they lowered their standards in order to try and make the second movie funnier. It wasn't as intelligent and witty as the first movie, but it was well worth the $4.75 I spent to see it.

LinuxPPC.com has announced that LinuxPPC 5.0 is shipping.(finally) There are substantial differences in this new version, and I look forward to receiving the copy I pre- ordered in January.

I saw Very Bad Things on DVD over the weekend. I didn't like it nearly as much as I expected to. It was very very very dark.

I found the new Red Hot Chili Peppers CD, Californication, to be a huge dissapointment. Very mellow and almost completely devoid of the energy that I had come to expect and love from them(they are still one of my favorite bands). The lyrics were very sing songy. They have realaudio versions of the songs on the Web site. 

I spent the majority of the weekend doing a vigorous fall cleaning. I'm getting rid of tons of clothes that don't fit me any longer. Very healthy and cleansing.

I am frustrated with the amount of physical possessions I have. Too many t-shirts, too many books, too many CD's. I want to strip this stuff away and get back to the basics.

I am grooving to the new Fat Boy Slim album, "You've Come a Long Way Baby" at work. It's really really solid, and I recommend it highly. Great album shots of his studio, which resembles the Bump clubhouse quite a bit.

I'm starting, in tandem with my girlfriend, on the Atkin's Diet today. She had been on it previously and had great success, and I am in terrible physical condition.

This week is starting strangely at work. I don't feel as pressured to complete any tasks right now as I normally do. We were acquired by Bill Communications two weeks ago, and it remains to be seen how this will effect me.

My trip to the Disney Institute has renewed my interest in 3D design and character animation. I am now beginning to spend a little time each day sketching and hope to develop characters to bring to life on my Mac.

More later......

The Beastie Boys show on Wednesday night was incredible. Mixmaster Mike , of the Invisibl Skratch Picklz , opened the show with a styling involving two copies of Rush's Tom Sawyer. He then proceded to produce all of the back beats during the show with vinyl.

The set was a good mix of material from each of the musical genres and eras of the Beastie Boys career. I think my favorite songs were the ones from the new album which I hadn't seen previously. If you have the opportunity to see them on this tour, I recommend it.

I am also enjoying Mixmaster Mike's solo "CD Anti-Theft Device."

I will pay good money for any recording from this tour.