Hell's Half Acre has a great e-card section where you can send e-postcards to people with sentiments like "i hate you", "shut up", and the ever popular "burn in hell."
There's a great assortment of things being posted to Monkey Fist .
In a brief perusal, I found Running Tally to be very very good. It led me to usr/bin/girl which I also enjoyed. Finally, I ended up at Hit or Miss , which rounded out my surfing session perfectly.
We are still without Cable, and have been since last night due to a rare ice storm here in the ATL. Normally, I could care less, but I wanted and planned to watch football today while redoing my Mac from scratch with a new SCSI hard drive I picked up a couple of weeks ago and a new LCD monitor that was too good a deal to resist.
Of course, with the cable out, I resorted to leaving the premises and found myself at the brand new Atlanta ESPN Zone . It was very crowded and impossible to get a seat or food. I imagine it will be like that for the next few weeks. It doesn't officially open until next weekend. I did get to see the Sportscenter anchors in person.
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.
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
"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
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.
I'm taking a break for a few hours to spend some time with Kate and eat some sushi. You can see my progress in turning the previous Photoshop comp into an actual Web page here. I just realized that the angles on the curves in the picture module don't match the ones in the Weblog module, so I went back and redid them. I'll be putting that up when I get back to it. I think you'll agree that it shows more inspiration and effort than any of the previous designs that I have built, even the ones I decided not to post.
Just so you know I'm not joshing you, here's a peek at what the new Bump looks like. I have at least one day of refinements and a day or two of production left to make this happen.
It's spring here in Atlanta, and I love this time of year. Time to reach into the closet and pull out all of the winter clothes to put them away until next year. It's always strange to me how early spring really hits here in Atlanta after living in the NorthEast all of my life. I see the thin green film of pollen on my car, so allergies should be about to kick in shortly.
It's also NCAA basketball march madness this week. It's my favorite sports time of year, better than the Super Bowl and World Series and NBA Finals etc... I've been slightly more disconnected from it than normal this year because of my trip to SXSW and my preoccupation with all things arthouse. Today is really the first time I've had a chance to check out any games. Go UCONN!!
I guess I have my own sort of march madness too. Some comments made at the Weblogs panel at SXSW have opened up a flood of emotions and the floodgates of self expression too. It was an unintentional aside too. A reference to something someone had written previously that was simply being used as an example in an answer to a question.
I find myself reading and writing far more than I have in years over the last few days. I feel this incredible need to create things and to digest things that others have labored to create. To redesign all of the crappy Web interfaces I have created. To build new apps that I have floating around in my head. To reexplore my relationship with Kate. I have a fiendish amount of energy. Where has this energy been hiding for the last year?
It's not all good, the emotions that were tapped were really painful for me at first. It was like someone had punched me in the gut. It was a moment when I realized my isolation from those around me, that it was self imposed, and that I could choose to cut it loose. I have a feeling that this happens to a lot of people my age. You reach a point when it's suddenly much harder to form close friendships with others. Not in a social sense necessarily, but emotionally. I'm not sure if it's the ability to trust others becomes more difficult, or that, as you become more set in your ways, it becomes near impossible to find others you can connect with.
The bottom line is that I realized that I rarely was expressing my inner stuff. I'm not letting stuff out. Sometimes not even to myself. I gotta work through this because that's really unhealthy.
Slowly Downward is the personal site of the gentleman who has been responsible for Radiohead's site for a while. There's a bunch of good fiction here, and some other content worth exploring.
Okay, so I meant to post last night, but I was exhausted by the time I got home. My office had scheduled two meetings for me yesterday afternoon, so I got off the plane, drove straight to the office, then hit my first meeting. The second meeting was offsite and went until almost 7 pm, so I was just absolutely shredded by the time I got home.
It feels good to be home.
Now that I've had a day to digest SXSW a little, I think that the number one thing I brought home with me was inspiration. I talked to so many talented people who I found so inspiring. People who aren't afraid to do great things and hold themselves to a higher standard no matter what kind of project they are working on. So if you talked to me at SXSW, thanks, you made a difference in my life in some way. You inspired me.
I sorted through the 300+ pictures I took now to find the ones that are suitable for use here. I got about 60 good ones that I will resize and get up on the server tonight. Hopefully over the weekend I will post them to a set of pages.
Harrumph has the best thing ever from SXSW: movies of web people dancing. hehe go there. Her pictures are also really high quality.
I've become re-interested in Applescript for some reason. In tune with that in some equally bizarre way, Hell's Half Acre released some nifty icon oriented Applescripts today.
I read In The Beginning ...Was the Command Line tonight. I don't think I'm part of the target demographic for this book. I found it over simplified, and I can't agree with all of the assumptions and assertions that the author makes, most of which are driven by the authors evolving OS preference. For someone with a limited technical background, and very little awareness of the history of computers, it's not a terrible introduction.
I just got back into Atlanta this afternoon. I apologize for not updating sooner, but will be doing a bunch of posting this evening. I'm still reeling from my SXSW experience.
It's absurd to think that I could possibly capture the things and conversations I have experienced over the last few days. I'm enjoying things quite a bit, and have met so many people I knew only online over the last few days.
Inevitably, the posting of the many many pictures I have taken will have to wait for my return to Atlanta and high speed Internet access. In the meantime, you can see some great pictures on Matt's site (including my now famous clown nose shot) and on Paul's site.
A couple of things worth blogging, first 64 new Audion faces were released this morning, and second, I saw an app so powerful two days ago that I will be buying a Palm VII as soon as I can.
I'm at the end of my first day here, and I'm really enjoying things so far. I got to talk with Harry from Ain't It Cool about the Lord of the Rings movies. I went out to lunch/dinner with Matt and Brad. I also met Nikolai, Heather, the guys from Deep Leap, Cam from Camworld and Judith. Everyone is interesting. It should make for an interesting group dynamic when the rest of the crew arrives tomorrow.
I'm in Austin. I arrived late last night after my flight was delayed twice by my good friends at Delta Airlines.
i-drive announced "infinite space" today. What this actually means is that, when you sideload content from their partners, you can sideload as much as you want. So it's technically infinite, but in reality it's not.
This site is worthy of being the only link of the day. Paul mailed me about it.
Today will probably be a really light day as far as updates go. I've got a lot of things to finish up and square away at the office, and at the end of the workday, I'm flying to Austin.
I'm excited about SXSW, but a little down on myself today. I make really bad decisions at times, and have a hard time forgiving myself for them.
Weblog Nation: It's a jjg joint yo so you know it gots to be good.
One nice thing about Ad Critic is that it gives me a chance to see all the slick negative campaign ads that the candidates are running in other states.
If I'm reading the text on this page correctly, it is illegal for one man to give another man a piggyback ride within the Atlanta city limits. (via usr/bin/girl)
Tom Green's Bum Bum Song is available on MP3.com. There are also a bunch of remixes listed in the lower right hand corner of the page.
Never Cry Wolf, one of my favorite book and movie combinations of all time, has been released on DVD.
Connectix has started shipping the Virtual Game Station Playstation emulator for Windows. If it's as good as the Macintosh version, this is a must buy for gamers.
I've long been frustrated by Apple's online sales policies, so this move is a step in the right direction.
My surfing patterns have changed quite a bit because of weblogs.com and linkwatcher. Now I check them first when I have a few minutes to surf. I used to go through my link list to the right two or three times a day to see if things had been updated, now I only do it once.
Salon has an interesting two part article(both parts are now up) on Romero's Daikatana development. Seems like it's been in development forever.
I don't know if I never noticed it before the redesign or if it was added when they redesigned, but the news section on the kaliber 10000 site amounts to a Weblog. I've started following it everyday, and they have been pointing at some really interesting stuff.
whassup.com features a new Rainforest whassup commercial in addition to the Superfriends one.(via kaliber 10000)
In order to compete with companies like Pyra which have multiple people with weblogs on staff, people at my company are launching weblogs like crazy. First two are paulbradbury.com and detours.org.
Can anyone recommend an online merchant that ships business cards in 24 hours or less? Email me.
Tired of that job title? Try the Job title generator to get a title refresh.
Verisign buys Network Solutions. Perhaps Verisign can make Network Solutions into a nicer company to deal with. I've stopped using them altogether because of price and ethics. When they redirected the Internic home page a while ago, I was not pleased.
They've got pictures of the finalists up for the Sexiest Geek Alive contest to be held next week in Austin. Oddly, the radio station I listen to on my way to work in the morning had the guy who organized the contest on their show this morning.
Adobe has started a public beta for Livemotion, their Flash compatible Web animation application.(via MetaFilter)
I find myself more and more driven to Web applications. Think Free Office is an online "replacement" or companion for Microsoft Office. It boasts both Windows and Linux compatibility with Macintosh and other Unix on the way.
Today's PeterMe has an interesting analysis about coffee shop layouts and customer experience.
Here's a really thorough Palm IIIc review from the Gadgeteer. Despite the need for more RAM in my Palm(I've got a V now that I've had for about a year.) I'm holding off on buying a new one for a while. I'm curious to see what the next round of devices from Handspring are going to be like.
Webgroove looks like something worth looking into.
If you go to this page, choose the "SiteBrain" button to the right and navigate for a few moments, you get to see an interesting concept in mapping site spaces created with The Brain. It's been almost a year since I last experimented with it, and this was a nice reminder to check it out again.
I'm not sure how I missed it, but Jargonscout has added "Moved to Atlanta" since my last visit. It's funny because this topic has been the subject of several jokes here in the 404 area code.
For my Mac user Readers: I've been using Drop Drawers for the last few days on my iBook, and I'm hooked. It installs drawers that dock on the side top or bottom of your screen. Inside the drawers you can keep almost anything: alaises to frequently used programs, links to Internet sites, email addresses, notes, images. Where screen real estate is at a premium, this is a great alternative to dock programs.
We got the new women's cable channel, Oxygen, a couple of weeks ago. They have an Internet shopping show named Shecommerce that Kate has been watching this morning. It's supposed to cover online shopping, but out of the four women that they have hosting the show, not one strikes me as Internet savvy. "Is this a secure site?" the one woman asked. You don't know how to tell if a site is secure or not? Perhaps you shouldn't be hosting a show about online shopping. With all of the gifted and talented women working the Internet, it seems like they must have hired someone's friends.
If you are going to South by SouthWest Interactive and want to get together, email me. I'll be there from Thursday to Thursday.
I just read Geeks by Jon Katz. It's one of those rare books that I started reading when I went to get a cup of coffee at my local coffee type establishment and kept reading and reading and reading until it was an hour and a half later and I had finished the book. If you are even remotely a geek, you should read this book. If you aren't a geek, and want to even remotely understand geeks, you should read this book. I'm sure I'll be reading it again. One thing that I thought of when I sat down to type this up is the fact that a great opportunity was missed. Katz could have chosen to couple an Internet site with the book where geeks could meet and discuss what being a geek is all about. I know we have Slashdot and other places, but the emotions evoked by this book are powerful enough to stimulate a powerful discussion and there should be a place to conduct it. I identified with this book in some really deep rooted ways. I might add more to this later.
I had to laugh when I read Jason's comments on the Jorn/Amazon hack article in Wired. When I read the Wired article yesterday, I said "How the hell is this a news story?" If this is hacking Amazon, I've been doing some serious hacking over the last couple of years. Perhaps Wired should hire some Weblog authors to write some of their news articles. At least we have some understanding of how to do research and of the Internet in general.
Google, which is my engine of choice, is now offering a set of bookmarklets that should come in handy.(via Metafilter) Matt hacked together a dictionary.com bookmarklet that should also come in handy. Why is everyone trying to make my life easier?
Here's all the Rubber Duck you'll ever need. The link is to a newish Weblog too.I'm quite busy trying to finish the project we have been working on.
Now this is a good idea. Not Dental school, although that may be a good idea for some people, no more lugging heavy textbooks around. I wonder what file format they are using? Can you take notes in the margins and highlight things?
How many dollars in campaign financing do you think this set of comments is worth?
I got a phone call at 8:07 am on my cellular phone, and it was a telemarketer from bulkregister.com telling me that I can register my domains through them for $10. I find that really hard to believe. Also, I frankly dislike phone spam as much as Internet spam.
Welcome to March, the gateway to Spring. Let's not forget to order our King Cakes in time for Fat Tuesday. (hint: you don't have much time.) Also coming in short order is SXSW Interactive.
Does this sound familiar? It's 4:47 AM here, and I'm still awake coding ecommerce transaction handlers for a site launching today.
In other cool movie news, E! has a special Lord of the Rings section on their site for the upcoming movies. Their news page has some great material that scoops almost everyone else covering the movie.
Well back to work.
Soundtrack this morning: Machina - Machines of God by The Smashing Pumpkins. It's the new one, and I like it so far. I have to say that, for a band of their caliber, the Pumpkins Web site sucks.
Ahh Bringing February to a close. I have to reveal that February isn't my favorite month of the year, and I'm happy to see it go.
Over the last few months since I made the transition from being an in-house developer and consultant to a agency based one, I've experienced a whole new world of situations that I never had to deal with previously. Most of them center on the relationship with the client, who might not always understand or want to understand why things should be done a certain way.(Hopefully that's why they hire us.) This HTMHell column by Zeldman touches on tuning these relationships to set accurate expectations and scopes.
I discovered the actual location of the Internet over the weekend by accident. We were taking a shuttle from our hotel in Key West to the Duvall Street when I spotted a large sign on the front of a convenience store that read "The Internet is here!!" So, apparently, the Internet is actually located in this store in Key West. I tried to locate the store the next day to get a picture of it, but I just didn't have enough time.
Here's an interview with Jurassic 5. Their hip hop is refreshing in this post Strong Island era.
I make my return to work today after three relaxing days in Key West. Seems like a lot has happened in the three days I was away. The Macintosh community lost a stalwart this weekend with the passing of Don Crabb. Anyone involved deeply in Mac pursuits has read articles and books by him. I met Don for the first time at Apple's WWDC conference in 1996, and have seen him several times since. He always remembered my name, and was a really nice guy to talk to. It seems like everyone in the community has nice things to say about him today. Macintouch has a page devoted to him, MacCentral has a story with some nice quotes from Bob Levitus, and Roger Ebert wrote his obituary.
ICANN has opened it's voting membership ranks to individual Internet users, you can register here. There is a New York TImes article on this subject. (via Tomalak's Realm)
Jack noted the end of Bring the Rock. I always liked the site, but understand Jason's reasons.(Jack also noted our office kickball game which I missed while I was in Key West.)
I also read Miss Wyoming at the pool this weekend. Mr. Coupland has yet to dissapoint me. This book was an interesting hodge podge of Hollywood, fame and the human condition with fantastic characters and a bizarre series of events. I really enjoyed it, and got through it in one day.
I still haven't decided exactly how I feel about this whole patent issue with Amazon. What I clearly see is that we could just as easily be dealing with this issue with any of the big Web retailers if they got this in first.
The story that started with this article and continued with this article comes to some sort of resolution with today's installment. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed with the talent these people have or the amount of free time they seem to posess. Either way I'm jealous.
Interesting, Mac OS Rumors is reporting that the Aqua interface is contained in a single editable file in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3.
Not having a good day at all today.
Wondering what Web server software your favorite Weblogs are running? RasterWeb has the answer.
The Web the Way it Was. I'd like to congratulate everyone at Pyra, everyone at Userland, Brig and Jorn for their well deserved mentions in this article. A lot of hard work went into building the tools that everyone is using now, and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. The article itself isn't all that insightful.
Nikolai has this great new linking scheme for his offsite links. Every site has a tiny box with some defining element of it's design in it that acts as the link too that site. I've been reading his site pretty regularly over the last couple of weeks. I'm honored that Bump merited a box inside the box.
One thing that Palm announced today that I haven't seen covered anywhere is a new unlimited plan for the Palm VII's wireless access.
New Foop. It implicates me as the rat that turned my competitor, The Bradlands, in to the feds. No comment.
From today's RasterWeb Posting: "rasterweb: the only website with deadly kung foo action!" Peter seems to have forgotten who the kungfumaster is.
I read Shift every month now. I started reading it when it was a Canadian import, and now they have launched the magazine in the US too. On their site, they have this Shift List where you can view, then vote on, sites. They then publish the monthly tally in the magazine. A good combination of using online energy to produce offline content. Also of note is this map that shows you where their current site visitors are geographically. (Still not as cool as that new Kaliber 10000)
I've expanded the Where I go section to the right a little. I want it to accurately reflect the sites I'm going to on a daily basis. A reworked links page/portal is about half done, and will include a much more comprehehnsive directory of my less frequent visits than the existing links page.
Damn, I was just over at Kaliber 10000, and they've redesigned. The previous design was long one of my favorite site designs, and I like the new one, but not as much yet. Looks like there's lots of new content in the kiosks throughout the site too, or I missed it all before. Still no t-shirts.(Hint hint.)
Something I will never be: sixfoot6 He's got some beautiful sky pictures up there.(Perhaps he takes better sky pictures than I do because he is closer to the sky than I am.)
Al Gore's WuName is Jive Talkin' Choirboy. Fitting perhaps.
If you are running Windows 2k, you must go to this page. There are so many great things I hadn't discovered yet like accessing the command line in your task bar.(Found via Queso.)
I'm very tired of complexity. I'm thinking about getting rid of all my computers and buying one really powerful PC laptop and one powerful Mac laptop and calling it a day. Right now, there always seems to be at least one computer that needs some sort of maintenance, and I have little or no time to do it.
This is a very good idea. Spam has become a worse and worse issue for me. It would be nice to filter it all into the garbage.
In the office again cleaning up some code we need to hand off to a client tommorrow. Weblogs.com now has YAPI(Yet another popularity index). Bump is now ranked 24th.
