It's a quiet Saturday here in the office. I really enjoy being here when the place is empty. I'm doing boring things like setting up new Web servers and configuring everything to go with them. It's fun.
Another great thing about coming downtown to work on the weekend is that my favorite places to eat are more easily accessible from here. Kate and I went to Surin for lunch. MMMM Thai.
I'm closing in on a year of having my New Beetle pretty quickly now, and so I'm evaluating whether I want to keep it or get a new one.(I had requested a Turbo a few months ago, but never heard anything back from the dealer.) One thing that is sort of strange about owning one is that there is this strange sort of community among people that own them. I can't even count the amount of people driving them that wave to me when I'm in mine. In the years I owned the two Honda Accords I've had, I never had another Accord owner wave to me just because I was driving an Accord. Today, after lunch, another person in a silver Beetle parked theirs right behind mine facing in the opposite direction.(I'll post the picture here tonight.)
Pardon my french, but there are some crazy, unneeded pissing contests going on in the Weblog community right now. I think I'll only exacerbate the situation if I link to anyone, and I probably shouldn't even dignify it with a mention. Sometimes, you just have to realize that, in these types of situations there are no winners, and keep walking.
Looking like a long week on the horizon. Next weekend, Kate and I are traveling to Key West for some R & R time. (I don't talk about Kate much here because she works in another state all week then flies home on the weekends.) It's really tough not having her around all the time, but good for us too. In between is mostly finishing the project that Jack and David have been slaving at the last couple of weeks.
From the "other Weblogs with a duck on their homepage" category: harrumph Ooops. It's a random image, so you might get the duck, or you might not.
In an effort to cut the amount of typing required to access this site by 14%, and not to be outdone by the cool kids, you can now reach bump from the bump.nu domain.
Well, this is my first update on my Gateway Laptop upgraded to Windows 2000. Despite the various reports of major errors in the OS around the Web, my upgrade went really smoothly. It recognized all of my hardware on the first try(which is saying something if you've ever used NT.) It's much faster on this machine than 98(which isn't saying much). I'll spare you from further details, there's plenty of press elsewhere to consume.
It's getting to the point very quickly that I think I'm going to be sick of the Aqua interface before Mac OS X even ships. Despite that fact, here's a well designed Aqua site with some interesting icons.
From there, I found Dropshadow. Killer desktops(that's wallpaper for you PC folk).
They've posted the X-Men movie trailer to the movie Web site. (via metafilter) I've been an avid comic book collector since I was a kid. In the past few years, I've gone dormant. I loved the X-Men books of the late eighties. I've been scrolling through the trailer, some of the scenes look amazing.(Like the one of Storm fighting Sabertooth, and Sabertooth fighting Wolverine on top of the Statue of Liberty. Mystique also looks pretty cool.)
I hope Dan isn't talking about me. I'm working real hard to become totally platform agnostic.
I probably would have updated this site again sooner, but I spent the majority of the day trying to fend off a strong, distributed and malicious attack on our network at work. Stressful day to say the least.
After reading yesterday's EatonWeb, I went back an reread the Cut the Cheese piece I linked to yesterday. It's pretty clear to me that I didn't read this article as carefully as I should have. I do think good, consistent, well written content is lacking in commercial sites almost universally. Lord knows, we get some pretty poorly developed content from clients to be shoved into their Web templates. It's pretty clear that a professional copy writer would have helped many of these sites to be better and more professional.
I think that this article attacks the good content issue from the wrong perspective. It's not how you get to the goal of good content that matters, but that you actually get to that goal. Why not have professionally edited content and user contributed content?(Eopinions uses this model already. I also disagree with the articles criticism of eOpinions, I just received my first check from them, and I dig reading other peoples reviews.) As far as this being enough of a competitive advantage to sell me, forget it. If prices are the same, it then becomes a competitive advantage worth exploring.
As if that wasn't bad enough, my free drive space link from Monday seems to lead to a service that is broken if it exists at all.
New Powerbooks, new iBooks, new G4's. I'm now selling the following items so I can buy a new Powerbook(with Firewire which is what I've been waiting for.) a Powerbook 1400 upgraded to a 250 Mhz G3 processor, an iBook(with the RAM maxxed out),and a Power Macintosh 9600/350. I'll get the full details and pricing up on this site tonight.
I just received my order from Incase. I ordered a Moya Pak. It's a perfect case for carrying the odd collection of gadgets I haul around on a daily basis. They have also introduced a laptop carrying case that is large enough for the iBook. Based on the quality of the first order, I will doubtless be ordering that item as well.
New Weblog(at least to me) that is in sync with today's Oscar news: The Hollywood Tattler
I've been terrible about updating the RSS file for this site. I'm resolving to update it from now on.
In case you care, my log analysis software has informed me that this page has averaged x visits a day since I moved it to its current server on February 17th, 1998. I find this number shockingly high. "Ah, x amount of visits, very good."
Cutting the Cheese If you are involved at all with the development or business end of an ecommerce Web site, you should read this article. If that's not enough for you, check out this quote: "It seems that all E-commerce sites worldwide are virtually interchangeable." Amen brother.
My ISP is experiencing router issues that may make this site, and email to me, not work. Hopefully this will be remedied quickly.
Barbelith talks about his daily site stats. I've never discussed Bump's daily stats because I really didn't think anyone cared how many hits this page gets. I also am pretty unconcerned about how many hits the site gets, getting millions of page views is not my primary reason for posting things to this site. I don't think there is any taboo on it, rather, I think people don't really care.
Here's a gift: this service offers 300 Mb of online storage for free. They have a Mac oriented version too. This makes Apple's 20 Mb iDisk look paltry.
I finally moved the January entries off to their own page in the archive.
I'm watching the Homicide movie on NBC, and Kate and I used to watch the show every Friday a couple of years ago. Since when is Jason Priestly on the show?
In Dan Bricklin's Thurday, February 10, post to his Log, he covered Demo 2000. There's some great information on three of the upcoming Springboard modules for handspring handhelds. The most interesting is a min-pda that plugs into you Palm to give you an even smaller PDA. The camera module looks neat too.
This article from the British MacUser magazine seems to be a pretty reliable account about Apple's Palm based device in development.
Like everyone else(or so it seems), I beat the pre-registration deadline for SXSW and will be attending.
I can't think of anything that has had me going around in circles in the last few months as much as this Salon piece on Orson Scott Card. I've read somewhere around ten books he's written, and loved every single one of them. Nothing offensive there, in fact mostly values that I wholeheartedly agree with. Then I read this interview, and it makes me sad. Then I start debating with myself about the whole issue. Can I seperate his works from him? I honestly don't know. It really sucks.
I don't want to violate my NDA or anything, but I can say that I am now in acquisition talks with another Weblog after yesterday's Bump business strategy update. Update: At least two other Weblogs have now announced they want to be acquired by my growing conglomerate.
Matt passed on this link to a fantastic RealVideo movie of a Krispy Kreme in action. In case I didn't mention it, I really like donuts.
Array is churning out some really great Web design links.
Handspring is finally going to make their Visor handhelds available in retail stores. One of the people at the company we share office space with bought one but sent it back because he felt it was too cheaply made. I'm waiting to see what their second generation devices are going to look like.
MacCentral interviewed the CEO of Connectix about their recent court victory.
Big thanks to Jim and Scott for their kind words about my redesign.
In keeping with successful business strategies for attaining maximum valuation in other Internet ventures, Bump will be pursuing an aggressive strategy over the next several months. We will be acquiring as many other weblogs as possible, regardless of quality, to ensure that we generate lots of press releases. After we have acquired several other Weblogs, even if we have managed to alienate their original users through our rebranding and redesign of these entities, we will attempt to IPO.
MacCentral reports that Connectix has won the suit that Sony brought over their Virtual Game Station product. I love this product, it works great, and now they'll finally be able to release updates to it legally. This also means they will be able to release their Windows version. Here's the Connectix press release that explains it, and links to the judgement online.
More proof that our government doesn't get the Internet. Do they understand how pervasively cookies are used in Web development for benign purposes? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this bill, but it seems that this is not the way to get regulation on these Internet advertising companies. I remain unconvinced that this sort of legislation is a good thing or that it sets a good precedent for our industry.
We're looking for a good project/team management Web application that can be used to schedule meetings, send out email notifications, schedule resources, and view other people's scheduled events. eProject.com will give Outlook haters fits, it uses the exact same layout and icons as Outlook 2000. It doesn't have all the features we want. Guess we may have to roll our own solution.
I love Krispy Kreme Donuts a little too much. Really good Web site for such an old school company.
The Apex AD-600A is a DVD player that will also play CD-ROM's full of MP3 files. Here's an in-depth review of the unit. I find it interesting that the person who maintains this site uses Circuit City as his example of somewhere you can buy the unit. I'm still boycotting Circuit City over the whole DIVX fiasco. People have really short memories.
I've had a Mindspring account since 1996. As I'm sure most of you know by now, they merged with Earthlink to become the small number two to AOL's number one. Somehow, they got it in their head that their customers need to be reminded of this fact almost daily via email. It's driving me nuts.
David Brin on Tomorrow's World . This is up on the iPlanet Web site, which is the brand assigned to the Netscape/Sun alliance that came out of the AOL purchase of Netscape.
Still looking for that magical color combination. I'm pretty certain that this is the final color scheme, so if you don't like it, be sure to get me some feedback asap. I'm hoping to get a script in place to let you choose your own color schemes ala Camworld, but will be finalizing design and all the secondary pages first. Content will continue to grow and change on this page over the next few weeks. Some new pics above in what I hope will be a regular new feature.
Well, I don't think this is a parody.(via Camworld) This person has now taken the site down, it was a rip off of the much lauded(at least here) new Evhead design.
We had a movie night last night and watched Run Lola Run . I really liked it, but found the concept rather unoriginal. I also went to see Eye of the Beholder last weekend. The movie had some great elements to it, but the ending was terrible, I mean really really terrible. Wait for the video.
Who Toy will help you name your brand new Weblog.(via Evhead)
Starting tomorrow, I won't be using QBullets in the log section of this site anymore. With this new color scheme, links stand out well enough on their own.
Today's Soundtrack:
Nick Drake's Pink Moon . Perhaps the use of Pink Moon in the Volkswagon commercial will make more people aware of this completely brilliant piece of work.
I like Evhead's new design much better than the recent design. It's usable and visually pleasing. I also now have Ev's Head as an icon in my bookmarks menu. It might be the best designed Weblog yet in my opinion.
I've made it one month without smoking. I don't feel like celebrating. I made it over a year without smoking at one point, then lapsed right back into it. I also made the step down to the next level of patch today. I expect that I'll be grumpy.
Well. This is definitely a work in progress.
I've gotten really mixed feedback so far. Seems most people writing in do not like this color scheme, so I'll revisit it tonight. I changed the content font style sheet so it no longer is fixed at 12 pt. Thanks to Jeff Harrell and Jim Roepcke for the excellent pointers.
I want to hear what a bad job I've done of making this site easy to read so I can fix it. There will be additional content and layout changes on this page this week. The pictures above will link to pages with descriptions as soon as I have time to build a template and write some descriptions. For now, they link to a larger version of the image and feature scenes from last week.
Also, I haven't updated any of the other pages yet.
Dan Sanderson has written a filter that lets you see only the Weblogs on the weblog.com update list that you want to. A useful feature, but I use that list to discover new Weblogs. Still, with the ever growing number of new blogs, it's good to have filters.
Snapcase : designs for automation. I really really like this band a lot. Not for you if you don't like agressive music.
Michael Penn : MP4 [days since a lost time accident]. The jury is still out on this one. It's probably going to grow on me. I don't know about naming a CD "MP4" at this point in time.
What in the world is this all about? Is this going to be real football? In this age of salary caps, I would imagine that the talent pool for the NFL would be susceptible to a well financed competitor league. I just wonder about the source.
This evolt article and the recent CERT advisory on non-validated dynamically inserted HTML seems pretty common sense to me. Data validation in input is critical. The scarier part of this is the part about poisoned cookies and persistent attacks.
Speaking of Monkeyfist , it has rapidly become a site I look forward to reading every day. It's a mature Weblog after only a short time of being active. They are turning out content faster than I can read and digest it.
I started using ICQ again today. You can now tell if I'm online by looking at the flower at the bottom of the page.
Somehow I missed the fact that today is Groundhog's Day . I've made the pilgramage to Punxsutawney, PA twice to see Phil on his big day. There's nothing better than spending all night in below freezing weather in a clearing. I had a great time on both trips. There was alcohol comsumption involved(how else would I have been able to stay outside in the freezing cold all night.) Thanks to Mirasol for reminding me.
Willie B. dies . I was just at the zoo four weeks ago and saw him. He sat, ignoring the obnoxious humans, proud and regal. He's been an Atlanta landmark for years. There's a picture gallery of him up on the Web too.
Oh yeah, there's a Weblog for this year's SXSW.(I'm going.)
Quite a lot of buzz today over the new home page design that Amazon.com is testing.(According to this News.com article ) You might or might not get the new design when you log onto their site. Personally, I like the previous, tab based(and oft-copied) design better. IMHO it was warmer and more innovative.
Speaking of redesigns, Version Tracker , the best place to stay up to date on Macintosh software releases, has redesigned and added an email notification service. Not surprisingly, I don't really like the new identity or navigation.
I'm not sure why redesigning has been such a slow process, but I'm not going to talk about it here any longer. Somepeopleseem to have no problem getting a redesign out the door, but I think I'm struggling with deciding what technology to base things on.
After what seemed like months of waffling, I finally bought a digital camera this weekend. I'm really pleased with it so far, and I splurged and picked up a 48 Mb Compact Flash card, which allows me to take 79 high quality images at a session. The only negative(and very wasteful note) is that it comes with a single disposable battery. It burns through these rather expensive jobbers in about 60 pictures. I can't afford the rechargeable kit yet, so I'm going to have to use the camera sparingly in the meantime.
All of our local news agencies have been predicting a winter apocalypse for the last four days. Nothing even close to a real winter event has occurred.
It turns out that Jorn is having ISP problems. In the meantime, you can reach Robot Wisdom at [64.6.45.65/RobotWisd...](http://64.6.45.65/RobotWisdom/.)
Something that might interest people who want to link to a particular post on this site:
There is an anchor in each day's post with the date in six digit format(so today would be http://bumps.wpengine.com/index.html#012600). I put them there for my own use, but realized that, when Jorn linked to me last week, he had no way of going right to that particular day's entry because I hadn't posted this. They don't go back all the way to November 1997 because I haven't had the time to insert them all yet.
I have an Apple eMate 300 that I have used very little. I'm interested in trading it for a Newton 2100. If you know anyone who might be interested in negotiating a deal, please contact me.
This major label(BMI) sponsored site , in its Internet awards, honored the RIAA with its "Best Organization" award. This organization has done more to set music on the Internet back than any one other group thus far, how can you give them an Internet music award? Talk about bias. Let's cowtow to the big money's thugs. Oops, the winners were chosen by members of the public. Who voted for RIAA?
MacCentral is reporting a color Palm device about to be announced which is already in CompUSA's inventory system.
I'm not fond of MacAddict's recent redesign . It's not very usable. Everything is all jumbled around. It also doesn't seem to render properly on the most recent version of Netscape for the Mac OS. It's especially evident how lacking it is when you compare it to the recent O'Grady Macintosh portal, Go2Mac.com . I wasn't happy about this site at first as a long time reader of The Powerpage, but I've warmed up to it as they have improved the design over the last month.
For some reason, I never noticed The Onion's archive page . It's at least an hour of laughing endlessly.
On the subject of ecards for unusual occasions and themes, Waferbaby, home of Pixhell has a great page of cards too.(Many of these are not appropriate for children, and if you are easily offended by sexual imagery, you might want to pass.)
As if no one learned the horrible lesson of DIVX, here's someone trying to do the same thing.(via Looka)
The Super Bowl is coming to town this week. I work about 300 yards from the Georgia Dome, so I'm sure I'm going to see some interesting things in our neighborhood this week. The first signs were giant ABC trucks getting off the highway en masse this week.
VerticalNet brokers a deal with Microsoft . Traditional business to business publishers had better take notice of this, they are quickly losing this battle through inactivity.
This kind of thing is the beginning of the end for the notebook computer. I know it's very expensive now, but it's no more expensive than notebooks generally were less than five years ago. I, frankly, want one. I especially like the fact that it supports portrait or landscape.
Barnes and Noble is working on a credit card that allows you to earn points towards books when you use it.
In case you live under some kind of technology free bubble, Transmeta announced their new processor today. It is x386 compatible and aimed at the mobile market.(Do you see a theme developing here?) Their first product to market is designed to run a special version of Linux and last for a full day on one battery charge. For an insane amount of detail, go to the Slashdot report .
The lack of updates over the last four days can be attributed directly to the installation of Quake 3 Arena on my home machine. If you smoke and intend to quit, you might find that extended video game forays help you take your mind off the gnawing sensation of your body weening itself from addiction.
Four days and still cooking along on the not smoking thing. I'd like to thank everyone for all of the encouraging emails. It's helped me out quite a bit, in fact more than once I got them while I was craving a cigarette and they encouraged me to push on.
It's been a very focused week at work. We're pushing a project out the door early next week, and we have all been putting in extra effort to get the development done. One of the aspects of this project is an edit interface, and coding it made me appreciate Manila all that much more.
I don't know how many of the same readers we have, but does anyone else use a Netscape browser to access Scripting News ? I get blank pages about 90% of the time with either Communicator 4.7 for Mac or Windows. It just started happening recently. It's one of those sites that I read often enough that I find myself firing up Internet Exploder just to read it.
MacCentral has an article today on the USB Kritter Cam from iRez. I got one for Christmas to go with my iBook, and have been quite pleased with it so far. I still haven't decided if I want cam type pictures of me up on this site though.
I started down a better path today. I'm quitting smoking. It's a nasty disgusting habit, and I want to be rid of it once and for all. I'm using the NicoDerm CQ patch. A little background: in 1997 I quit smoking after almost eight years. I succeeded and remained smoke free until 1999 when I broke down slowly. I made the mistake of thinking I could have the occasional cigarette without breaking. I then slowly spiraled back into the life of a smoker. I put the patch on this morning(I started with the 21 mg version.), and the first thing that happens is a really itchey feeling where you put it on. Now I'm feeling a little spacey, probably because it's more nicotine than my body is used to. I'm not craving a butt now, but I will as the day goes on. It's a wrenching feeling as your body craves the substance it's addicted to. What the patch does is allow you to seperate the two different aspects of the addiction and break each down as a unique battle. I'll keep you informed of my progress. Feel free to encourage me.