On Monday, when my home was without power, I was forced to go to a local coffee shop to work on their Wifi network. How did I know when the power was back on and it was safe to go home. I pinged the router on my home network. When it responded, I knew the power was back on and it was safe to return home to finish my work.
Gawker Media Contract Publications is a weblog advertorial service from Gawker. Their first project is a month long Weblog for Nike. This is the point where Weblog business starts to sound quite a bit like the magazine publishing business to me.
Ben Forta spoke at our ACFUG meeting last night, which I partially sponsored. He mainly spoke about Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion, and the state of the ColdFusion community. ColdFusion is apparently a thriving market, with quarter over quarter growth for the last nine fiscal quarters. Blackstone takes the next set of steps in merging some Flash technology into the ColdFusion platform where it makes sense, and also brings more reporting functionality to the table. I can’t tell you more than that without getting into trouble.
I sponsored the meeting because, in my eyes, I owe ACFUG quite a bit from a career perspective. I have made almost every single important career contact from the last six years of my life at or through ACFUG. My last three jobs have been either in part or completely as a result of my involvement in the organization.
So, I am finally somewhat back to normal after our weekend marathon of golf fun. Some thoughts that have gone through my head in the last twenty four hours, in no particulate order.
Atlantans head eastward in search of community. I really like the neighborhood that I live in, and I think that East Atlanta hoods will continue to improve.
I’ve been working, since last Monday, on our site coverage and scoring of The 65th Annual Senior PGA Championship. It has been delayed, again and again, from Thursday to today, making it the longest tournament I have ever worked on in my year and a half of doing this golf web thing. For those of you who are not that familiar with competitive golf, tournaments typically end on Sunday, around 6 p.m. Yesterday, they were finishing up round three, which would normally happen on Saturday, and had just started the last round when the tornado sirens started to blow. This morning, I woke up to thunder storms here in Atlanta, and my home was without power, so I had to get in the car and find a Starbucks with power in order to work. The course, however, is underwater again after the rain last night.
Engadget has a post about a $50 iPod from Microsoft, and it is the tenth or eleventh post about this that I have seen come across my newsreader (NNW natch) in the last twenty four hours. I think that this is typical Microsoft. Announce really early, too early, and announce with ridiculous statements. A fifty dollar music player with iPod level storage and features? Not possible. It’s a typical tactic to cast doubts and fear on the marketplace. Good old MSFT, we can always count on her for the same tactics. Prediction: Their music service will suck ass. Their players will suck too, or at least not be as good as the iPod. They will lose tons of money trying to establish themselves, and attempt to leverage Windows to get more traction. In the end, they won’t be successful for the same reasons that Apple won’t. The labels control the industry, and they won’t let some distributor, no matter how big the company is, into their little piece of turf.
Update: Well, it turns out that the gentleman from Microsoft was misquoted. Well, I apologize for assuming the worst about Microsoft, I was wrong.
Atlanta’s On the Bricks Friday Night Concert Series starts tonight with Train and Liz Phair. I’m not terribly excited about either, and have worked something like 20 hours in the last two days already, but I thought I would point to the schedule anyway.
I notice that my Blogger profile is now on the first page of results when searching for meeting famous people and meeting aliens. I find this amusing. If I had my choice, I think I would rather meet famous people than meet aliens, assuming that the famous people were A-List.
The Yanks stayed hot this week, wrapping up a sweep of the Orioles last night with an 18-5 clubbing. Unfortunately, the Red Sox stayed hot as well, and the Yanks are half a game out of first. I really do have to get up to see a game soon. I wish that I didn’t live in a National League city, I should have thought that one through a bit more. Then again, my judgement in 1997 had to be somewhat impaired considering the company I was keeping at the time.
Years ago, I used to work at a comic book store for about a year. I mainly worked shows, and only worked in the actual store one day a week. As the years have passed, I had gotten out of the habit of reading comics. Recently, however, a friend turned me on to Wanted (link to a 5 page preview of the first book). This series, thus far, has rekindled what I used to love about reading comics. It is not a comic for kids, with mature themes.
Now I know where to go when I need some new bling bling.
iPodLibrary aims to put books on your iPod. I could never, ever, read an entire novel on my iPod’s tiny screen. I can read more than the amount of text that fits on the screen at once, and it would annoy me to have to keep scrolling to catch up.
I found The May 2004 issue of The Believer to be particularly good, especially David Ng’s piece on computer languages and computer books. It had me rolling on the floor laughing(ROTFL). I think, in some ways, that it is a shame that they don’t do more with the Web.
NSLog() discovered that Apple may be enabling third party apps in Software Update in Tiger. (via)
Electronic Frontier Foundation: FairPlay: Another Anticompetitive Use of DRM This is a must read mini-piece on Apple’s use of Fairplay DRM to protect their music store investment from other player manufacturers.
Fox News: Al Qaeda Increasing in Strength. This is scary stuff. For all of you who have told me that I should vote for Bush because of security matters, and there have been a few of you, in what way has he managed to deplete this threat? It seems like, by invading Iraq, he has made this threat worse.
The easiest to understand set of instructions for protecting your Mac OS X machine from the much discussed, but seldom understood, security issue.
This weekend, I read Calm Surrender: Walking the Hard Road of Forgiveness by Kent Nerburn. It’s more of a book of observations about forgiveness, its nature, its role in our lives, and attaining the balance to live with it, than a how-to guide of some sort. These sorts of books seem to be more effective for people of my nature. There is a chapter of the book up on his site if you want to give it a test drive. I really enjoyed the book, and I think it had a good impact on me. It remains to be seen whether that impact is fleeting or if I can make more meaningful change in my demeanor.
Imagine my surprise, after enjoying the book and thinking that I might want to read additional titles by Kent Nerburn, to discover, via the almighty G, of course, that Kent Nerburn has a blog, with an RSS feed and everything.
I have to admit that I obsess a bit more than I should about the cases and bags that I carry my gear in on a day to day basis. Last week, in some surfing, I was really impreseed with Vaja’s cellphone cases. Today, iPodlounge reviews their iPod case which looks both lovely and functional. I gotta curb my spending though, so I can afford all that work on the house I have started.
Tim Buntel’s Long Overdue and Reluctantly Agreed-to Blackstone Blog (It’s a ColdFusion thing, so you know.)
Well, last week saw the launch of a new set of software that I wrote, and this software was a substantially refactored version of some software that I wrote last year. I, apparently, was much dumber last year, because I am generating the same result with my software as the set of components I wrote a year ago, but the new version is something like 2200 lines of code shorter. Anyway, I spent a good chunk of my weekend overseeing the live burn-in of that software, fixing some minor bugs that cropped up, and generating a punchlist for some improvements. All fun, and fun to cross a big project off my to do list.
Unfortunately, the end of that project coincides with the true beginning of our busy season. We have our first major event of the season this week. If I remember last year correctly, everything from this event forward is a blur of work.
I really do not know the first thing about software development Someday, maybe I will. I am trying very hard to learn.