• When this comes out, I will need to find more friends.....
• Hacking the Kindle part 3: root shell and runtime system Interesting stuff here, including image support that is not turned on. I still haven't played with a Kindle.
• Reinvented Software started a support forum for Together. This was one of the reasons I wasn't going to use Together instead of Yojimbo. I seem to be back to that same argument again now...
• It's a matter of perspective First time I have ever linked to an Amazon blog post, but this one, talking about lens focal length and area of view, is an excellent quick read for you photogs.

This deserves a post unto itself. I was present at the first ever meeting of Brian and Lori. (At an Atlanta Flickr meetup no less.) I learned first over Facebook, then email, that they got engaged New Year’s Eve. Great people both, and made for each other, my life has been made richer by knowing them both. Congratulations.

A day late, but Happy New Year to those of you who read this. 2007 was an awesome year in a lot of ways, but I still have hopes to make 2008 even better. One way will be increased posting here, on Flickr and on Twitter. I plan on carrying my 4 months of being smoke free through all of 2008. Who knows what else the year will bring.

iTunesFS is a read only MacFuse filesystem of your iTunes library on Mac OS X. “A friend of mine wanted to copy some files from an iTunes playlist to an external drive, but iTunes wouldn’t allow her to simply let these files being dragged to the intended destination folder in Finder. She asked me what she could do about it.”

Yojimbo, which has become my Mac OS X choice for the management of my todo list and transient information on my work machine, was updated to 1.5 today. (Anyone know of an application like this for Windows?) I haven’t spent much time with the update yet, but the biggest update in terms of day to day use seems to be the addition of images as first class assets in the Yojimbo database. It’s really an excellent application for the management of transient information like notes, web archives of articles you want to read or passwords and serial numbers. (Those last are really not transient information, but it’s usefule to have them in an application that you have open all the time.)

In related news, I have been testing out Together, an application which is somewhat similar to Yojimbo, for the last few days. It's got a different approach to the storage of the items, and I honestly like it's UI a bit more than Yojimbo's currently. I imported all the items in my Yojimbo database in about five minutes, and I was off using it. Since it doesn't support .Mac syncing like Yojimbo, I set up some Chronosync scripts to copy the application, it's preferences, and the directories where it stores it's data to my 160Gb iPod, and to sync this stuff back on my laptop and Mac Pro. It's a somewhat tough call as far as which of these two apps I will end up sticking with long term, especially with Yojimbo being updated. Together has a few annoyances, and there's no user community like the mailing list that Bare Bones has for Yojimbo. Of course, I am still using Devonthink Pro to keep anything I might want access to long term.

For reference purposes, here's a screenshot of my Together UI, and here's one of my Yojimbo UI.

I was afk for the better part of the last week as my younger brother Paul got married over the weekend. It was our second family wedding in six months, so we are old pros at it now. I also now have two awesome sisters-in-law. I posted some photos in a Flickr Set, and you can expect more there as time allows. I will try and have that closed out before Christmas, since my Uncle gave me such a hard time about not “sending him a CD” of the pictures from the last wedding. Most of the pictures up there now have been modified with Lightroom somehow, as I try to learn to process my work with that tool.

Anyway, I'm back in Atlanta, and will probably be posting a bit between now and Christmas. Speaking of posting, MarsEdit is the deal on MacSanta today. It's the application I use to write posts on my desktop and post them to this site. I recommend it, and Red Sweater Software seems like a good steward of the application since they acquired it earlier this year.

Only some of my friends will understand why I am posting this. Turns out that Sweet Caroline was Caroline Kennedy. I believe that this will be the first, and last Neil Diamond post ever on bump. Hat Tip to Papi.

Burial's new album, Untrue, came out on November 5th. (Amazon | iTMS) It's really interesting combinations of a few different styles. (The Wikipedia article refers to it as dubstep. I don't really know what that is.) It's pretty dark stuff, music for abandoned cities, but at times it approaches clubiness. I couldn't stop listening to it last week.

Eliot Lipp might be the greatest electronic musician you have never heard of before. I referred to his newest album as the "soundtrack of my fall 2007". I'm still listening to it. It's very beat driven, and mostly stripped down, great for putting your headphones on and getting some stuff done, or just for hanging out reading. If you want to check him out, I recommend starting with his The Days EP from 2006. (iTMS) Listen carefully. My favorite song is definitely "Koreatown Minimall" on that EP.

Obviously, still listening to the Saul WIlliams and Sigur Ros with a regular mix of other stuff thrown in. I wouldn't have easily guessed that I mostly listened to electronic music last week. Seems like I am going in the other direction this week, more rock.

I had all sorts of issues with my Mac Pro yesterday. It's one of the first generation Intel towers, and over the last couple of months, I have been seeing the video card get very hot. After installing Leopard, the card has actually been overheating to the point where I see artifacting on the screen. If I run Spaces for any extended amount of time, the machine locks right up. It's got an ATI Radeon X1900 XT card in it, and it seems these cards are prone to overheating. Using iSlayer's awesome iStat menus (pictured above), I watched the Northbridge temperature in the machine go North of 170 degrees F.

My first inclination on this overheating, since it's something I had only started to see over the last couple of months, was that the video card cooling system might be clogged with dirt. I took the machine apart last week to put some RAM in, and cleaned the card, which was, in fact dirty. However, this did not make the problem go away. Yesterday, I stayed home from work, so I was using the tower all day. Sure enough, last night it started overheating. I searched on Google a bit, and it seemed that most of what I found were references to MacBook Pro's overheating. Thankfully, one of the solutions employed to fix that issue on the laptop also solved my issue. There's an excellent piece of software named smcFanControl. It lets you manually control the fans in your machine. The stock fan settings in my Mac Pro seemed to be around 500 rpm. That was clearly not enough to cool my machine, which also has 3 SATA internal drives in it. I bumped (no pun) the fan rpm's for two of the fans up to 750 rpm. The cooling issue seems to be completely solved. I highly recommend both iStat menus and smcFanControl to other Mac Pro owners.

Also yesterday, I noticed a strange constant read pattern from the drive bays. Some of my apps were lagging. I would type something into an iChat window, but the text wouldn't appear for several seconds. I spent some time with the Activity Monitor, and couldn't find an obvious culprit. So I rebooted my machine from the Leopard disk and ran Disk Utility. As is sometimes the case, it found a ton of errors that it coud not repair. My theory became that all the crashing from the overheating problem was slowly damaging my hard drive file system. Not the physical drive, but the directory information on it. In the past I have used Disk Warrior to fix this issue. Currently, Disk Warrior is not compatible with Leopard in that it has issues if you run it while booted from a Leopard disk. Laziness paid off in that I have not upgraded the external utility disk I use for such tasks. I booted from that disk (Jeter) ran Disk Warrior, and fixed all of the issues. I recommend keeping an external disk with Tiger on it for such ocassions until the verious troubleshooting vendors update their software, and I highly recommend Disk Warrior.

• I might have pink eye (again) wtf. I mean really.
• We pushed a new build of Super Deluxe today. Nothing too exciting, just pushing more videos at people.
• What's in a Project Name? One of my favorite moments at work is getting to name the releases. It's my one chance to make my SVP say things like "Hammerhead". Some good naming ideas in this post.

• Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's image One of the best things about the writer's strike, in my opinion, is the amount of thinking that is going into these issues now.
• Lists: 65 T-Shirt Blogs I need to stop buying t-shirts. Damn you Internets.
• William Gibson Rolling Stone Interview
• Stacks Overlay for Leopard Hey, everyone else linked to it, why can't I?
• Amazing Guinness Commercial.

I am going to try to upload my top artists each week, and maybe write a thing or two about that week's listening starting this week. As you can see, I listened to a lot of Sigur Ros this week. Mainly because Hvarf - Heim was released and listening to it reminded me how much I like Sigur Ros, and so I ended up listening to some of the older stuff too. Also last week, the J Dilla album, Jay Loves Japan (iTMS link) became available via the ITMS, and I bought that, and listened to it a couple of times. It's quite good. I'm not crazy about the new Jay-Z, and I really did give it a chance.

• Extravigator is a new luxury travel site. Pretty nice.
• Is the most prolific reviewer on Amazon a real person? You decide.
• I want to be Jill Greenberg when I grow up. Her new Ursine series looks amazing.

• Great AppleInsider piece on the evolution of Mail.app. It's one in a series of pieces they are doing called "Road Mac OS X Leopard.
• M & M Survival of the Fittest
• SNL Digital Short: People Getting Punched Just Before Eating Features some funny cameos.
• Bodega. I found this video to be excellent and funny.
• shadowClipboard is a really well designed full featured clipboard manager for Mac OS X.

• NPR : José González in Concert This is fantastic. I have been a huge fan of his for about two years now, and this show is a good showcase of why. He was also excellent on Conan on Friday night.

I haven’t done a link post in a while. I’m way behind on my rss feeds after doing a mental health day on Friday.

• This 25 minute live Prefuse73 set from Tokyo is awesome and worth the download.
• An Aperture User Looks at Adobe Lightroom
• The Rawking Refuses To Stop! has a great post with live versions of most of the songs on the just announced and soon to be released Radiohead album. I have listened to all of them once at least now, and the quality of the recordings is excellent, as are these new songs.
• There's a new UI coming with the next version of Pathfinder. Looks good, the longer I use Pathfinder, the more I loathe the Finder from Apple.
• Starting tomorrow, Starbucks is giving away music. Looking at the list of expected artists, I don't see much that interests me.
• I gave the Amazon MP3 store a try last week. It's great to see some competition for Apple in this area. They have been able to run rampant for long enough, and competition is always a good thing.
• Went to see Rilo Kiley at the Variety Playhouse on Saturday night. They put on a great show, as expected, however, George Harrison wants his guitar riff back. I'll pretty much go see anything that Jenny Lewis is involved with from here on out.

Well, here I am two weeks in. Still smoke free. Still very much wanting to smoke. I can say, with some level of certainty that Chantix is working out very well for me. It’s made life easier than the patch has in the past, and I don’t feel medicated either. Quitting is never going to be easy, no matter what method you use, but the level of discomfort with this method is the least I have had. As far as side effects go, the only thing I notice is some nausea in the morning after I take the first dose of the day. I suspect that I would not have this if I ate before taking the pill.

I'm hoping that the urges will lessen as the third week begins. There is no doubt that it's going to take me a while before I feel comfortable. I won't be able to drink beer for at least a couple of months, which sucks because it's football season, and the baseball playoffs are about to start.

Today, I try again, for the fourth time, to quit smoking. I could talk for a while about the circumstances of my other attempts failing, but in the end I can only blame myself for those failures. In one case, I stopped smoking for an entire year and relapsed, so I know that I can do the stopping thing with some level of confidence. This time, I am using Chantix, a pretty new drug from Phizer. It blocks the receptors that nicotine stimulates to create dopamine, and in turn produces some replacement dopamine of it’s own. I have been taking it for eight days now, and with this method of quitting, you smoke for the first week. Meanwhile the Chantix is making the nicotine absorbtion go down more every day. So in a sense, you are dealing with the physical side of the addiction while you are still smoking. After taking it for a week, you stop smoking, and today is that day for me. Yesterday, my smokes tasted awful and offered none of the satisfaction they used to, which means the Chantix is working.

As I have tried quitting before, I have some experience with the patch and Zyban to compare this to. Chantix seems to make dealing with the physical part of the addiction a non-issue. The first day without smokes is always tough, and today has been no exception, but in a sense it's easy because, despite the discomfort, you are very focused on the fact that you are quitting, at least I am. I am using some visualization to help myself too, something that I must have picked up somewhere, but don't remember reading about. I also feel like I am set up better to quit now than I have ever been. Alcohol should be a non-issue, and I live with a lovely non-smoking, stable woman who has promised to be supportive.

My reasons for quitting are myriad. In the end, I want to live. I care some about the three dollars and fifty cents a day I was spending on cigarettes, but I'm far more interested in tasting my food. It's scary getting ready to quit and stepping off that ledge like I did last night, but the payoff, while not immediate in some cases, is totally worth it. In summary, I am not looking forward to the challenges of the next six weeks of mental wrestling, but I am prepared to deal with them and I will. You can't stop me, you can only hope to contain me.

Since I use my iPod as an external disk drive quite often, I was very excited by the new iPod Classic, which came in a 160Gb size. I ordered one last week and it arrived today. Oddly it arrived in some kind of diagnostic mode, which I played with and took a bunch of pictures of this morning. There's a Flickr set of said pictures here.

• gSync Syncs iCal with Google calendar and vice versa. 20 bucks.
• Yay. Jason is back from his paternity leave.
• This iPhone bookmarklet article is a must read. I thought I already linked to it, but I guess not.
• How to write a book, the short honest truth. I'm seriously thinking through writing a book.
• Tip: Don't Design Site Navigation like ads. I've personally seen this more than once. What looks pretty is not always what users will click on. It's hard to convince non-Web people of this fact.
• Goodbye, cruel Word As time goes on, it seems like more and more people are looking for alternatives to Microsoft Bloatfice.