I think that the thing that disturbs me the most about the two party political system we currently have in this country is that both groups feel the need to stretch the truth or resort to unprovable rhetoric in order to make their points. This is probably meant to muddy the waters for people who take things at face, but it is incredibly difficult to attempt to educate myself on important issues with all of the “doody” floating in the waters.
I went and got my hair cut this afternoon. For years, I had long hair, and I only got a haircut every three of four months, there was no need to do otherwise. Since I went the short hair route six months ago, I have to go every six weeks or so to keep the appearance of neatness. Not that I mind the whole personal grooming routine, I think I actually enjoy it more than most men I know. They mostly seem to want to go in to get their hair cut and spend as little time maintaining their hair every day as possible. Anyway, I’m digressing, this is supposed to be an essay about will power or, more accurately, the battle of the hair styles that occurs on my head every six weeks. I go to a fancy salon, it’s an indulgence that I allow myself, and I really enjoy the whole process of going, changing into the special salon robe, getting a scalp massage, a shampoo, and finally getting my hair cut. While this has all gone well, it’s the styling part, post-haircut, where the trouble arises. While I am keeping things pretty conservative, my stylist likes to make some artisitic choices when styling my hair that I am not certain work for me. He’s an artist though, and I don’t want to belittle his judgement because he probably does know better than I do what works. Don’t laugh at me when I call him an artist, do you have any idea the havoc that a bad haircut can wreak in one’s life? So anyway, I’m sitting here in Starbucks, connected to the Wi-Fi, wondering whether I should be styling my hair when I get up tomorrow the way he styled it this afternoon, or the way that I think it should be styled.
Well, I will say that it seems like quite a lot of squabbling has been going on in blog-land the last couple of weeks. Taking a simplistic viewpoint, it might seem like Dave Winer against the rest of the blog-tool vendors and a smattering of community folks. It seems, from my perspective, that both groups have written things that are somewhat questionable, but I don’t really want to get into a “I’m gonna take a side and here is why the other guys are wrong” position. From my perspective, as a real long term blog maintainer guy, it seems like there was an infrastructure in blogland that worked pretty well, and could be enhanced over time if everyone could work together, which seems unlikely from what I have seen. Since it seemed unlikely that everyone could work together, which, in my perception, has very little to do with the technology side of things, one group decided to build a new set of infrastructure for blogland. It seems like a huge undertaking from the perspective of arriving at a consensus and then properly implementing and testing this consensus in software. These wheels are in motion, and while it does no one any harm for me to express an opinion about this, I doubt there is much that anyone could do to halt the inertia of the situation. So I will just say this, it seems, from what I can tell, that there is no one in this situation who is primarily motivated by the practical good of blogland itself. I find this frustrating, but I am going to go get a nice cup of coffee now, and then I might read a book.
Scott’s got a good Buddy Hackett story on his blog type thing.
My favorite discovery of the week so far has been Freshly Mixed. It’s a great archive of 407 DJ sets in a variety of styles. It includes some great sets by some really high profile folks too. The only downside is a registration process that requires a valid email address, which made me a little uncomfortable, and download speeds of the massive files are a bit slow, even over a very high speed connection.
Heh, well I almost don’t even know where to start and where to end with this post. I have so much stuff going on in my head. Last week, after tidying work things up after the weekend’s tournaments and what not, I struck out on a mini-holiday to sunny Miami. Late June in Miami is supposed to be their offseason, and the general idea was to keep to myself, relax, and destress as much as possible. I’ve always enjoyed taking off on my own like this, being in a strange city alone doesn’t appeal to most people, as far as I can tell, but there is something about the anonymity of it that I really seem to enjoy. I could tell, even from the reactions of the people who work in the hospitality industry down there, that most people seem to view people who are on vacation alone like they are some kind of freaks.
Well, Miami is a beautiful city, the weather was gorgeous for the most part, despite forecasts which said otherwise, and the people were friendly and fun. For the first couple of days, I chose to keep to myself, lying by the pool and reading books, so many books in fact, that I had to run to a nearby bookstore during my lunch wandering the second day to pick up some more material to keep me busy. I will leave the book notes for another entry in the next few days. As the trip progressed, I met some awesome and interesting people who I spent a bunch of time with. I firmly believe that things happen for a reason, and I return with a reinforcement of that opinion. I return refreshed, happier, and far less stressed out than when I left. I wish I could have been gone more than five days, but, fear not, I'm heading up North for some quality time with my family, which is long overdue, this weekend for a couple of days. In the meantime, there seem to be a sheer multitude of work things that need my attention. I guess I should make a couple of notes about places I went to in Miami that I would recommend, since I took pretty copious notes and a bunch of pictures while I was there, but that will have to wait for now.
Well, there’s a lot of coverage of the WWDC keynote elsewhere, so I’ll just give a couple of opinions and call it a day. First, Panther looks great, there are a lot of changes at the system level that make sense and were expected. The new features all make sense strategically, and put them solidly ahead of MSFT in the OS innovation department yet again. MSFT has attempted to create buzz for Longhorn, something that won’t see the light of day for another two years at least. I can only imagine all the innovations we’ll see from our friends in Cupertino in the same time period. Second, I’m drooling over the new hardware architecture. It puts Apple in a place where they can plausibly compete with the Wintel architecture, even if they are only slightly behind in performance, the OS is so much better that it makes for a good argument. By the time the machines hit the streets, the top end Wintel machine will be faster than the one we saw today. Regardless, I will be replacing my aged tower when these machines hit the streets, and I’m excited to see what they, and Panther, can do.
I also know where I am going to be tomorrow night. If you live in the ATL, you should come down to MJQ and represent.
I guess I know where I will be tomorrow at 1 pm ET.
I like the new version of Blogger, but I wish that all of the features they offer me on my Windows machine/IE were there when I logged in with Mozilla or Safari. It’s definitely an improvement from a performance perspective, although I haven’t really discovered any new features that I find terribly useful. The interface is much bluer.
What a busy weekend. In addition to my normal golf tournament babysitting duties, we have the Club Professional’s Championship running this weekend, and weather has been the opponent for the tournaments all weekend. I’ve still managed to fit some pool time into my schedule, with regular exits to use the Wifi network at the nearest Starbucks. Because I have a T-Mobile cell phone, my Sidekick actually, I get unlimited access to the T-Mobile hotspots for $19.99 a month, and it has worked out great. In Atlanta, there is no shortage of Starbucks locations, so I can bring my machine wherever I go without fear that I’ll be far away from VPN access to work.
This review of a shareware metronome application is the funniest thing I have read in June. (Thanks Buzz)
Europe outlaws business model patents.
“On June 13, at approximately 9:45 p.m., our friend and co-worker Lay Kian “Canny” Ong was abducted from the parking lot of the Bangsar Shopping Complex in Malaysia." This needs more exposure. If you’ve got a blog, and feel like linking to this post or that site, it would be great. She is a friend of a good friend of mine, and everyone is worried sick about the situation. There’s more information on how you can help at the site. Update: They found her, but sadly, she was already dead. If more news about this story appears, I will make certain to link to it. It really is a tragedy, and my thoughts are with her family and friends. Another Update: Here’s an article, which is very disturbing, about the body they found.
A watch with up to 256 Mb of Memory built into it that you can access via a handy USB cable that is also built into it. Seems to me that this is an industrial espionager’s wet dream.
Final Scratch is finally available for Mac OS X. Cool stuff.
Todd got our most recent event site to validate. My involvement with this one was purely scoring information in the form of leaderboards and scorecards during the event, but it’s nice to know that something I’ve worked on has validated.
Man am I tired. Not sure why exactly.
I suspect that the sustained amount of tracks that Apple will continue to sell via the iTunes music store will continue to decrease. I think this because they don’t seem to have the new releases that matter to what I perceive as their target audience. The new Radiohead cd, Hail to the Thief, was released today, and it is nowhere to be found on the iTunes music store. In fact, they also do not have about ten other new major label releases that I think matter from the last couple of months. For instance, the new Metallica cd, although that may have something to do with Metallica themselves, I find it amusing that their music is not available via this legal electronic distribution channel when they complained so vehemently about Napster. While adding the indies will be a huge step forward, and I am happy to see Apple pursuing them, I think they need to take a look at the Billboard top 200 album chart every week, and ask themselves why about half the CD’s on the current one are not available from their store. I don’t think a brick and mortar store would find it acceptable to only have half the merchandise that their customers were asking for, and I hope that Apple is treating this the same way.
Testing out posting to the site using my Sidekick. That is all.
It’s odd, I find myself in this weird purgatory of relationship land. I’ve been single, after about eight years of being in a single relationship, for about eight months. I thought originally that I would remain single for a few months, then be ready to date again. Unfortunately, I think the heart takes longer to heal than I originally thought. Of course, this depends on the type of person that you are. I find myself still missing her, and it’s not easy for me to say that at all. It’s even more difficult to write about it in an open manner like this, but I think that it’s good for me to express these thoughts. I shouldn’t miss her, I keep telling myself. Eight months is a long time to get used to the idea of not having someone in your life. I have wondered quite a bit if it was my loneliness that was driving that feeling, missing waking up next to someone that you want to spend time with, the meals out, the closeness and ability to confide in another person without reservation. I’ve tried to date, and discovered that I am still too messed up emotionally to pull it off. There’s parts of me that are ready, without any doubt at all, but the core, my “rendering engine” so to speak, is just still too confused. Unfortunately, the end result is a person with this hint of constant sadness, at least internally. I bought a shirt last week that has the slogan “I believe the next time I fall in love it will be forever,” and god do I want to believe that, really I do.
I did find the time over last weekend to read Designing with Web Standards. I can recommend this book with any hesitation whatsoever, and regardless of whether your role in Web development is as a designer, developer, business owner, or hobbyist. Jeffrey did a fantastic job of making the case for design and development with standards, but not in a heavy handed manner, and with wit that I wish I could employ. He also describes the pitfalls to watch out for and the techniques to use to avoid them with aplomb. I found it one of the easiest to read books about Web development I have ever read. Pick it up.
Boy, I’ll tell you, you work head down on something for a few days, and everything becomes a blur. I’m a little tired, actually more than a little. I guess I have the consolation of a paycheck though.
For some reason RSS on this site has been the broken for a while. I fixed it now. It’s here.