“Hello my friend!!!” If you’re ever at the corner of Marietta and Cone streets in Atlanta GA, you owe it to yourself to visit this man and pick up a fantastic smoothie. If you’re lucky, you may turn out to be his friend. (link, picture and text courtesy of n0d.org)
Dan Gillmor: Microsoft’s desktop `concession' taken from same old bag of tricks
Frankly, this is too little too late for this market segement. Microsoft managed to kill off any real viable alternative to Internet Explorer. Hold on, I know you are thinking "there's Mozilla, iCab, Opera" Well think about it this way, think of all the improvements that could have been made to Netscape if they had been able to charge for their software. Think of the innovations we might have seen had they been able to sink a huge, revenue based, R & D effort behind their browser. Well here we are in 2001, and the browser hasn't really moved very far from 1998-9. This is Microsoft's fault, and we need our government to step up to the plate here and not cave and settle.
Leo from Screen Savers on TechTV has a blog.
Osiris G-Bag is a backpack with built in speakers for listening to music.
Emusic has almost every George Carlin album as MP3’s up on their site. I continue to enjoy the unlimited downloads for $9.99 plan at eMusic very much. Especially since I started using Musicmatch Jukebox Pro as my player on my new Windows machine. As some would say, it automagically loads songs I download into my library.
I’ve been watching Major League Lacrosse whenever the games are on here. I played for a couple of seasons in college, and have always loved the sport. It’s so much more exciting to watch than some of the other professional sporting events on TV.
I am finally recovering from the massive data loss and sheer privacy invasion of my laptop disappearance. It has taken me a while. I bought new equipment, not the same stuff I had because I frankly couldn’t afford it. I’m hoping the hotel’s insurance will cover the rest. I’ve written up the whole story, but don’t want to publish it yet in case the thief is smart enough to check this site. I must have changed 200 passwords in the last few days, and spent almost a week getting software installed and configured. Now I have to get back on track at work where this has cost me at least one work week. Back up your data every day boys and girls, and encrypt stuff you don’t want others to see with PGP and password utilities like Web Confidential (Mac OS, Windows, and Palm).
Others have pointed to this book review about the Supreme Court decision on the election last year. It is worth a read, and I will without a doubt be reading the books it covers.
I apologize for the lack of updates. When staying in San Francisco over the weekend, someone broke into my hotel room and stole my Titanium Laptop, iPaq, and all of the other various pieces of computer equipment that I had brought on the trip for work. The most disturbing thing in the whole mess is the loss of my data and the invasion of my privacy. If you know someone in the bay area that may have purchased items like this at hot prices, feel free to email me. I, of course, have the police on the case.
Liongames is reporting that a Mac OS port of Black & White is in progress. This is good news for you Mac gamers. This game is spectacular and entertaining. I’ve been playing it on my Win 2000 machine for the last week, and it’s engaging.
This SV.com Roundtable has some amazing insightful points being made in it. It’s interesting to see a sharp mind like Bruce Perens respond to Craig Mundie’s points. It seems like the sad thing here is that a well oiled PR machine like Microsoft can continue to operate through disinformation because the general public could care less about this kind of stuff. I mean Bill Gates is the ultimate computer genius, he’s much smarter than the average computer user, so whatever he says must be incredibly accurate.
This Bluetooth review is very much in need of a few of what I like to call “paragraph breaks.”
I have to say that playing Unreal Tournament until 3:30 am on the eve of a workday is not a wise move.
Free-Lance Beat Media Cos. in Court. This will probably be a big deal for existing articles, but I’m sure all of these firms are now amending their freelance contracts to deal with this issue.
Ogg Vorbis: Open Free Audio.
The word “gangsta” has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. I’ll be using this word a lot more often now. Some other choice terms added: road rage, slacker, homie, lifestyle drug, and zero tolerance. (link via the interesting Currentform.)
For all your hip hop needs : B-Boys.com
I’m working on the information architecture for a large site for a client right now. In working on it, I was reminded by my bookmarks file what an excellent compendium of resources are available at Jesse James Garrett’s information architecture resources page is. It’s a one stop shop for all your IA needs.
AppleScript in a Nutshell. It’s about time that someone came out with a book like this for Applescript. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it.
Over the weekend and throughout this week, The Atlanta Film and Video Festival is being held here in Atlanta. It offers some movies that have only been shown at SXSW and Sundance. So far, I have gone to see three movies, and all of them were really solid.
Scratch, which is a history of turntablism, was the best of the three in my opinion, and it did a really solid job of covering this one angle of the hip hop community. The history of the art of scratching and DJing in general was really solid. All of my favorite DJ's like QBert, Mixmaster Mike, and Cut Chemist were featured in the movie, and DJ Faust and DJ Shortee were actually at the showing. If you have any interest in this sort of thing, and an opportunity to see this movie, go see it.
Next, we went to see Burning Man: The Burning Sensation. Since I haven't been to Burning Man yet, it's hard for me to judge how well this film captures the spirit of Burning Man. The film did contain some very interesting art pieces and happenings at Burning Man, and there was excellent discussion with the film's director afterwards.
Finally, I went to see Revolution OS, a documentary about the Free Software movement and Linux. While I think this film did a great job of capturing the personalities of people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, I did not think that all of the people that they chose to focus on would have been my first choices. I would have liked to have seen some mention of PERL, and more coverage of Apache in the movie because I think that these two things, more than any other, have contributed to the success of Linux as an operating system. I also would have liked to have seen more coverage of individual distributions rather than the focus on a VA Linux, a hardware vendor. Finally, I think that this documentary went out of its way to position Microsoft as the evil empire. I would rather have been provided with the raw data and then been able to form my own opinion rather than having the situation framed in such a biased manner. Still, this film was well worth seeing no matter how much or little you know abotu the Free Software Movement. Oddly, I was unable to find a live Web site for this movie.
Software Methods and Tools provides a really comprehensive index of useful tools and resources for a variety of different types of development.