The new trailer for Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer looks just awesome. “All that you know is at an end.”

I have Joost invites. Leave me your name and email in the comments and I will send you one. After I have sent it, I will delete the comment, so your email will not remain out on the web. Cool.

One person confirmed dead after CNN Center shooting

Today started like a normal Tuesday. I went to the office, we deployed the new Super Deluxe patch, and then I headed down to CNN Center for my normal slate of meetings. In between meetings, I usually find an empty conference room to squat in and do my work. Today, however, all the rooms were full, so I went to the Omni Hotel, which is connected to CNN, to use their free WiFi network. I was sitting there, at the top of the escalators, when a single gun shot rang out. This was followed by a pause, and then three or four more gun shots. All I remember is picking up my things and running. Somehow I ended up behind the security door at the suite of offices behind the front desk, where I waited with hotel employees and some other civilians until the situation was safe. Scary stuff to be sure.

Here's a blog post that details our most recent incremental site updates on Super Deluxe.

You should go watch the video for this fantastic song, Cops on Bikes. There are also wallpapers and AIM buddy icons. Cops on Bikes is gonna be huge, I just know it.

I’ve been using SmartSVN, but it just doesn’t feel like a Mac app. Anyone have a first class Mac OS X Subversion Client that they can recommend? Has no one written the equivalent of Transmit for the SVN protocol yet?

It's been four years since the last time I went to SXSW. Thinking over the last seven years, since the 2000 conference where so many of those of us in the blog world met for the first time, and how valuable the two that I've attended have been to me, it's amazing that I haven't attended more. This year, with my newest labor of love just out the door, it seems like the perfect time for me to go again, so I am. I'm hoping to renew some acquaintances from year's past, and meet lots of new people.

I was quite please to find that SXSWBaby exists as strong as it ever was. It's a great resource in the sea of information.

If you are going, and want to meet up, or have a tip on a hot party, feel free to drop me a line.

Well, we've got a press release out today. I'm generally not a fan of press releases, but there are two things in this one that are pretty cool. First, Super Deluxe hit a million unique users. With no press push, no really heavy corporate promotion or anything, we hit a pretty reasonable sized user number. Second, there are a bunch of new names in the press release that we hadn't announced yet. Probably the biggest are David Cross, Wayne Brady, Horatio Sanz and Dave Attell. I'm really looking forward to seeing these guys out on the site, and I am hoping that they interact with the community and other artists the way some of the existing artists are interacting. Cool stuff, to be sure.

Oh, and Weenie.

I spent a good part of my three day weekend tearing my office apart and reassembling it the right way. On the way, I installed two new hard drives in my Mac Pro, which is super easy to do. I also finally installed BootCamp on that machine, which is what one of the new hard drives is dedicated to, and XP on top of that. I plan on upgrading that to Windows Vista this week. I still have a lot to do, but I am now wishing that I had taken a before picture, because the after picture will be pretty cool. I reran all the cables the right way, put down carpet, put all my devices on a shelf in a unit that now houses the towers and printer as well, set up a new RAID backup system, and reworked the home entertainment part of the office. It feels good to be productive.

Of course, after putting all that effort in over the weekend, I find this awesome Make Magazine post today. It's a really cool idea to declutter your office.

So, at the end of 2005, Turner asked some of us to sit in a conference room. At first, I was like, "That sounds boring." After a while though, I realized that it would be a good way to get out of work on PGA.com. That part was pretty awesome because I had gotten kind of bored working to make sure leaderboards were updated all the time. Then they started asking us to come with ideas for "broadband" projects. So I went to Wikipedia and looked up broadband. Then I made some stuff up. In the end, we came with an idea for a comedy broadband Web site. It was a pretty good idea, or so I thought. Then they made me go back to work on the golf Web site. Then a month went by, and they asked us to start "fleshing out" the idea. I am pretty fleshy, so I was good at that part.

After this, it was a crazy wild ride. I have always wanted to say that something was a crazy wild ride, so this worked out perfectly for me. We did some stuff, and then we did some more stuff. Finally, they decided that this idea was good enough to actually build. This made me nervous, because it entailed me actually doing work. It was a pretty big project, and they weren't going to give us much time to get it done. I had one employee, and no code written. Over the next four months, I hired a full development team, and worked with three other development teams, and our gifted presentation team to build the site from scratch.

In all seriousness, I am very proud of what our team accomplished, and this project was a time of massive personal growth for me. There's a lot more we want to do, and we've already started working to improve and enhance what is already out there. I will definitely write more posts about the many lessons I learned. In closing, check out Little Michael Jackson.

I reworked a nice Wordpress template for my current ancient blogger infrastructure. I think you will agree that this is much nicer than the previous dated Kubrick layout. Hopefully, I will get to making a layout of my own soon, but I was so tired of looking at the old one that I wasn’t posting, and that sort of defeats the purpose of the site altogether.

So, the cat is kinda out of the bag this morning. With this Hollywood Reporter story, and the launch of our bubble wrapalicious placeholder site, the project I have been working on under wraps at Turner is no longer a secret.

I guess the only thing I will say is that we're cranking along behind the scenes getting things ready. It's hard to believe that this whole thing started with a little conversation in a conference room over a year ago. PaidContent comments, somehow linking our project with Office Pirates, although the concepts are completely different. I can see how they might see anything that comes from Time Warner as all part of the same bucket, but we actually started working on this well in advance of Office Pirates going public, and our content and site are very different from theirs. Well, gotta get back to working on the site now....

Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s followup to Office Space, is out in theaters, but apparently has been purposely underpromoted. Happily, Atlanta is one of the cities where it is currently playing, so I am going to try and see it this weekend.

This post from our quality friends at Beer and Rap has it all. I’ve never seen a tag team combination like the Corn Muffins and the Business Casual Drunk. For this, I award this post with my Blog Post of the Week. While you are there, download his mix.

Hazel looks like a must have Mac OS X utility. I have been using an Applescript that automatically keeps my downloads folder organized by day, and that is a very useful solution, but this looks like it will take that to the next level.

On this project, I seem to have a million documents and versions to keep track of, and since a lot of the end users and creators of those documents are non-technical, using our SVN repository as the master document archive would require way too much time on my part. I try really hard to keep the most recent versions of everything in DevonThink, but it's virtually impossible for me to keep up with all the updates. We would use Basecamp, but the lack of versioning makes that feature not as useful. I think we are going to just use a corporate eRoom to manage them for now, but even that is not a perfect solution. I'm curious if anyone else has a toolset that they would recommend for this task.

The text of Rob Pardo’s keynote from the Austin Game Conference got me thinking about core values and product teams. Rob is the lead designer at Blizzard, and is responsible for World of Warcraft’s experience, which is fantastic. The simple details that they got right make this game compelling, and frankly have also made it difficult for me to latch on to any other game recently. I’ve tried playing a bunch, including Saint’s Row and Dead Rising, and there always seems to be some simple detail that drives me nuts.

To get back to the matter at hand, as the head of a team of developers, and that team being as large as the largest one I have ever led, I started asking myself what our core values are. These wouldn't map directly to Rob's as "concentrated coolness" doesn't really apply to Java code. I can't decide whether these kind of core values are best left to organically develop or whether they should be something that I decide on and then attempt to instill into our efforts. It seems like they would be truer if I let them develop, then codify them. Regardless, I think this keynote text is something everyone should read, whether interested in things World of Warcraft or not.

Just a note from your blog curator to say that I haven’t abandoned you. Rest assured I am very busy, and learning a lot, and also working very very hard. I want to get back to daily updates, and hopefully that will become more reasonable and possible soon. Until then, I say, cheers.

Metallica Capitulates to iTunes. “Metallica has decided to compromise the artistic integrity of its albums in return for materialistic gain from digital sales of its singles.” Well, hahahahaha. P.S. haha.

Update: The live tracks are only available if you buy the whole album, which you undoubtedly already have. Asshattery continues.

This video is just insane.  Plenty more of Birdy Nam Nam over at YouTube.  They also have some video content over at their pretty cool site. Anyone know where I can buy their stuff stateside?

Apple releases the MacBook. Anyone want to buy a 15" Macbook Pro?

Well, I've been working on this new project, that I can't really talk about too much here, for about six months now.  I will say, however, that I very much believe that, on any Web project, you should be able to get some kind of release out the door in six months.  That kind of thinking, however, doesn't take into account the manner in which large corporations go about making decisions and executing on those decisions. It does frustrate me that we are still pretty far from having some sort of public version of this project, but I understand the world I am living in at work.

Having said that, we are now getting into the building stage, and I am looking for people who want to work on something webby. I need skilled Web Developers who have solid J2EE experience, preferably with some JSP experience. We are working on something that is really cool, and the team and environment is unique and fun. Get in touch with me if this sounds like something you would be interested in.

Our team moved over to Williams Street today. I have to say, it is a very different, and much cooler environment than the two cube farms I lived in before this. I am so happy.

From Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools, Consensus Web Filters. In addition to an excellent write up on the emergence of this category of Web site, it includes a pretty comprehensive list of sites that fit into this category. One great filter, which I have sort of become addicted to, but which is not mentioned in his piece, is TailRank. TailRank has gone from being a site I was not familiar with to one of my ten most visited sites in less than a month.

For me, the purpose of these sites is not the "surf by proxy" filtering that most people seem to use them for. I like the daily scour for information that I currently pursue. These sites give me ancillary links and perspective from the community that surfing alone could never get me. Considering how smart this community seems to be in most cases, it would be foolish of me not to ingest the community's perspectives and additional datapoints that folks provide.

Ma.gnolia extends social bookmarking to groups and contacts, with basic social network functionality. I like it. Some of the design choices, like the way they chose to display groups in group listing pages, annoyed me a little. Having said that, I’m all over this, imported my delicious bookmarks, and am going to rip it up over there for a few days and see how it fits. Oh yeah, and ajax stuff and blah blah blah.