“We have upgraded your MacBook Pro from a 1.83GHz processor to a 2.0GHz processor at no additional cost!” Thanks Apple!!

Slanket. Arriving at the Occhialini Atlanta base of operations in 10 days to 3 weeks.

Fox to Release High-Def Movie DVDs 60 Days after Theater Release. It seems like, over time, the movie industry is getting around to dealing with the issues that I raised in this post two years ago. Good for them.

Extra Tasty is a social network enabled drink recipe site. I like the feature where you can enter the items you have in your bar, and it shows you the drinks you can make from them. Another great idea from our friends at skinnyCorp.

Blizzard released patch 1.9 for World of Warcraft yesterday. Something Awful has great, and funny patch notes commentary. My guild went into ZG, one of the mid-level endgame instances, last night, and discovered that the patch introduced some new bugs. These large trash mobs, Beserkers, fear after a certain amount of time into the encounter. Last night, this fear caused some large percentage of the party to crash, which was annoying and caused one wipe. Additionally, it seemed that a couple of the ZG bosses were buffed while others were made easier. (Tiger Boss for one.) Finally, Hakkar, the end boss, which was a pretty easy encounter for us previously, proved to be very difficult. I am not sure if this was a bug of some sort, or he was buffed. Overall, my patch experience was a negative one, which has pretty much been the norm with Blizzard. I hate that all my UI add ons stop working too, and I wish they would foster a better relationship with add on developers.

I’ve been pretty quiet here the last few months. I think this hiatus of sorts is over now, for a variety of reasons. One of them, however, is that I have accepted a new position working on a new project within Turner. I am no longer the lead technologist for PGA.com. The new position is exciting, and a bit scary in its proportions, but I am not allowed to discuss it in this forum. PGA.com was a great experience for me, three years filled with challenges, working with and for some great people, and learning a whole lot about golf and golf scoring. I think my final count was seven different golf scoring systems written from scratch. When the Masters approaches this Spring, I will feel a tinge of nostalgia.

Here’s wishing everyone, and their loved ones, a very happy and healthy New Year.

Swedish Campground

The new X-Men trailer makes me believe that this series of films is beginning to truly approach the embodiment of the comic series in the manner I had hoped for all along.

CoverBuddy lets you use your PSP as an iTunes remote over WiFi.

Rails for ColdFusion?

Lost Remote: Cancellation great for ‘Arrested Development’ Some great ideas and points here. This show deserves to live.

Ray releases Starfish into the wild. It’s a CF debugger he has been working on. Worth a look.

Macworld: Editors' Notes: Close-up on Aperture

BOOMTUNE mini - Tripod Speaker

Some very cool looking and unique Nano cases from Speck.

TiVO gets apps.

You can wrap your nano in pinstripes now.

Why should a ColdFusion Developer care about Flex 2.0

Aperture looks damn cool. Not sure if it’s five hundred dollars cool though.

Well, I got back from Max on Thursday. It’s the following Monday morning, and I think I have had ample time to distill the important things out of the experience. Let’s see if I can successfully now turn those thoughts into prose.

Much of the message from Macromedia this year was about Flex, their next iteration of leveraging the company's crown jewel. Flex is oriented towards application developers, and its appeal is certainly that it acts as a fairly RAD UI tool. Flex builder is based on Eclipse. That sounds great, until you look a little closer and realize that, at least in its Alpha iteration, it only runs on Windows. What? Isn't that sort of the point of Java? To run on any runtime? That's clearly a BigCo "we don't get it" decision. I would be running the IDE on my machine right now if it would run here. By the way, I am your target audience, and make platform decisions.

They didn't talk that much about "Scorpio", the codename for ColdFusion 8. They did, however, demo some cool Macromedia developed additions to CFEclipse. I was all excited about this at first. After thinking about it more in light of the above paragraph, I wonder if things like RDS support will be Windows only features when released. The file browsing that they had built, with it's cool two tabbed interface like Homesite, made me drool. That, honestly, is probably the one thing that has kept me using Homesite all this time.

There's more to talk about, obviously, like Flash 8.5, and Actionscript 3 and whatnot. I hope to get in here and add more comments as time allows today and tomorrow.

There’s not as much of it as there used to be. It happens to most guys as they get into middle age, and I have no doubt that my recession was slightly accelerated by the years of having a ponytail. Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. I have been going to the same stylist for the last four years. Before that I had this amazing Japanese woman who cut my hair. She cut my hair for two years before sadly moving to New York. Well, she didn’t move to New York sadly, I was sad that she moved. Now, four years later, I called to make an appointment to groom my shaggy hairstyle, and they informed me that my stylist no longer worked out of that salon.

I have no way of finding out where he is working now. So I made an appointment with one of the other stylists that work out of the salon. It seems odd to me though, I am not attached to the salon at all. If I knew where he went, I would go there.

My heart goes out to the folks in the states devastated right now by Katrina. I hate to bring up a political point at a time like this, but this article points out that the money slated to repair the levee in Louisiana was diverted by the Bush Administration to the war in Iraq. It’s a shame. I hope this gets out into the mainstream press.

Plans, the new Death Cab For Cutie cd due to come out in September, is the best cd release I have heard this year. (Don’t ask, I can’t tell you where it came from, and I am not passing it on.) It’s beautiful, melodic, and tugs at those heartstrings. For the electronica oriented among you, the new Kid 606 cd, Resilience, is a must buy.

Well, last week was another PGA Championship. It represents the climax of our season, and our work, every summer. I’m very proud of this site. I didn’t design it, but my team and I built virtually all the infrastructure that made it possible. We podcasted. I’m certain that is really cool, and it’s neat to see the podcast show up in the iTunes Music Store, even if it was after the event.

I can't easily explain how stressful this week is for me every year. If any of the software, or any of the servers fail, it is my responsibility, through millions of page views and thousands of updates. I enter a zone for that week that I wouldn't want to be in all the time. On Monday, when they finished the tournament due to bad weather on Sunday, I saw the single fastest minute by minute increase in traffic I've ever seen in my career. I wish I could post the graphical representation of that traffic surge here. It pushed our server farm to it's limits, we started to saturate the available pipe we had to work with, and just when it seemed like we might be in trouble, the tournament ended and the traffic subsided.

This week, I slowly emerge from the mode I was in. I'm hoping to update more here starting today. I'm hoping to see my friends more often for the rest of the summer. Finally, I am hoping to take some time off and go somewhere new and adventurous for me. The roller coaster ride is over, for this year at least.