If you are going to South by SouthWest Interactive and want to get together, email me. I'll be there from Thursday to Thursday.

I just read Geeks by Jon Katz. It's one of those rare books that I started reading when I went to get a cup of coffee at my local coffee type establishment and kept reading and reading and reading until it was an hour and a half later and I had finished the book. If you are even remotely a geek, you should read this book. If you aren't a geek, and want to even remotely understand geeks, you should read this book. I'm sure I'll be reading it again. One thing that I thought of when I sat down to type this up is the fact that a great opportunity was missed. Katz could have chosen to couple an Internet site with the book where geeks could meet and discuss what being a geek is all about. I know we have Slashdot and other places, but the emotions evoked by this book are powerful enough to stimulate a powerful discussion and there should be a place to conduct it. I identified with this book in some really deep rooted ways. I might add more to this later.

This thing thinks I'm Frohike from The X-Files.(via kottke.org)

I had to laugh when I read Jason's comments on the Jorn/Amazon hack article in Wired. When I read the Wired article yesterday, I said "How the hell is this a news story?" If this is hacking Amazon, I've been doing some serious hacking over the last couple of years. Perhaps Wired should hire some Weblog authors to write some of their news articles. At least we have some understanding of how to do research and of the Internet in general.

Google, which is my engine of choice, is now offering a set of bookmarklets that should come in handy.(via Metafilter) Matt hacked together a dictionary.com bookmarklet that should also come in handy. Why is everyone trying to make my life easier?

Here's all the Rubber Duck you'll ever need. The link is to a newish Weblog too.I'm quite busy trying to finish the project we have been working on.

Now this is a good idea. Not Dental school, although that may be a good idea for some people, no more lugging heavy textbooks around. I wonder what file format they are using? Can you take notes in the margins and highlight things?

A new foop. Top 10 Misspellings of Weblog URLs

How many dollars in campaign financing do you think this set of comments is worth?

I got a phone call at 8:07 am on my cellular phone, and it was a telemarketer from bulkregister.com telling me that I can register my domains through them for $10. I find that really hard to believe. Also, I frankly dislike phone spam as much as Internet spam.

Welcome to March, the gateway to Spring. Let's not forget to order our King Cakes in time for Fat Tuesday. (hint: you don't have much time.) Also coming in short order is SXSW Interactive.

Does this sound familiar? It's 4:47 AM here, and I'm still awake coding ecommerce transaction handlers for a site launching today.

A Tim Burton directed Planet of the Apes movie sounds great to me.

In other cool movie news, E! has a special Lord of the Rings section on their site for the upcoming movies. Their news page has some great material that scoops almost everyone else covering the movie.

Well back to work.

Soundtrack this morning: Machina - Machines of God by The Smashing Pumpkins. It's the new one, and I like it so far. I have to say that, for a band of their caliber, the Pumpkins Web site sucks.

I wonder when this Linux based PDA will make it to market?

Ahh Bringing February to a close. I have to reveal that February isn't my favorite month of the year, and I'm happy to see it go.

Over the last few months since I made the transition from being an in-house developer and consultant to a agency based one, I've experienced a whole new world of situations that I never had to deal with previously. Most of them center on the relationship with the client, who might not always understand or want to understand why things should be done a certain way.(Hopefully that's why they hire us.) This HTMHell column by Zeldman touches on tuning these relationships to set accurate expectations and scopes.

I discovered the actual location of the Internet over the weekend by accident. We were taking a shuttle from our hotel in Key West to the Duvall Street when I spotted a large sign on the front of a convenience store that read "The Internet is here!!" So, apparently, the Internet is actually located in this store in Key West. I tried to locate the store the next day to get a picture of it, but I just didn't have enough time.

Here's an interview with Jurassic 5. Their hip hop is refreshing in this post Strong Island era.

I make my return to work today after three relaxing days in Key West. Seems like a lot has happened in the three days I was away. The Macintosh community lost a stalwart this weekend with the passing of Don Crabb. Anyone involved deeply in Mac pursuits has read articles and books by him. I met Don for the first time at Apple's WWDC conference in 1996, and have seen him several times since. He always remembered my name, and was a really nice guy to talk to. It seems like everyone in the community has nice things to say about him today. Macintouch has a page devoted to him, MacCentral has a story with some nice quotes from Bob Levitus, and Roger Ebert wrote his obituary.

ICANN has opened it's voting membership ranks to individual Internet users, you can register here. There is a New York TImes article on this subject. (via Tomalak's Realm)

Jack noted the end of Bring the Rock. I always liked the site, but understand Jason's reasons.(Jack also noted our office kickball game which I missed while I was in Key West.)

I also read Miss Wyoming at the pool this weekend. Mr. Coupland has yet to dissapoint me. This book was an interesting hodge podge of Hollywood, fame and the human condition with fantastic characters and a bizarre series of events. I really enjoyed it, and got through it in one day.

RasterWeb sports a tuned up design.

I still haven't decided exactly how I feel about this whole patent issue with Amazon. What I clearly see is that we could just as easily be dealing with this issue with any of the big Web retailers if they got this in first.

I'm taking a three day weekend to sun myself and rest my brain. There may be updates here, but probably not. Enjoy your weekend.

The story that started with this article and continued with this article comes to some sort of resolution with today's installment. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed with the talent these people have or the amount of free time they seem to posess. Either way I'm jealous.

Interesting, Mac OS Rumors is reporting that the Aqua interface is contained in a single editable file in Mac OS X Developer Preview 3.

Not having a good day at all today.

Wondering what Web server software your favorite Weblogs are running? RasterWeb has the answer.

The Web the Way it Was. I'd like to congratulate everyone at Pyra, everyone at Userland, Brig and Jorn for their well deserved mentions in this article. A lot of hard work went into building the tools that everyone is using now, and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. The article itself isn't all that insightful.

Nikolai has this great new linking scheme for his offsite links. Every site has a tiny box with some defining element of it's design in it that acts as the link too that site. I've been reading his site pretty regularly over the last couple of weeks. I'm honored that Bump merited a box inside the box.

Oops, the Palm keyboard is from Think Outside. Is anyone besides Jason still in the box?

More on the Stowaway keyboard for the Palm.

One thing that Palm announced today that I haven't seen covered anywhere is a new unlimited plan for the Palm VII's wireless access.

New Foop. It implicates me as the rat that turned my competitor, The Bradlands, in to the feds. No comment.

From today's RasterWeb Posting: "rasterweb: the only website with deadly kung foo action!" Peter seems to have forgotten who the kungfumaster is.

I read Shift every month now. I started reading it when it was a Canadian import, and now they have launched the magazine in the US too. On their site, they have this Shift List where you can view, then vote on, sites. They then publish the monthly tally in the magazine. A good combination of using online energy to produce offline content. Also of note is this map that shows you where their current site visitors are geographically. (Still not as cool as that new Kaliber 10000)

For my friends who only read this site: The Superfriends Wazzzup Commercial

Palm makes Color device official. The IIIc comes with 8 Mb of RAM. They also came out with this neat folding keyboard, and Kodak released their camera that hooks to the Palm. The cradle is still serial and there is no USB option, and you have to pay for Mac Support separately.

I've expanded the Where I go section to the right a little. I want it to accurately reflect the sites I'm going to on a daily basis. A reworked links page/portal is about half done, and will include a much more comprehehnsive directory of my less frequent visits than the existing links page.

Damn, I was just over at Kaliber 10000, and they've redesigned. The previous design was long one of my favorite site designs, and I like the new one, but not as much yet. Looks like there's lots of new content in the kiosks throughout the site too, or I missed it all before. Still no t-shirts.(Hint hint.)

10 Big Myths about copyright explained.

Something I will never be: sixfoot6 He's got some beautiful sky pictures up there.(Perhaps he takes better sky pictures than I do because he is closer to the sky than I am.)

Al Gore's WuName is Jive Talkin' Choirboy. Fitting perhaps.

If you are running Windows 2k, you must go to this page. There are so many great things I hadn't discovered yet like accessing the command line in your task bar.(Found via Queso.)

I'd settle for even mid-band right now.

I'm very tired of complexity. I'm thinking about getting rid of all my computers and buying one really powerful PC laptop and one powerful Mac laptop and calling it a day. Right now, there always seems to be at least one computer that needs some sort of maintenance, and I have little or no time to do it.

This is a very good idea. Spam has become a worse and worse issue for me. It would be nice to filter it all into the garbage.

Links served up this month so far: 104.

In the office again cleaning up some code we need to hand off to a client tommorrow. Weblogs.com now has YAPI(Yet another popularity index). Bump is now ranked 24th.

Return of The Stuffed Dog.

It's a quiet Saturday here in the office. I really enjoy being here when the place is empty. I'm doing boring things like setting up new Web servers and configuring everything to go with them. It's fun.

Another great thing about coming downtown to work on the weekend is that my favorite places to eat are more easily accessible from here. Kate and I went to Surin for lunch. MMMM Thai.

I'm closing in on a year of having my New Beetle pretty quickly now, and so I'm evaluating whether I want to keep it or get a new one.(I had requested a Turbo a few months ago, but never heard anything back from the dealer.) One thing that is sort of strange about owning one is that there is this strange sort of community among people that own them. I can't even count the amount of people driving them that wave to me when I'm in mine. In the years I owned the two Honda Accords I've had, I never had another Accord owner wave to me just because I was driving an Accord. Today, after lunch, another person in a silver Beetle parked theirs right behind mine facing in the opposite direction.(I'll post the picture here tonight.)

Pardon my french, but there are some crazy, unneeded pissing contests going on in the Weblog community right now. I think I'll only exacerbate the situation if I link to anyone, and I probably shouldn't even dignify it with a mention. Sometimes, you just have to realize that, in these types of situations there are no winners, and keep walking.

Looking like a long week on the horizon. Next weekend, Kate and I are traveling to Key West for some R & R time. (I don't talk about Kate much here because she works in another state all week then flies home on the weekends.) It's really tough not having her around all the time, but good for us too. In between is mostly finishing the project that Jack and David have been slaving at the last couple of weeks.

Mister Bump is a weekly comic strip.

From the "other Weblogs with a duck on their homepage" category: harrumph Ooops. It's a random image, so you might get the duck, or you might not.

In an effort to cut the amount of typing required to access this site by 14%, and not to be outdone by the cool kids, you can now reach bump from the bump.nu domain.

Well, this is my first update on my Gateway Laptop upgraded to Windows 2000. Despite the various reports of major errors in the OS around the Web, my upgrade went really smoothly. It recognized all of my hardware on the first try(which is saying something if you've ever used NT.) It's much faster on this machine than 98(which isn't saying much). I'll spare you from further details, there's plenty of press elsewhere to consume.

This Workspot thing looks really interesting. (via rc3.org)

It's getting to the point very quickly that I think I'm going to be sick of the Aqua interface before Mac OS X even ships. Despite that fact, here's a well designed Aqua site with some interesting icons.

From there, I found Dropshadow. Killer desktops(that's wallpaper for you PC folk).

They've posted the X-Men movie trailer to the movie Web site. (via metafilter) I've been an avid comic book collector since I was a kid. In the past few years, I've gone dormant. I loved the X-Men books of the late eighties. I've been scrolling through the trailer, some of the scenes look amazing.(Like the one of Storm fighting Sabertooth, and Sabertooth fighting Wolverine on top of the Statue of Liberty. Mystique also looks pretty cool.)

New blue Megnut.

thetruth.com Damn right.

I hope Dan isn't talking about me. I'm working real hard to become totally platform agnostic.

I probably would have updated this site again sooner, but I spent the majority of the day trying to fend off a strong, distributed and malicious attack on our network at work. Stressful day to say the least.

After reading yesterday's EatonWeb, I went back an reread the Cut the Cheese piece I linked to yesterday. It's pretty clear to me that I didn't read this article as carefully as I should have. I do think good, consistent, well written content is lacking in commercial sites almost universally. Lord knows, we get some pretty poorly developed content from clients to be shoved into their Web templates. It's pretty clear that a professional copy writer would have helped many of these sites to be better and more professional.

I think that this article attacks the good content issue from the wrong perspective. It's not how you get to the goal of good content that matters, but that you actually get to that goal. Why not have professionally edited content and user contributed content?(Eopinions uses this model already. I also disagree with the articles criticism of eOpinions, I just received my first check from them, and I dig reading other peoples reviews.) As far as this being enough of a competitive advantage to sell me, forget it. If prices are the same, it then becomes a competitive advantage worth exploring.

As if that wasn't bad enough, my free drive space link from Monday seems to lead to a service that is broken if it exists at all.

New Powerbooks, new iBooks, new G4's. I'm now selling the following items so I can buy a new Powerbook(with Firewire which is what I've been waiting for.) a Powerbook 1400 upgraded to a 250 Mhz G3 processor, an iBook(with the RAM maxxed out),and a Power Macintosh 9600/350. I'll get the full details and pricing up on this site tonight.

News of the Palm IIIc from China

I just received my order from Incase. I ordered a Moya Pak. It's a perfect case for carrying the odd collection of gadgets I haul around on a daily basis. They have also introduced a laptop carrying case that is large enough for the iBook. Based on the quality of the first order, I will doubtless be ordering that item as well.

New Weblog(at least to me) that is in sync with today's Oscar news: The Hollywood Tattler

I've been terrible about updating the RSS file for this site. I'm resolving to update it from now on.

In case you care, my log analysis software has informed me that this page has averaged x visits a day since I moved it to its current server on February 17th, 1998. I find this number shockingly high. "Ah, x amount of visits, very good."

Cutting the Cheese If you are involved at all with the development or business end of an ecommerce Web site, you should read this article. If that's not enough for you, check out this quote: "It seems that all E-commerce sites worldwide are virtually interchangeable." Amen brother.

My ISP is experiencing router issues that may make this site, and email to me, not work. Hopefully this will be remedied quickly.

Barbelith talks about his daily site stats. I've never discussed Bump's daily stats because I really didn't think anyone cared how many hits this page gets. I also am pretty unconcerned about how many hits the site gets, getting millions of page views is not my primary reason for posting things to this site. I don't think there is any taboo on it, rather, I think people don't really care.

Here's a gift: this service offers 300 Mb of online storage for free. They have a Mac oriented version too. This makes Apple's 20 Mb iDisk look paltry.

I finally moved the January entries off to their own page in the archive.

It's clear that spring is approaching here in Georgia. Tonight marks the first set of tornado warnings this year.

Charles Schulz dies. I don't even know what to say about this. He brought us the Great Pumpkin.

I'd forgotten about this toy that Andy had mailed me about. It's really fun, and worth a look.

As if one great person's passing wasn't enough, Screaming Jay Hawkins dead at 70.

I'm watching the Homicide movie on NBC, and Kate and I used to watch the show every Friday a couple of years ago. Since when is Jason Priestly on the show?

In Dan Bricklin's Thurday, February 10, post to his Log, he covered Demo 2000. There's some great information on three of the upcoming Springboard modules for handspring handhelds. The most interesting is a min-pda that plugs into you Palm to give you an even smaller PDA. The camera module looks neat too.

This article from the British MacUser magazine seems to be a pretty reliable account about Apple's Palm based device in development.

Like everyone else(or so it seems), I beat the pre-registration deadline for SXSW and will be attending.

I can't think of anything that has had me going around in circles in the last few months as much as this Salon piece on Orson Scott Card. I've read somewhere around ten books he's written, and loved every single one of them. Nothing offensive there, in fact mostly values that I wholeheartedly agree with. Then I read this interview, and it makes me sad. Then I start debating with myself about the whole issue. Can I seperate his works from him? I honestly don't know. It really sucks.

I don't want to violate my NDA or anything, but I can say that I am now in acquisition talks with another Weblog after yesterday's Bump business strategy update. Update: At least two other Weblogs have now announced they want to be acquired by my growing conglomerate.