Steve Ivy, who I met at a Web conference in April, has started a Weblog named Redmonk. He's a sharp guy, as well as an accomplished Frontier developer, and I look forward to reading his thoughts and findings.

I went to both Thrashers pre-season games this weekend and was not dissapointed by the experience. They split the games, losing to the New York Rangers 3-2 in Overtime and crushed the New Jersey Devils today 6-1. They looked a lot better than I expected. I also took a bunch of pictures with traditional film that will end up here as soon as I get them developed.

I spent the majority of the weekend at these games and watching some pretty bad movies with Kate, but also working on the backend of Bump. There will be subtle changes to the site later this week, and bigger ones in early October.

On that note, Camworld saw some major changes this week, and Cam has really improved the interface and made it more integrated. He also added a personalization feature that allows the user to customize the page color. Kepp it up Cam, you're an inspiration to the rest of the Weblog community.

On the subject of my favorite sites, I don't think I've mentioned kottke.org yet. Strong design and great links with opinion. Another person that I feel humble in the presence of. He recently pointed to a site talking about the status of the casting for the upcoming Lord of the Rings movie which I am eagerly anticipating. I've read the books somewhere on the order of 20 times, and I'm considering giving them another go soon.

Looking forward, there is a lot going on this week. The Matrix DVD is out Tuesday, and so is the new Nine Inch Nails CD. I'm looking forward to both.

OnMP3.com is an MP3 oriented Weblog.

fischler.org is a new Weblog with some potential. If you don't believe me, look at this guy's links page which is 178k.

Another new Weblog site that caught my eye this week is Lake Effect. I'm not sure I like the color scheme though. It's powered by Blogger.com which I mentioned a few posts ago.

I updated the DMOZ Weblog directory tonight. To show how much things have grown, we're up to 93 sites listed. We were somewhere in the twenties when I signed on as an editor. If you have a Weblog and aren't listed, I encourage you to submit your site. (You go there to submit, but I'll take your submission via email if you are that lazy.)

Maybe it had something to do with parting with all of my old change, but I've been at a loss this week to figure out where all of my motivation went. I feel like a real big slacker. It bothers me that I seem to be this fragile. Here's an Onion story that seems very on-topic.

Handspring has released the details of their Visor product which is based on the Palm OS.(Complete with pictures) Their site seems to have a lot of broken links to images this morning, but the devices look great, come in several colors, and are cheaper than a traditional Palm from Palm Computing. They also have a special expansion slot that accomodates things like modems, extra memory, MP3 players and software. The $249 model comes with 8Mb of memory.

My iBook order is "Being Assembled." I called and it should ship within the next two weeks.

My tickets for this weekends Thrashers pre-season games and the regular season games I ordered tickets for in advance came today. The game on Saturday will be the first played in the new Philips Arena here in Atlanta. I excited to be part of this new team as a fan.

GeneHack has redesigned

I took my collected loose change to one of those machines for lazy people who don't want to roll their change. I had enough that I managed to buy a scanner with the result and had some money left over for coffee.

They've updated the Sleepy Hollow site to include desktop wallpaper and sketches. It's worth a look or two.

Metascene manages to snag "most favored Weblog status" for the week with this writeup (scroll to the bottom.) I can't believe that I've been doing Bump for almost two years. I also can't believe how many new and amazing log sites have popped up in 1999. When I started doing Bump, the ranks consisted of Robot Wisdom, Scripting News, RasterWeb, Gulker's News Page, and CamWorld (which I wasn't even aware of at the time.) Now there are Weblogs to suit all tastes. Keep em coming.

Salon has an article about running Linux on commercially available laptops which goes into depth about the WinModem issue. I have struggled with this running Red Hat on my Gateway Laptop. I'm forced to use my one precious PC Card port for a modem in order to get Internet access. This makes me angry.

I spent the long weekend cleaning and organizing the Bump clubhouse and the rest of my apartment. As usual with these things, I'm amazed at how much junk I acquire somehow. I'm going to eBay a lot of stuff over the next month.

Evhead changes layouts. It has rapidly become one of my favorite Weblog sites.

The Crossfader noticed he's on my reading list and notes that I'm on his. Maybe I should change the name of the blog from Bump to Yoda? Anyway, he seems to be the only blogger who likes Tribe Called Quest as much as I do. What happened to culturally positive Rap and hip-hop? You must learn!!

Bring the Rock gets a great redesign.

Psyberspace now contains a Cold Fusion resource Search Engine. Very Useful.

Guru.com seems like an online Fast Company type site. There's a lot of good info there even if you aren't an independent business person. Plus they are giving away an Aeron Chair.

I love the draggable pals at Melty.com

I found link to Ampersand Lounge at Melty.com too. I think I've been there before, but I liked what I found. There was also a link to Give Quick! which lets Web developers donate their affiliate referral fees to charity. Bump is going that route as soon as I have the time to change all of my links.

Via EvHead, I found a link to a page on the Mappa Mundi site. Good site with real solid content and design.

My copy of Danny Elfman's score to the movie Instinct arrived yesterday. Like all of his music, I found it exquisite and disturbing. I wish it was longer. I listened to it twice this afternoon while working from home. I wish I could work from home all the time. I hate commuting.

Via Hack the Planet I found a spoof on MacOS Rumors named Mac OS Rumorz.

Pitchfork has the news that there's a Sunny Day Real Estate live CD and Video coming out. (via Bring the Rock) I once got drunk with the drummer and they are one of the bands I really like. I hope they keep putting out new music on their new label.

Kill HTML before it kills us I didn't realize this was an either or sort of choice. I've always been of the "best tool for each job" mindset.

I went home for a few days, which explains the lack of updates. It was great to spend time with my family. It always recharges my batteries.

While I was traveling, I finished Po Bronson's Nudist on the Late Shift. I thought it was well written and extremely interesting. If you have any interest in dot com businesses or what goes on behind the scenes with Internet business in Silicon Valley, this book is for you. I found the section about HotMail to be the most interesting and inspiring to me. Next up: Seth Godin's Permission Marketing.

Linkwatcher got a design upgrade recently. I check the recently updated Weblog list every day now.

Jason at 0sil8 made a neato Web font named Silkscreen.

I guess there was never really much doubt, but this article indicates we can look forward to at least two more Matrix films.(link courtesy of Mr. Hope)

Boy do I like MrBarret.com. Guess I'll be updating the links page tonight after all.

I'm enjoying reading this new list on Amazon of what books are bought by which companies. Also humorous is the listing for Atlanta which reveals something about the city. I would think there are some privacy concerns about this information. It could even reveal a project at a company that is supposed to be a secret.

Paul Mather mailed me about his SubAtomic Humor column. The newest one features some Blair Witch humor.

For those who aren't Slashdot readers, the sync has some great video content. Don't go there unless you have some time to watch though.

I love Yahtzee, and now there's Flash Yahtzee (with instructions on building your own).

It's a good thing I missed this auction, because I don't have a spare $301.00.

Allaire released Cold Fusion Express today. It's a lite version of Cold Fusion.

iMaul (via Grouse)

Here’s my first Blogger based entry. I’m pretty sure that the FTP settings are going to need tweaking.

Blogger.com raises the bar for Web based logging tools. It’s brought to us by the same folks that developed PYRA. Here’s a Bump page run through their system.

A Motley Fool discussion of the idea that Wal-Mart will kill Amazon.

I still haven't gotten the G3 monster back from the shop. Frustrating.

Banners Suck?

ECML is an XML based digital wallet standard being backed by heavyweights like Visa and American Express. I doubt that they will get all of the backend ecommerce vendors to support this as they all have different uses for the data and want it different ways.

Network Solutions' newest play is an Internet directory/portal called the dot com directory. It doesn't seem like anything special to me, and its main function is akin to the various Yellow Pages sites around the Web.

Coolfont is not about fonts at all, but rather, new age instead.

This site is mainly about working in Great Britain, but there's something here for the stateside worker too.

Here's a font archive stored in some solidly designed PHP driven pages. There's some great fonts there too.

The biggest thing I took away from the Jupiter conference I attended last week was that the big Web players are collecting a scary amount of information about the average surfer's habits and demographics. They feel like they are justified in doing so because they post privacy policies. Inevitably, the amount of "targeted" junk email each of the people reading this page will receive will increase dramatically over the next 24 months. This direct marketing approach is the next wave of the Web from a marketer's perspective. There is nothing you can do about it. Every time your register for a site service, enter a contest, or join a mailing list you are giving them all the permission they need.

AOL plans TV channel

I'm very sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days. It's been a very busy time for me at work, and I just haven't had the energy to get to Bump in my off hours. I'll be putting a large amount of material up today, and hope to have my write up on the Jupiter conference from last week up tonight at some point.

I got a promotion at work last week to a new postion titled "Manager, eMedia."

I'm in New York City attending Jupiter Communications Online Advertising conference. There are 1500 people here, most of whom represent consumer oriented sites. I'll be writing up a summation of day one and posting it tonight. I apologize for the lack of updates over the last two days.

What is this? Looks like another weblog application is about to emerge. I was reading a magazine interview with Marc Canter and he referenced this URL as his most recent project.

Need a search engine for your site? Check out atomz.com. I've added a search engine at the bottom of this page for your convenience, so now you can search for all manner of strange things on my site.

Panic Software, makers of Transmit, my ftp client of choice, released Audion, a snazzy looking MP3 player for the Macintosh.

Chris Cornell's site has a jukebox page where you can hear a different new track off of the new CD each day.

There should be a lot more here later. I have a list of 25 sites I haven't gotten to link to over the last two days.

Here's a really good corporate identity site that someone mailed me about today. I've got to get my Flash skills built in a hurry.

I've been thinking about some bands that I love but haven't listened to in years. I can't seem to find my copy of Alice Donut's Mule, one of my favorite records.(I actually mean vinyl records.)

A couple of friends and I ate sushi and watched movies last night. We watched The Seven Samurai. If you haven't seen it, this is one of my favorite movies ever. It influenced all manner of seminal Western films, and is really entertaining too. It's got a fair share of humor, action, and drama. It's in balck and white and sub-titled, but don't let that intimidate you. It was also remade as a western you might be familiar with named The Magnificent Seven in 1960. Here's the Internet Movie Database listing for Shichinin no samurai, which is the film's real name.

I am not affiliated with, nor do I endorse, The Bumper despite it's name. Let's attempt to turn our Palm sized device into a subnotebook.

I'm looking to learn PHP, but didn't find much in the way of books on the subject. If anyone reading Bump has some hints or suggestions about good resources and methods for learning, please email me.

Here's a builder.com introductory article on PHP.

I finished up the project this morning. As always, it was a huge series of compromises between what I wanted to do and what I actually got to build. The pages are way bigger than they should be, it looks terrible at 640x480, and the navigation is terrible. I'm beat, but not too beat for some Bump.

This week's Onion has a great Blair Witch infographic. Their new site design requires horizontal scrolling at 800x600. 54% of Web surfers are using this resolution.(Statmarket.com)

I deeply respect peterme. This Weblog is definitely deserving of all the attention it has gotten. Strong writing from a knowlegable perspective.

Chris Cornell (Soundgarden) has his new single available as an MP3 on his Web site. I think it's one of the best commercial songs I've heard in a while.

Krispy Kreme IPOnut?

Don't spill your coffee on this paper. Interesting, but I don't know.

Rocket E-Book emulation software for the PC. You can download it with a dictionary too.

MetaScene, which has taken the role of the Weblogs Weblog, has a great piece with tons of interesting links about Weblogs in reponse to the now infamous Ben Brown article.

I'm on Death March project number 51 this year. Building some decent stuff in Cold Fusion backended by databases. I should be lighter than I have been with updates over the next two days.

Seems like a lighter than normal day on the news tip regardless of my workload. This morning, I stuck my head in a Macromedia seminar for a couple of hours. They covered Flash, Fireworks, and DreamWeaver with a dabble in Director and Generator. Pretty rudimentary, but I did pick up a couple of undocumented tricks so all wasn't lost. I like the way their tools interact with each other.

Arthur G3 processor contains sword.(Via MacOS Rumors)

Why the Web Sucks(Via Robot Wisdom)

I received the September issue of Fast Company(It's not online yet.) over the weekend. This magazine has gotten positively huge. I imagine they will be releasing a new magazine soon because they clearly have more ad pages than one magazine can contain on a regular basis. I love it, but now it has gotten so big that I can't carry it around easily. Time for a Palm version of it.

It's a dailywebthing

AppleInsider has a sneak peek at Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh.

iBook Zone has some information on ship dates for the iBook today.

Builder.com reviews REBOL 2.1. REBOL is available for just about every platform out there, and they have a pending version for the Palm.

The Industry Standard has an article about what LauchPad is doing with Pointcast after it bought the company. They have launched a site called EntryPoint. I downloaded the software and discovered this isn't just a site, but a new version of Pointcast rebranded and with ecommerce stuff based on eWallet included, as well as a portalized site. My first comments are that they don't have all of the news categories I want to be displayed. It's neat, but not as customizable as I want. If I'm going to give up desktop real estate to something like this, I want it to be exactly tailored to my interests, locations, etc.

World's Oldest Goldfish Dead at 43

I finished the novel The Beach by Alex Garland over the weekend. Quite good, and probably deserving of all of the accolades it has received over the last couple of years. It has some crazy metaphor and analogy in it, and the descriptions of Thailand make me want to pack a rucksack today and leave tonight. Definitely a worthwhile read by a GenX author. I like the theme of searching for Utopia in our constantly shrinking planet. I'm also happy that I finally got to read it since it's been sitting around my house for 8 months. I haven't decided which of the hundred books I want to read that I will be proceeding to next.

Here's the Salon interview with Alex Garland who wrote The Beach from February of 1997 when it was first released.

I took the weekend off from logging to try and fix my ailing Blue and White G3. No dice. It's pretty much dead in the water. I expect to have to replace both the hard drive and logic board. (Essentially meaning I need a whole new computer.) I also took in a Braves game, and slept quite a bit.

I was making my way through a few days of Peterme , and discovered this page about the Broadvision software's backend. This proves that marketing and reality are two very different things.

OK, I find this almost too cool for words. Battlebots I guess I'm a fan of live robotic combat.

Pyra is a site where Web teams can collaborate and track projects online. Seems like a good working set up considering all of the location challenged collaboration that goes on with Web projects. Link via EvHead which a newish Weblog (at least to me) that is both beautiful and content rich, including a link to an MP3 of the Dukes of Hazzard theme on this page . The page that the theme is on also contains the themes from Fat Albert, Welcome Back Kotter, The Love Boat, and many other shows. Very cool.

In a very negative turn of events, the hard drive in my three week old Blue and White G3 died last night. Since I'm a stickler about backing up my data, I only lost email messages from the last week and a half as a result. Of course I now have to deal with the hassle of getting a new drive under warranty and re-installing everything.

Here's a comprehensive quality review of the available Macintosh MP3 encoders. Here's a comparable but not exact duplicate for Windows(Thanks Eli)

From gorguss (Another new Weblog.) Donkey Kong, Centipede and Joust for the Palm

Dutch postman suspended for working in mini-skirt

Instructions on how to make a Hello Kitty laptop

Here's a picture of the new Hot Wheels and Barbie computers from Mattel. I think the Hot Wheels one is bad ass.

Apparently, the world's population is expected to reach the 6 billion mark on October 12th. Here's a site celebrating that fact?

iTime is a system extension that adds an Internet Time or Metric Time clock in your Macintosh menu bar next to the traditional Macintosh clock.

I'm attending the Jupiter Online Advertising Forum in New York from August 17-19. Interesting group of people speaking.

I attended the monthly meeting of The Association of Internet Professionals here in Atlanta. There were presenters from Andromedia and Broadvision . Andromedia's products allow for detailed tracking of user activity and data drilldown and analyzation of the resulting information. Really complex stuff. Broadvision has an end to end software product that acts as a personalization engine and content management system. Wish we could afford either, but their solutions are priced for the Hewlett Packards and Home Depots of the world. I like Andromedia's site design much better than Broadvision's. More attractive and professional looking.

I'm listening to Jack from saturn.org's Internet Mixed Tape . It's got some interesting music. Most interesting to me is that I haven't heard most of it before.(I love the Faith No More song he included.)

My Netscape seems to have some channel updating issues. Scripting News and CamWorld channels aren't updating. (Maybe Dave and Cam have decided not to do this syndication anymore.)

Outliners.com

I'm hiring a production level Web person. Here's the job description.(Atlanta area only please.)