Luxo points to a Sarah Vowell Interview. I had no idea that she was the voice of one of the characters, Violet, in the Incredibles, she is currently one of my favorite authors. Seems an incredibly odd combination to me, but it obviously works.
Policy Research: “Did Clinton ‘Gut’ the Military?” Interesting to see common perceptions, reinforced by years of political campaigning and media spin, combatted with black and white facts. I did similar research this summer, when hanging out with someone on a sporadic basis who said this same thing on a regular basis when I was with her. Truth of the matter, when looking at actual budget numbers, is that Democrats don’t necessarily spend less, or have less of a committment to defense spending, than Republicans. Having said that, this is not the issue I usually have with the Democrats, it’s fiscal responsibility. Oddly, they have turned the tables on that as well in recent years.
The True Story of Audion. Panic has decided to retire Audion, a great little music player, which had much similarity to a version of WinAMP for the Mac OS, for those of you unfamiliar with it. This article is a great behind the scenes look at independent software development in the Mac OS market. It is also an interesting look into this particular market segment, and the things that happened behind the scenes. Apple wanted to buy Audion at least twice, and AOL also tried at one point. Finally, this article reveals something that those of us using their software already knew, that the guys at Panic are truly great guys, and that they do what they do for all the right reasons. If you are a Mac user, they are offering Audion as a free download. I own a license, bought before the iTunes Music Store, and I haven’t had the app installed on my machine in a while.
So Atlanta’s favorite Yankee was named Yankees' bench coach today. Mel and the Don are back too. Now the question is, who will the Yankees purchase this offseason for them to coach? Unquestionably, the Boss has to be a wee bit angry that the Red Sox sold their soul to the Dark Side of spend too, with much success. We don’t want a guy who refers to a baseball team as his daddy, I know that for certain. Even if he hangs out under a mango tree sometimes.
The big news in the iPod market today? You can, get this, order the much anticipated iPod Socks from the Apple Store. Please people, get some kind of grip, any kind, and then move on. Seriously, please….get grip.
Oh, and by the way, there are some pics from the New Orleans trip up on my Flickr space
I should mention that I am way behind in posting, and that there are a bunch of things I wanted to get up here in relation to the Macromedia conference, but haven’t had time to export from my brain. As far as today’s news, aside from the good news about GMail POP access reported by Mr. Hammersley and the hilarious “Thumb Drive”, the ever delightful matt pond PA are playing at the Echo Lounge here in Atlanta tonight.
Maeda Studio has some fantastic computer wallpapers based on food. You really have to go and look, very unconventional use of food as the basis.
Friends of the Beltline are having a fundraising event next weekend with food and a live band. I’m planning on going, drop me a line if you want to tag along.
So, I arrived in New Orleans (nola) this afternoon. Everything so far has been a little bit off kilter. First, my room wasn’t ready and I had to wait in the Executive Lounge for an hour before they had my room ready. Instead of a non-smoking room, which is what I asked for, I got a smoking room with the ash trays removed. This place smells awful. There is an Everquest Convention going on in the hotel I am making my temporary home. As a result, there are some odd looking folks, even odder than your normal computer convention crew, wandering the halls. In addition, the hotel’s in-room Internet service is being rendered downright unusable. I can only surmise that the bandwidth is being sucked up with hundreds of Everquest sessions going on, but doing anything even slightly Broadbandish is brutally slow. The result will be that any picture posting may have to wait until either their convention ends, or I can get to a faster, less logjammed connection.
In final hours, Bush mailings display images of burning World Trade Center (No matter who you support in the election, the use of these images for political purposes should be unacceptable to you. Personally, I would like the Bush Administration to apologize.)
Officlal Macromedia page for Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion. Lots of useful new features in this release, but probably the most interesting one they have revealed in these pages is Sourceless Deployment, which lets you distribute compiled Java bytecode versions of your applications. There are, of course, others, which I wish I could talk about, because they will allow App Developers to do things with ColdFusion/Java that just weren’t posssible before.
Well, clearly I should not have waited until today to advance vote. I arrived at the polling place at 7:30 am, half an hour after they opened the doors, to find a line of about 2500 people. I waited, with my seven new line friends, for six hours before I got to actually vote. The polling folks were very clearly unprepared for the turnout, with only 16 booths. I whipped through the touch screen voting process in about thirty seconds. I have now fulfilled my responsibility, and will now become a spectator. When I left the polling place around 1:30 pm, the line was longer than when I got there. (The polls also close at 7 pm, so if you do the math, some of those people are going to get shut out.) My feet hurt. Oh, and I don’t care who you vote for, but please vote. It’s a responsibility in addition to being a right. If I can wait in line six hours to make sure my ballot is cast, you can also take time to cast yours.
Things around the office have been really crazy this last couple of weeks for a variety of reasons. Reason number one is that it seems like tasks swell to whatever the current amount of available time is plus ten percent. Reason number two is that I am leaving town on Saturday and need to find a few hours before I leave to take advantage of Georgia’s new advance voting while still finishing out all of my team’s projects. Reason number three is that our office culture is one hundred eighty degrees opposed to one that fosters good development and specification processes. Features change, features are dropped, features are added, and while I do my best to keep things in check, I inevitably could do better. (That’s one that I have had to struggle with for the last 22 months, so I am not sure that it really counts.) Unfortunately, this means that I end up leaning rather heavily on those around me for support. We’ll see how this turns out, but Friday will, without a doubt, be a very interesting day.
Subtraction: When Losers Win I could not have said it better myself. Seriously.
Contrary to what you might expect from me, I am happy for the Red Sox and their fans. The imaginary curse has be obliviated, and the entire identity of that sports town is about to shift. No longer will they be able to cling to the “victim” status that they have defined themselves by for so long. Finally, this actually makes the whole Yankees/Red Sox thing a real rivalry. It’s not really a rivalry if one team wins all the time. Oh, and wait until next year:-)
Twice in the last two years to my delight, people who have disappeared from my life over time have re-appeared after finding my Web site doing a Google search for my unique last name. Most recently, a former college roomate and great friend who I lost touch with over the years commented on a post on my blog. However, he didn’t leave me any way to get back in touch with him. So Tyler, if you are reading this, send me an email at bumpnet – at – gmail – dot — com.
Just in time for my trip to New Orleans, where I will be staying at the Hilton, comes this report about issues with RSS Readers and the hotel’s ISP of choice. Great. I wonder if it’s too late to switch hotels. (via)
New template time. I got tired of looking at the other template, and found Binary Bonsai’s Kubrick via Flickr. I’ll be making more modifications moving forward, as this template set is a little more nimble than the previous one I was using, and includes the psd. Thanks to Michael Heilmann and Michael K. Pate for this handy resource.
This weekend, I am traveling a bit early to Macromedia MAX 2004. I would like to take some photographic walks while I am there, and if you have some hints for me to that effect, I would really appreciate them. Any further advice on traveling to New Orleans would also be welcome. If you are going to Max, and wanna hang out and have a drink, drop me a line. I will most probably be willing to buy you the first round.
It’s clear to me that with their announcement of a tool similar to Google’s desktop search, Microsoft continues to prove out their role as a copier of ideas. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I heard of a new product for consumers from MSFT that sounded innovative.
The WIRED Magazine Creative Commons CD arrived in my mailbox yesterday. Good stuff, with tracks from the Beasties, Thievery Corp. and Dangermouse, among others.
Well, clearly not our greatest day as Yankee fans today after the four game skip that ended with the Boston Red Sox celebrating at Yankee Stadium. First, my best to the Red Sox and Red Sox fans. The Red Sox showed an unbelievable will to win this series. Not only is the come back from three games to none unprecedented, they were close to out in both the fourth and fifth games, and came back to win both. The Yankees, despite losing the series, played well in all but the final game, in my opinion. They got beat by a better team, there is no doubt of that fact. Wait until next year:-)