Rating Bar puts a small iTunes star rating widget in your menu bar, making it easy to rate your music. I currently use the keyboard commands in Synergy to do this same thing and more(displays album artwork at the beginning of a new song, and provides play etc controls). It got me to thinking that it might be useful to list the ones that I use here for other folks to check out.

So those are the first two from left to right. The third one is BluePhoneMenu. It adds a menu with Signal and Battery strength for your Bluetooth enabled and supported phone (I have the Sony Ericcson T61x.) It also does on screen call notification, which is quite handy if you are a headphone wearing fool like myself.

Fourth from the left is the ubiquitous Quicksilver. I'll save everyone yet another description of this invaluable utility. Next to it is SlimBatteryMonitor which saves me some screen real estate on the menu bar for more utilities without taking away the functionality of the Apple battery monitor.

Next to that is the excellent, donationware, Menu Calendar. It gives me the current date without any hassles, access to a monthly calendar, and easy access to iCal. The rest are all Apple provided ones, Airport, Displays, Applescript, Security, Bluetooth, and Sound.

Got any that you can't live without that I missed? That's what the comments are for baby!!

Ben gives a brief state of the platform comment, and then asks for feedback.

Well, in addition to relaunching Blogger, Google launched a Google Blog. Oddly, Evan signs his first post inside of the post itself, and it appears that they have turned off attribution in the posted/permalink section of each post. I’m guessing that this means we won’t have any idea who posted things unless they want us to know:-)

hymn – Hear Your Music aNywhere: “The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.”

Mark and Sarah Foo are engaged. They are both great, and even better together.

In an effort to go completely overboard with Blogger relaunch stuff and get it out of my system, I now link to Blogger’s RSS Decision: Atom Only. I completely agree with Dan about this. It’s worth mentioning that Blogger’s claim, that different XML syndication formats are problematic for their application, is a load of crap. Forget for a moment the server farm argument that Dan presents in his opinion piece, and consider how Blogger works at a core level. They take post information, which is stored in a relational database, and then push that information through a publishing engine, which grabs your custom template and pushes your structured post information into that template in pre-defined locations. So they are already storing millions of different output formats (everyone’s templates), and publishing information through all of them, but they can’t support two xml outputs at the same time? If this is the case, they might want to revisit their application architecture. If you have an argument against something technical, present that argument, but don’t raise some fud argument that any reasonable, semi-technical person can see through. As a former Pro user, I can still publish good old rss. However, I cannot publish both RSS and Atom at the same time, and this irks me.

Whitespace has a comparison: Blogger vs. TypePad. Acts of Volition has some Thoughts on Template Design of the new “rockstar” designed templates. PB, who was one of the OG Blogger folks, has some thoughts about the lack of evolution of Blogging tools/entry interfaces.

Stopdesign has the skinny on the Blogger rework from an interface perspective. There is also a Blogger article about the rework from their side of the project.

Blogger Developers Network: “we have rolled out beta support for the Atom API. This means a more robust API for you to use in creating new blogging applications.”

Engadget: Sony’s 1TB digital video recorder with seven TV tuners. Wow, I don’t think that there are ever more than two or three shows I would want to watch at one time.

After ten weeks of wearing nicotine patches and managing to remain smoke free, today marks the beginning of my “flying without a net,” so to speak. I’m ready for it, and I am going to make it this time. As far as the effects of being smoke free, I feel much better. Not that it has been easy, it hasn’t. I’ve gained a few pounds, and I’m not happy about that aspect of my cessation.

I’m messing with the new Blogger, design might change a bit over the next few days.

I think that I need to think less and do more. I’m not sure where the idea got into my head, but the phrase “You will be judged on your output” seems to be stuck in my head. It occurs to me that my output is very low right now, but that the amount of effort going into that output is very high. It seems as if I could generate much more output from the same amount of effort. Odd that.

Say Hi To Maple Dorothy Congrats to you both.

Dan Gillmor: How a Nation Forfeits its Meaning I feel like plausible deniability is being asserted by the administration, and it is the same kind of slickness that the same group of neo-conservatives who are now such staunch supporters of GW complained about during the Clinton administration. The difference this time is that peoples lives, and everything our country stands for, are at risk. Bush and Rumsfeld are in charge, and, if they are not, then shame on them for that instead and in addition to these atrocities. I can’t believe that people are not more outraged by this whole incident. It goes against the very moral core of this country to do stuff like this. I’m embarrassed, frankly, and I would like to see the people responsible for this be punished severely to send a message. As this year goes on, the Bush administration continues to do a fantastic job of driving moderates like myself towards the other party. Mistakes happen, but it’s the slick nature of their response to mistakes that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. See also: The Misunderestimated Man.

Wilco has a preview of their new CD, A ghost is born, up on their site. It’s due to be released on June 22nd. I was pretty disappointed that they cancelled their set at Coachella, but considering the circumstances, there wasn’t much else they could do.

Based on this post it looks like Blogger is about to unveil a new version. No details of what this new version might entail beyond a redesign and “additional features”, but they haven’t released a major version since Google bought them.

I’ve been meaning to mention that my brother Chris' most recent band, Husky, has their debut EP up on the iTunes Music Store. (iTMS link) Check it out, “Jukebox” seems to be the song that is turning people’s heads.

MLB is putting the Spiderman logo on bases and pitching rubbers? That is messed up. Where do you draw the line? Personally, as a lifelong baseball junkie, I am mortified by this decision. This, in my mind, was what seperated baseball and football from NASCAR. Update: The Yankees are refusing to go along with MLB’s plan. Good for them, like I said previously, you have to draw the line somewhere.

Back from Coachella. I really enjoyed it. More on that later.

Mark comments on the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan . In this age of the bling bling and atheletes who seem more interested in “getting theirs” than anything else, Pat Tillman did what he thought was right. Having said that, my thoughts are with his family, as they are with the families of all the servicemen that we have lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gmail Gems (Hints and tips for Gmail users.)

Roger Ebert reviews Shaolin Soccer.

The Onion A.V. Club interviews the brilliant Ricky Gervais from the BBC’s “The Office.”

Apparently, this guy wants a gMail account. I just got one through the generosity of the blogger.com folks. Nothing to report yet. Oh, and I did not lie to that guy, nor is that a picture of me.