Friends of the Beltline. This would be good for the city, no matter which way you dice it. Seriously.

I had been holding off on a new Powerbook for the last month or so. My first-generation 12 inch has been feeling a bit overcrowded from a resource and speed perspective recently, and I had been thinking that I would go up to the 15 inch. Apple, of course, updated their line this morning. I would buy another 12 inch, if they offered the Radeon video chipset for it because I love the form factor. They however, decided to limit the chipset to the NVidia. Time to start figuring out if I can afford the 15" that I want.

Kevin Byrd took a trip to the Atlanta Botonical Gardens over the weekend and took a lovely picture. I took my parents there a couple of weeks ago when they were in town. If you live in or visit Atlanta, I think that the gardens are a must see.

Well, it has been seven weeks since my last cigarette. I’ve executed on my game plan almost perfectly so far. I knew in advance how hard it would be, but until you are actually in the withdrawal symptoms, it is difficult to gauge just how hard they are to cope with. I accidentally went down a stage in the patch system two weeks early, and that may be what is causing some of my current discomfort, but I only have one more week of patches left. I will be very happy when this discomfort stage is over, and I am already feeling much better than I was a couple of weeks ago. I’ve managed, so far, to keep my weight gain to a minimum. I’m hoping that, as soon as I am through the extra hunger stage, that I can trim off the four pounds rapidly.

Well, here we go again. Tonight, the Yankees begin their regular season series with the most hated Red Sox. I predict that the Yankees will win ten out of the nineteen meetings during the regular season.

RIAA’s Nasty Easter Egg. Seriously, you have to be kidding me. Okay, let me give you an incentive to go back to “sharing” your MP3’s with your friends.

Cameron Childress, a good friend and longtime co-worker, has started a ColdFusion-centric blog. He is one of the top CF developers, in my opinion, making his site a must-read, assuming that he manages to stay focused and update it on a regular basis:-)

GUI Galaxy has returned, with a very nice modular redesign.

In other sports related news, Mike Mussina became the 100th big league pitcher to win 200 games yesterday.

Meg is not eating sushi anymore because they freeze the fish. I would submit that, if we knew everything that was done to our food before it made it’s way onto our plates and into our supermarkets, we would eat differently than we currently do. I, however, just love sushi.

Phil Mickelson won The 2004 Masters yesterday. For those of you who aren’t golf fans, Phil has for years been one of the best, and most consistent, golfers on the tour. He, however, had never won one of the four major championships. Last year, he had a bit of a rough year, but he has managed to come back strong this year. This weekend, at the Masters, he seemed like a different guy, and he finally pulled one out. I know that everyone on our team is extremely happy for him.

Torre gets extension This is great news, Joe Torre is the greatest Yankee manager of the modern era, and we are blessed to have him at the helm for three more years.

DNS Stuff: DNS tools, WHOIS, tracert, ping, and other network tools. Really useful web interface to DNS tools. (Thanks w00t.)

Claim vs. Fact: Condoleezza Rice’s Opening Statement Now granted, I like to think of myself as generally nonpartisan, and this is from an organization that skews pretty hard to the left, but this stuff does really bother me. It seems like this whole 9/11 commission thing has turned into this massive, awful, he said/he said/she said/Bush said/Clinton said thing. It’s all about ass-covering and grandstanding, and not about learning practical lessons from the tragedy. This does a disrespect to the the people who died, the city that was forever changed, and the rest of us, who would benefit from the lessons learned.

Lots of information about the upcoming Beastie Boys record, “To the 5 Boroughs.”

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary (via Disobey.com)

Gurus v. Bloggers, Round 1

CFMyAdmin is a ColdFusion based MySQL db management front end.

Music Recommendation System for iTunes (via JD)

Great 37 Signals post referencing a Chicago Tribune piece on Kanji tattoos and how they sometimes do not mean what the people who have them think they mean. I found this especially amusing since I have a tattoo of nine Kanji symbols on my right shoulder. Before I went to get the tattoo, I spent a whole day at a University library researching the symbols, and then special ordered a book for further research. I find it amazing that people would take something that they will have on their bodies for the rest of their lives so lightly. I’ve had my tattoo for almost ten years now, and I am as fond of it now as I was when I got it.

Great news for Guinness lovers. I enjoy a nicely poured Guinness from time to time. Lately, however, my beverage of choice has been Grey Goose and tonic water with a lime. I have moved away from the staple bourbon and coke that had been my drink of choice since the pre-awful ex-girlfriend era of the mid-nineties. Of course, I sort of decided to make some real changes this year, and changing my default beverage to match my new lack of nicotine inhalation addiction seemed to make good sense.

Hell yeah. Go Huskies. I’m happy for them, and they completely dominated GaTech. Listening to the radio here in Atlanta this morning, I don’t know if the local media are giving UConn enough credit. Now, if the UConn women can just pull it off tonight, they will make some history in collegiate athletics.

Five weeks since I quit smoking. It’s going to be a busy week with The Masters starting Thursday, so posting will be at a minimum.

I stepped down to the second stage nicotine patch yesterday, cutting my daily dosage of nicotine by one third in the process. This morning, I thought it would be interesting to gauge how severe my physical addiction is by attempting to not wear a patch at all. I got into the office on time, and we had a network issue that sucked up the first two hours of my day. During that time, I became grumpy, irritable, and even went so far as to snap on a couple of co-workers. Needless to say, I put the patch on almost immediately after that, and felt my grumpiness disappear. The moral of the story is that I have some ground to cover before I have the physical addiciton kicked. Still, I feel so much better. My breathing is clear, I can taste my food, and I am kicking it in the gym like I haven’t since college.

Kinja has launched, you can find my digest here. I haven’t had enough time to think about it yet, but at first blush, I prefer to use RSS for this sort of thing, mainly because I track hundreds of sites, not just five or six.

Update: Nick Denton, the boss over at Gawker, has a post about Kinja, the thinking behind it, and the intended target audience. He also explains that they were totally aware of the News reader explosion(RSS/Atom) when they decided to go down this road. He also sent me a link to his digest, which is subscribed to over 600 sites. I maintain that this won't be a good tool for following that many sites unless one is able to keep refreshing and checking that page. On the other hand, for the audience that would be interested in following fewer sites, this seems like it could be a good graphical tool without having to search for the rss feed, which is on a different part of seemingly every blog that doesn't have automagical discovery enabled. Another feature that could end up making it a lot more useful would be the ability to create multiple digests under a single account. Then one could create small subject specific blogs for each area that one follows. Still, I am obviously not the target user for a system like this. I wonder however, if my mother is, or my less technical siblings.