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.

Today marks one month without a smoke.

Achoo!

Todd, apparently after being hipped by Nate, hipped me to Quicksilver. If you have used Launchbar, you get the general idea, but this app is even better. Nicer interface, more functionality, and (currently) free. Worth a looksee if you are a Mac OS X user.

I’m guessing, based on Xeni Jardin’s list of RSS readers at the bottom of this Wired article, that she is a Win32 user. It wouldn’t have been too hard to mention one Mac OS X RSS reader.

I’m now at 23 days without a cigarette. It got a lot easier after the first week, and has remained at about the same level of difficulty since then. At the end of this week, I step down to the next level of nicotine patch. I suspect that will be the next hard part, as I have gotten used to the cravings and have relearned how to weather them when they strike.

I’m back from a very enjoyable week off from my everyday life. I completely unplugged, and played golf almost every day while I was in Florida. I returned to overflowing inboxes, a ton of snail mail and a house and yard that are in need of my attention. I, however, remain relaxed for the moment. Oh, and my golf game improved substantially.

halfass: The Jay Z Industry and the Sound Of A Paradigm Shift I have nothing to add.

Heh, we drove by this church sign yesterday on our way to grab some brunch, and one of the people in my car started a whole conversation about the movie because of the sign. Pretty funny to then find it in my RSS Reader this morning.

I had quite a good weekend, Spring is here in Atlanta, and we’re making the most of it. I’m still smoke free, one week in and it is starting to get easier. I’ve had a lot of support from my family and friends, and that’s made a huge difference. My fears about going out to bars were confirmed, but since the weather was so nice, we managed to stay outside on patios, which helped substantially. Yesterday, I went and bought a set of golf clubs for this season. I managed to buy everything except for the putter used, and that saved me a lot of money. Now I just have to get out there and start improving.

Well, I’ve made it to Friday smoke free. It has been pretty rough at times, but I feel really peaceful about things right now. My moodiness hasn’t been nearly as bad I remember it being during previous quit attempts. I’m chalking that up to a combination of my emotional maturity level being higher, and the fact that I am more hard nosed in terms of my quitting mental state. I think the first time that I quit, when I made it a full year before relapsing, I was equally as positive about my desire to quit. The relapse was a moment of mental weakness involving alcohol, and I’ve decided that, instead of avoiding social drinking situations as I did when I quit that time, I’m going to go ahead and put myself in those situations throughout the quitting process because I think that will help me to develop the mental hardness necessary to stay quit months from now. I’m still a bit scared of being in those situations over the next few weeks, this weekend should be an interesting study in how strong my desire is.

Ars Technica: Increase your memory capacity with mental exercise

I’ve been using OmniGraffle Professional quite a bit the last couple of days as I architect a medium sized application that I am currently working on. It’s a fantastic, easy to use application that even a design impaired developer can use to produce nice looking diagrams. There are a couple of Stencils that I have found invaluable that I thought I would point out in case readers weren’t aware of them. For mapping out page content and forms, Charles Parcell’s Wireframe Palette makes specing out page wireframes a very fast and very adaptable process. For mapping out page application flow and technology, I have been using Toxic Toy’s Web Flowchart.

Yanks-Red Sox feud to resume on national TV On April 16th, it’s on.

Day two was much worse than day one. The cravings were pretty bad during the day at work. I went to see the Lakers play the Hawks last night. We had a couple of beers during the game, which didn’t seem to make matters worse, which is surprising to me. Afterwards a nice late supper at a local brewpub, where I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. It was a nice night. The cravings got much worse at the end of the night, and I felt relieved to wake up this morning knowing that I weathered the storm. Usually, day three has been the worst day for me when quitting, but so far, it hasn’t been that bad. We’ll see as the afternoon wears on. I’ve been working very hard to adapt my mental toolset to deal with the mindgames necessary to convince myself that the cravings will subside.