Ulaanbaatar is an RSS reader in development for the hiptop. Sweet.

Back from Florida, and a bit preoccupied and tired. I just love my TiVo.

In other good news, the softball team that I have been playing on for the last three seasons turned a major corner last night, winning against a team that had previously dominated us. Team Bad Guy also clinched at least a .500 record for the season. Personally, I had a great game, although my hitting this season has been tepid at best, but I went 3 for 4 with four RBI’s and a couple of runs scored. After the game, I felt better than I have felt in a few days. Winning has a way of doing that. It’s a funny thing that, you have to learn to win, and believe that you can win, and I think we finally have managed to get to the point where we do believe.

Getting ready today to head out on a one day business trip to Florida to do some end user training on the content management system we use on the site. I don’t travel much for work these days, and this will only be the second business only trip of the year for me. Now that I’ve gotten a bit more settled into a routine, and my house, I don’t enjoy the business travel thing nearly as much as I used to in the whole boom era. A one day trip like this is a nice precision strike though, and I will be back in time for this weekends festivities, which look to be very interesting, so no complaints here.

Oh this is cool: Don Mattingly is the Yankees new hitting coach. They are making Luis Sojo the new 1st base coach and Willie Randolph is moving into Zimmer’s spot in the dugout.

You ever get to a point where you are wrestling with one of life’s bigger issues, and you have a strong feeling about where you are going to end up at the end of the struggle? You, however, have to live with the percolation that results in your ending up in a place that you know you are going to end up. Otherwise, you won’t have the level of commitment to the general life philosophy that comes from the struggle. There is a sweet relief in the end of a struggle with yourself, where you point yourself in a single minded direction and continue on with this new idea or ideal in mind. I wish I didn’t have to wait to get there, but boy is it gonna be worth it when I do.

Slashdot: Neil Gaiman Responds

What an odd, and, at times, disturbing weekend. Halloween was a great time, I dressed up as the Pope. Had a great lunch and caught up with a friend on Saturday, and it was all downhill after that. Spent most of the day today moping around the house. Now I am watching football, and waiting for the Falcons to unravel the way my weekend did.

San Diego County wildfires are out of control. So much so that they had to move the Monday Night Football game to Arizona. My thoughts are with the people of Southern California today.

It has been well documented that it is a copy of the excellent Mac OS X utility Launchbar, but, for Windows XP users, AppRocket is a fantastic tool for launching applications and documents. Having it on my Sony laptop has made my day today. In addition to providing the functionality that Launchbar users might expect, the author has taught it a couple of new tricks, including the ability to read MP3 files' ID3 tags. Every song in my music library is now only a few key clicks away. If you are a Windows user, and are unfamiliar with Launchbar, I recommend downloading AppRocket and trying it out. It requires the .NET framework.

I’m also quite addicted to The Believer.

I’ve really been enjoying Pages Magazine the last couple of months. The most recent issue, with the Steve Martin cover story, is especially good.

Dive into OS X: What’s New in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther

Economist.com: The future of energy: “What then is the best way to speed things up? Unfortunately, not through the approach currently advocated by President George Bush and America’s Congress, which this week has been haggling over a new energy bill. America’s leaders are still concerning themselves almost exclusively with increasing the supply of oil, rather than with curbing the demand for it while increasing the supply of alternatives.”

Elliot Smith killed himself? Damn, checking my iTunes play counter, two of the top five most listened to songs on my laptop are Elliot Smith songs. I was originally turned on to Elliot by Jack Saturn, as far as I remember, when we worked together. He was a masterful song writer, in my opinion, and yet another terrible loss. I’m never going to know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow.

My six day absence was caused by a variety of factors, but mainly the fact that I have been way behind with some of my household chores. I spent a good chunk of the weekend cleaning my house up, and yesterday I had to take the day off to wait for the HVAC guy, and in the meantime I shredded two garbage bags full of old paperwork, receipts and credit card statements. It feels good to get rid of the old, and I plan on dropping a carload of stuff off at Salvation Army this weekend. I also managed to read a couple of books.

CENTRAL APPS is a community site devoted to Macromedia Central applications.

A List Apart has redeisgned and relaunched.

In case you are living under a rock, iTunes for Windows. We tried it out in the office this afternoon as soon as it was available for download. Pertty neat stuff. Decent sized download(19+ Mb), I am guessing because it includes Quicktime 6.4. Being able to include our Windows using bretheren in our office music sharing pool will be a huge plus, as it supports the sharing(streaming) of music libraries between platforms. As far as I can tell, the only mistake that Apple seems to have made is screwing people who bought first and second generation iPods. The redesigned iTunes Music Store is also quite nice. I like the addition of audio books, although I doubt I will be using that feature much. I think I will do another write up on the celebrity playlists, but they are an interesting idea that seems very well implemented. Finally, Apple is including a lot more liner note information on the albums available. That was one of the things that bothered me the most about the previous version of the iTunes Music Store.

I’m old, but I am younger than I will be someday.