One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in others' coverage of Devcon was the presence of Wi-Fi throughout the conference area. Macromedia had set up at least two Cisco wireless routers, as far as I could tell from using my Stumbler, that covered most of the session rooms even for my range limited TiBook. During the General Sessions, I discovered that other people using Mac OS X 10.2 were logged into the network and had their iChat apps launched with Rendezvous enabled. This meant that we all had the ability to discuss the keynotes with other people who were in the room without actually having to know who else in the room had a laptop and wi-fi. This was very interesting to me, even though the actual communications weren’t terribly useful this time.
A busy weekend on the heels of my trip to Orlando. Friday night, I got a chance to see one of the most innovative DJ’s I have ever heard, Z-Trip. He mixes music that you would never expect to hear a dj mix, and I think you just might have to see it to believe it. Saturday night, it was a Halloween party where the four amigos were the life of the party. Sunday, another trip to the Georgia Dome to see the Falcons win followed by the chance to see a friend perform some hilarious inventive comedy. The moral of the story is that I am trying very hard to stay busy, with limited success. The quick back story is that things ended recently between the woman I have been dating for the last seven years and I. Try as I might, I can’t stop thinking about her, missing her, mourning what has been lost, and wondering where life is going to take me now. I know that, with time, the pain I am in right now will pass, but while my mind is ready to move on, my heart just isn’t yet. It’s very sad. I thought that going away to Orlando would help me take my mind off things. Somehow I managed to forget that the last couple of times I have been there for pleasure it has been with her. It seemed that, everywhere I went, memories kept popping out.
Back from Macromedia Devcon, and I do believe my brain is somewhat full. I am also still a little tired. The show was good, and a very welcome distraction to everything else that has been going on in my life.
As I prepared for tomorrow’s roadtrip, I unwrapped a new 20 Gb iPod. Apple has really done a nice job of enhancing the second generation iPod’s. The most amazing thing is just how much music fits on this thing. It’s taking me quite a long time to sift through my library and put all of the music on the iPod mainly because I am doing it manually. I couldn’t do it automatically because the machine that I am attaching this iPod to has more than 20 Gb of music on it:-)
There is one song from the forthcoming audioslave cd up on their Web site. In case you aren’t familiar with audioslave, they are the musicians from Rage Against the Machine fronted by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden fame. Might be your thing, or it might not, but I am enjoying it quite a bit.
Yesterday, I went to see The Atlanta Falcons play for the first time this season. All I can say is that Michael Vick is an incredible athlete. Seeing him play gives me the same feeling that I got watching Michael Jordan early in his career. He is capable of things that no other player at his position can physically do. I really think, if he can stay healthy, that his career will be one that raises the Falcon franchise to a whole new level.
Today’s my birthday! That last sentence should not have an exclamation point at the end of it. The older I get, the less my birthday actually feels like my birthday instead of just another day. I don’t mean this in some depressing, bitter, or jaded way, it’s just an observation.
The new Jurassic 5 cd, Power in Numbers, is really good. It brings me back to the early nineties Strong Island stuff. Cut Chemist and Nu Mark do a fantastic job on the production front, which I thought was the weakest part of the last J5 release. Do yourself a favor, put down the Eminem cd, and pick this one up.
Alan Cooper: 14 Principles of Polite Apps (thanks Adam)
“Then one day, one will forget, then the other. One day, no one will know.” - Beneath Autumn Sky
A bunch of us went to the Atlanta Thrashers' home opener last night. I had a great time, despite the loss in overtime to Florida. I definitely plan on going to more games this year, but I can’t believe how expensive tickets are. We had decent seats, and they cost $60 each. That means that it cost the family of four sitting in front of me $240 to attend before snacks or anything else. I really think that pro sports have gotten out of control. After the game, Joan Jett played on the ice. She sounded great.
On a related note to the post below, I think that, due to the community aspects of blogging, it would be possible to write a piece of software that generated conversations that could occur between various bloggers when they meet and talk. Not that bloggers as a group are limited in topics of discussion, but that, knowing a particular blogger, and their daily surf lists it is possible to figure out both their general interests are and what their inputs have been over the last few days. You could use a pattern algorithm to then match the inputs and interests between the group, and probably accurately predict what the topics of conversation would be. This comes from having the sorts of conversations that I expected to have with Todd and Nathan.
The Flash Turntable that Todd put up today is cool, and he was telling Nathan and I about it at dinner last night. The complexity of it is far deeper than you might imagine, it accurately tracks where the needle should be based on the length of the track.
I will be attending the Fusebox Developers Conference and Macromedia DevCon 2002
October 26-30 in Orlando and blogging, of course, both here and over at cfblog.
Sadly, I cannot count eating soup as one of the things that I do gracefully.
Last night, I went to our monthly Interactive Media Alliance meeting, which featured three members of the Cartoon Network Web Team based out of Atlanta. They talked about their site, team, community, and process. It was interesting to hear them talk about their redesign that launched over the summer, how they are building community through the use of their Orbit system, and especially the animation process they go through to get hand drawn animation into Flash. The one single thing that struck me is how much careful planning seemed go to into their community development. They even enlisted the help of an economics professor to help them design their “points” system. Unfortunately, there was no Samurai Jack swag to be had.
Some people I like a lot, others, not so much.
Last night, I was re-organizing my living room(nothing like a little cleaning to help you get over that cruel woman.) I was moving all of my DVD’s onto the sizable mantle in my living room. I can’t believe what poor judgement I have shown in the past when purchasing movies. Among the many classics in my DVD collection, there seems to be no shortage of absolutely awful films. Why I would have purchased this garbage is currently beyond me.
Make no mistake, I am merciless.
eWeek: Microsoft Adds XDocs to Office Family There is this quote from one of the beta testers of XDocs on the first page of the article; “The validation capability within XDocs enables us to check our data against criteria that we have set, improving the accuracy of data entry.” I don’t see how this would be a selling point for a product. We already have an easy to build form mechanism that allows us to validate against virtually any criteria imaginable, it’s called a Web page. In my current project, we are replacing a company’s legacy ERP system, which does everything from supply chain management to accounting, with a browser based system. ERP systems are form intensive, believe me, I should know as I have been developing an application module for the last two weeks that has hundreds of unique pieces of data related to a single item. So I am unable to grasp what sort of value this XDocs product delivers to Microsoft’s customer base. We already have tight Web/Database integration through several middleware products, you take your pick, and virtually all of them have solid XML support now. I just don’t get it. Why solve a problem that already has a fantastic solution? (Microsoft XDocs Page is here.)
I guess I was a little dramatic with yesterday’s post. I’m okay, everyone around me is okay. I’m just going through a rough period in terms of my affairs of the heart, and that is not stuff I want to or should discuss in this forum at a detail level. At the same time, I think it’s good to remind people every once in a while how important this stuff is. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the trenches of day to day life. The stakes with this stuff is usually pretty high, at least it is with me at this point in my life. I will now attempt to return to the regularly scheduled inane postings about other stuff.
I don’t really know what to post here right now. Normally, I’d be posting some comments about the Yankees season ending the earliest it has in a few years, or making some comment about a piece of software. This morning, all I can think of is how important love is in our lives, and how sad circumstances can be sometimes. It’s necessary in this life to treat every day of your relationships with urgency and with care because you really never know what will happen tomorrow.
Test post
Angels vs. Yankees Here we go again.
I should have mentioned by now that NetNewsWire Lite has become one of my favorite Mac OS X applications. I’m looking forward to the release of the Pro version so I can reward Brent for his work on this beast. I’m also looking forward to the additions he mentioned for the Pro version, including a notepad feature and Blogger API support.