mark notes The Onion’s link policy. This is especially odd to me considering the fact that most of what drives traffic to The Onion must be links that point out how funny certain headlines and articles are. I’ve probably linked to articles on their site hundreds of times over the last five years. I also have had them in my link box since the first version. Guess that is going to have to change now. It’s a shame really.
Jeremy Allaire has created something called Audio Blogger. Worth a look for sure. I’m not sure, however, about his use of Blogger in the name, I thought that was the name of a commercial product already.
I was thinking this morning about stories from my life, small experiences that changed me and have stuck with me which, from the outside, might not seem that important in the grand scheme of things. For some reason, something that happened to me in junior high school popped into my mind. Oddly, I can’t figure out why, because I don’t think it taught me anything that I refer to daily. It was my eighth grade year, and I was in science class. We were studying Centrifugal force. Mr. Sagnella, my science teacher, was my favorite teacher. He asked for someone to come to the front of the class to help him with the demonstration. I volunteered. I went up to the front of the class, and he handed me a bucket full of water. To demonstrate the power of the force, I was to spin the bucket around. No water would come out of the bucket due to the centrifugal force. No water that is, until the bucket attempted to occupy the same space at the same time as the 100 gallon fishtank that was directly behind me. The tank shattered, the bucket went flying, and I stood at the center where the force of the water from the fishtank and the remaining water in the bucket met. Needless to say, I was “that kid who shattered the fishtank” for several months. In my professional life, I don’t think I’ve ever given a presentation or demo that has gone worse. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time I get up to speak in public.
Apple, IBM Team on 64-Bit CPU “Apple is testing the CPU, dubbed the GigaProcessor Ultralite (GPUL) on Mac OS X-based hardware” Who names this stuff?
I’ll be at the Atlanta Blog MEETUP tonight. If you are in Atlanta, stop by and say hello.
Nokia doesn’t like warchalking? I’m not surprised. (via 802.11b News)
eWeek: Apple Folds in Mac OS 9 Group. While this is the end of an era, a goodbye to a friend, I don’t feel particularly sad about Mac OS 9’s passing. I removed Mac OS 9 from my machine when I installed Jaguar. All of the applications I use on a daily basis have made the jump now, and Mac OS X is completely superior to Mac OS 9 in terms of both performance on the same hardware and stability. The addition of the chewy Unix underpinnings, and the software that has accompanied it, has actually meant that I am also using my Windows laptop less and less as well. If you use the Mac OS, I urge you to embrace the winds of change rather than fight them. You won’t be sorry, I promise.
A rainy day here today. There’s something about rainy days that makes taking a nap more pleasurable, and I took full advantage this afternoon. I also spent some time today going through the pictures from my trip to Nova Scotia and Maine last month. What beautiful country it is up there. There are a bunch of new links posted on kungfumaster.
I’m not exactly certain what happened to my copy of Radio, but it got out of synch with my Blogger entries somehow in July. I figured that I would have time at some point to troubleshoot the problem, but it has lingered on for a while. Today, suddenly, things started working again. Very odd. In other site news, I’m shopping for a new hosting company, and I think I’ve decided to go with Media Temple. They offer Cold Fusion MX hosting on Linux, which is what I desire. My current hosting company is living in the stone ages, and inertia has been my foe in leaving them. So Radio Bump is being updated again, as is my RSS file, although both will be missing the posts from July and August. As far as I can tell, the only way for me to get those posts into Radio will be to re-import everything.
Wow, this Flash E-R diagramming tool is amazing. The kind of real time collaboration that is possible with this kind of technology is going to change the way people work.
Battle of the Flash Text Editor Components. This has been something that I have wanted to have access to for a while, but I am just not far enough up to speed with Flash MX to do it for myself yet. Definitely something I will be keeping my eye on moving forward. (via Jeremy Allaire’s Weblog)
I was shopping last night at MicroCenter, and I didn’t find the firewire drive enclosure that I was looking for. I didn’t end up puchasing anything, which is rare for me. I was in the magazine and book section when my cell phone rang, and it was one of the programmers that I am currently working with (for the sake of amusement, we’ll refer to him as Baron Von Big Head.) Baron Von Big Head was at a Barnes and Noble here in Atlanta, and had picked up a book named We Blog. He asked if I had ever heard of the book and was quite excited to tell me that bump.net was not only mentioned in the book, but that, on page 62 of the book, there was even a screen capture of bump.net used as an example. Wow, that’s incredibly cool, and I’m not certain I’ve done anything to deserve it.. It’s especially cool because I have so much respect for Matt, Meg, and Paul. All three of them are impressive people, both online and in person. Thanks.
Johnny Unitas died yesterday of a heart attack while working out.
I migrated my TiBook over to Mac OS 10.2 last week. It took longer than normal because I wanted to reformat the hard drive and that meant backing everything up and then having to re-install everything. This was complicated by the fact that my MS Office V.X CD is AWOL, and I’m going to have to order another one I guess. I’m finding Jaguar to be faster in all the right places, and with so many improvements that I wouldn’t even try to go into them here. I’m also using the just released iCal, despite reports on the Web that it is buggy, and the complaints that they forgot to offer the Canadian holidays, I think it’s well done, especially for a first effort. Some of the data entry stuff is not as intuitive as I would normally expect. For instance, there is no way to attach any kind of note to a To Do task. Normally, my to do items need additional information with them in order for me to get them done, and I like putting that stuff together when I enter them.
Lottery oddness in New York yesterday. Strange ending to the S&P Futures index yesterday.
Remember
The return of regular season NFL football last night was a welcome diversion for me. Despite the fact that my Giants lost, the game gave me new hope that the squad will be better this year, especially with the addition of Jeremy Shockey. It definitely opened the door for the rest of the pass offense, and Amani Toomer’s numbers bear that out. I submit that the game was lost due to the calling of the prevent defense, and bad clock management in the fourth quarter. My co-worker argues that the Giants lost the game because they scored fewer points than the 49ers.
I have a huge Pecan tree in my backyard. Pecan trees bear nuts every other year, and over the last month it has been consistently dropping nuts. About half of them drop right onto the roof of my house, making quite a bit of noise in the process, and another quarter of them seem to find their way into my pool, which is a total pain in the ass. Unfortunately, the tree is a little too close to my house for comfort. Pecan trees have this habit of dropping limbs, and with the size of the tree, I’m concerned that this could cause some major damage to my domicile. So I’m now torn between finding a way to keep the old man around, and just removing the tree altogether. I guess we’ll find out this afternoon, when the tree expert comes out to have a look. It doesn’t look good for the old man though.
This trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie, Comedian, is just hilarious. (Thanks Nathan)
Ken Bereskin continues to provide excellent commentary on new Jaguar features on his Weblog.
Arstechnica reviews Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. I’ve really enjoyed reading their previous reviews of the Mac OS X releases, and this review is no exception. I found the section on Rendezvous especially informative.
Welcome to September. My Labor day weekend? Good, a bit shorter than I wanted it to be. When I wasn’t waiting forever to get my sushi order and watching my friends being insulted by a sushi chef after waiting too long, I was installing Jaguar, attending one day of Dragoncon and wondering where the summer months went to. Last night, I was eliminated from a game of Risk in record time due to a combination of bad rolling and poor strategy. Well, I know I owe this site a write up of my excellent adventures in Nova Scotia and Maine, and I hope to get to that as soon as I finish the massive job of clean installing all of my apps on my TiBook.
So I’m now back at work after a fantastic ten day trip to Maine and Nova Scotia. If you sent me an email or voice message over the last week, it may take me a day or two to get back to you. All I can say is that I loved Nova Scotia. It’s a great place to take a vacation and the countryside is beautiful and unmolested. There are plenty of great outdoor activities, and we did a bunch of them. I’ll write more about this later tonight, and I’ll be putting some pictures up as well. I loved Maine nearly as much, but it’s a bit more touristy and built up.
Today’s post is brought to you via a free Wi-Fi network in the hotel I am staying at in Portland, Maine. I’m having a great trip here in Maine so far. We spent the first two days at an inn by Poland Springs, and have now moved on to Portland for a couple of days. We went to see the local minor league baseball team, the Portland Sea Dogs, play this afternoon, and oddly the starting pitcher was named Nate Bump. Well, I’m off to dinner, but I thought I would throw something up here since I have the access.