I’m currently watching the NCAA Lacrosse Semi-finals. It’s such a great sport. I really don’t understand why it hasn’t taken off more. I enjoy watching it more than virtually all of the professional sports that I’m a fan of. I have to admit that I played, and that I have a brother who plays, and that probably makes a huge difference in my level of interest.
Google is a fickle beast. I’m now in the fifties of a search for Robert.
Wow, out of over 25 million pages, I’m in the top fifteen Roberts listed on Google. I wonder what I need to do to get myself up in the top ten?
Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’ coming to screen This might be the best Science Fiction book ever written in my opinion. I’ve wondered why it had never been made into a movie, actually even out loud a couple of weeks ago. Between Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Matrix movies and all the comic book movies that have/are being made, we might just be in the golden age of science fiction/fantasy movies. I wonder which of the major cyberpunk works will be the first to be made into a major motion picture. I haven’t heard much about the Neuromancer movie that was being made lately. I would also love to see Snowcrash made into a movie someday, but it will be a very tough book to do justice to in a film.
It looks as if I’m going to be way too busy during the day to update, so I’m resolved to get a morning post in before I go to work starting tomorrow. It was, like most first days, both exciting and somewhat boring at times. I can tell that I am going to extend the limits of my skillset while building these applications. Now, I’m off to reward myself with a coffee while I clean the pool.
I start a new contract gig tomorrow. Web application development using high end SQL Server stuff and Cold Fusion. After the longish layoff, I’m really looking forward to building stuff again.
I’ve been a magazine addict for most of my life. I especially like discovering new magazines. I think that this is part of what made the Web so attractive to me initially. ReadyMade has to be the most amusing new magazine I’ve come across in a long time. I loved the first issue, and the second issue is out now. I would describe it as the magazine that Martha Stewart would come out with if she was actually cool and if she had a sense of humor about things. You should find this magazine, and then read it.
Xbox Live will cost $50 a year. Seems like a reasonable price to me. Especially with Star Wars Galaxies coming to the console. I think that Sony and Nintendo are leaving open the backdoor to the game market by neglecting this particular part of the console market. It’s a dangerous mistake in my opinion that may cost the entrenched companies their markets.
Well, I’m back today after a fun weekend in Northern California with my main squeeze. It was a short trip for the amount of flying involved, but I’d never been to Monterey and Carmel before. I enjoyed both, but liked Carmel much more, it’s less trashy and touristy, although it is still quite touristy. Today, I’m recovering from flying back on the redeye.
The chipmunk suicides continue. I estimate the death toll on my local chipmunk population at 12 or 13 now. This afternoon, I went out back to skim the pool, and floating in the middle of my pool was a baby chipmunk clinging to one of the pool noodles for dear life. I’m not sure how long he had been floating there, but he seemed like he had been there a while. I fished him out and dried him off, hopefully he will have learned a valuable lesson that many of his peers never learned: stay way from the ocean in the middle of the backyard.
Attack of the Clones was incredible. I won’t spoil anything here, but I heartily endorse it. As anyone who has been reading this site since 1997 or 1998 knows, I’m quite the Yoda fan, and his role in this movie was fantastic. This movie was much much better than the last one. I can only imagine how much this movie will gross at the box office. Update: Well, I slept off my midnight movie hangover, and now I’m reading what others thought of this movie. I’m really surprised at the mixed reviews this movie got. It was fun, it didn’t take itself too seriously, and it seems like a lot of other folks are taking it too seriously. I almost think that there is no way that George Lucas can win on the review front. On the other hand, there is almost no way he can lose on the dollar front, and what do you suppose is more important to him?
Yesterday, Dave was complaining(sort of) about the Smart Business interview he did. Today, Ziff Davis shuttered Smart Business magazine.
Fig Leaf is hosting a new Dreamweaver MX mailing list. The other lists that they host are really high quality in my experience with the right people from both the community and Macromedia being active.
What do you get when you combine an Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System (8-bit), Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2, and a Windows PC? You get Yoshi’s Boxx.
I couldn’t agree with what Joel said about RealNames more. I can remember the first time I met someone from the company, at an Internet Advertising conference in New York, I couldn’t believe that this was actually something that a company was doing. The fact that they spent $100 million trying to replace the existing Domain name system with a proprietary pay as you go one of their own serves them right. I can only imagine how many interesting businesses with real useful products could have been created with that money.
Apple: Xserve Wow. They really are going after the business market. Might as well, it would be a lot easier to run one of these as a Web server co-located than just about anything else.
I watched The Phantom Menace tonight with some friends before we go to see Attack of the Clones this week. I can’t believe how much more I dislike that movie with repeated viewings. Every time that Jar Jar talks, I cringe. Throughout this viewing, all I could think about was Jar Jar’s complete lack of relevance to the plot of the movie. In a way, it’s a good thing. By watching this annoying movie, I managed to lower my expectations for Wednesday night.
“Well Known” TCP and UDP Ports Used By Apple Software Products Quite a useful document to have around. (via Mac OS X Hints)
Location X Is a version of the very important and useful Location Manager for Mac OS X. For years, the location manager was, in my opinion, what made the classic Mac OS a better laptop OS than the various MSFT OSes. I’ve missed it. I couldn’t understand why Apple would leave something that was this valuable out of their new operating system when they rely so much on laptop sales now. I hope they do step up in a future version of the OS, but this will do for now.
infoSync : PocketPCs get even friendlier with Macs Sounds as if PocketMac is really getting there in terms of feature set.
Oh, and for the record, I know that the layout over at Radio Bump is broken. Having problems getting the calendar in the third column without it collapsing into the second column. Who said CSS positioning is easy? Feel free to comment over there if you think you know how to fix it:-)
Sites of note in the referrer logs this week include chrisruzin.net, the Atlanta Design List, and widepipe.org.
On the subject of add ons for iTunes, iTunes Remote is a fantastic shareware add on that gives you a control window in any application and also lets you control a copy of iTunes across the network. I heartily recommend downloading the miniblue skin for it which makes the control window tiny and means it won’t encroach on other application windows.
iTunesTrackInfo is an Applescript application that grabs the information from the currently playing track and uploads it to a Web server for inclusion in a page via includes.
Weblog BookWatch is yet another mini app from the brilliant mind of pb.