“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.

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?