In Dan Bricklin's Thurday, February 10, post to his Log, he covered Demo 2000. There's some great information on three of the upcoming Springboard modules for handspring handhelds. The most interesting is a min-pda that plugs into you Palm to give you an even smaller PDA. The camera module looks neat too.
This article from the British MacUser magazine seems to be a pretty reliable account about Apple's Palm based device in development.
Like everyone else(or so it seems), I beat the pre-registration deadline for SXSW and will be attending.
I can't think of anything that has had me going around in circles in the last few months as much as this Salon piece on Orson Scott Card. I've read somewhere around ten books he's written, and loved every single one of them. Nothing offensive there, in fact mostly values that I wholeheartedly agree with. Then I read this interview, and it makes me sad. Then I start debating with myself about the whole issue. Can I seperate his works from him? I honestly don't know. It really sucks.
I don't want to violate my NDA or anything, but I can say that I am now in acquisition talks with another Weblog after yesterday's Bump business strategy update. Update: At least two other Weblogs have now announced they want to be acquired by my growing conglomerate.
Matt passed on this link to a fantastic RealVideo movie of a Krispy Kreme in action. In case I didn't mention it, I really like donuts.
Array is churning out some really great Web design links.
Handspring is finally going to make their Visor handhelds available in retail stores. One of the people at the company we share office space with bought one but sent it back because he felt it was too cheaply made. I'm waiting to see what their second generation devices are going to look like.
MacCentral interviewed the CEO of Connectix about their recent court victory.
Big thanks to Jim and Scott for their kind words about my redesign.
In keeping with successful business strategies for attaining maximum valuation in other Internet ventures, Bump will be pursuing an aggressive strategy over the next several months. We will be acquiring as many other weblogs as possible, regardless of quality, to ensure that we generate lots of press releases. After we have acquired several other Weblogs, even if we have managed to alienate their original users through our rebranding and redesign of these entities, we will attempt to IPO.
MacCentral reports that Connectix has won the suit that Sony brought over their Virtual Game Station product. I love this product, it works great, and now they'll finally be able to release updates to it legally. This also means they will be able to release their Windows version. Here's the Connectix press release that explains it, and links to the judgement online.
More proof that our government doesn't get the Internet. Do they understand how pervasively cookies are used in Web development for benign purposes? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this bill, but it seems that this is not the way to get regulation on these Internet advertising companies. I remain unconvinced that this sort of legislation is a good thing or that it sets a good precedent for our industry.
We're looking for a good project/team management Web application that can be used to schedule meetings, send out email notifications, schedule resources, and view other people's scheduled events. eProject.com will give Outlook haters fits, it uses the exact same layout and icons as Outlook 2000. It doesn't have all the features we want. Guess we may have to roll our own solution.
I love Krispy Kreme Donuts a little too much. Really good Web site for such an old school company.
The Apex AD-600A is a DVD player that will also play CD-ROM's full of MP3 files. Here's an in-depth review of the unit. I find it interesting that the person who maintains this site uses Circuit City as his example of somewhere you can buy the unit. I'm still boycotting Circuit City over the whole DIVX fiasco. People have really short memories.
I've had a Mindspring account since 1996. As I'm sure most of you know by now, they merged with Earthlink to become the small number two to AOL's number one. Somehow, they got it in their head that their customers need to be reminded of this fact almost daily via email. It's driving me nuts.
David Brin on Tomorrow's World . This is up on the iPlanet Web site, which is the brand assigned to the Netscape/Sun alliance that came out of the AOL purchase of Netscape.
Still looking for that magical color combination. I'm pretty certain that this is the final color scheme, so if you don't like it, be sure to get me some feedback asap. I'm hoping to get a script in place to let you choose your own color schemes ala Camworld, but will be finalizing design and all the secondary pages first. Content will continue to grow and change on this page over the next few weeks. Some new pics above in what I hope will be a regular new feature.
Well, I don't think this is a parody.(via Camworld) This person has now taken the site down, it was a rip off of the much lauded(at least here) new Evhead design.
We had a movie night last night and watched Run Lola Run . I really liked it, but found the concept rather unoriginal. I also went to see Eye of the Beholder last weekend. The movie had some great elements to it, but the ending was terrible, I mean really really terrible. Wait for the video.
Who Toy will help you name your brand new Weblog.(via Evhead)
Starting tomorrow, I won't be using QBullets in the log section of this site anymore. With this new color scheme, links stand out well enough on their own.
Today's Soundtrack:
Nick Drake's Pink Moon . Perhaps the use of Pink Moon in the Volkswagon commercial will make more people aware of this completely brilliant piece of work.
I like Evhead's new design much better than the recent design. It's usable and visually pleasing. I also now have Ev's Head as an icon in my bookmarks menu. It might be the best designed Weblog yet in my opinion.
I've made it one month without smoking. I don't feel like celebrating. I made it over a year without smoking at one point, then lapsed right back into it. I also made the step down to the next level of patch today. I expect that I'll be grumpy.
Well. This is definitely a work in progress.
I've gotten really mixed feedback so far. Seems most people writing in do not like this color scheme, so I'll revisit it tonight. I changed the content font style sheet so it no longer is fixed at 12 pt. Thanks to Jeff Harrell and Jim Roepcke for the excellent pointers.
I want to hear what a bad job I've done of making this site easy to read so I can fix it. There will be additional content and layout changes on this page this week. The pictures above will link to pages with descriptions as soon as I have time to build a template and write some descriptions. For now, they link to a larger version of the image and feature scenes from last week.
Also, I haven't updated any of the other pages yet.
Dan Sanderson has written a filter that lets you see only the Weblogs on the weblog.com update list that you want to. A useful feature, but I use that list to discover new Weblogs. Still, with the ever growing number of new blogs, it's good to have filters.
Snapcase : designs for automation. I really really like this band a lot. Not for you if you don't like agressive music.
Michael Penn : MP4 [days since a lost time accident]. The jury is still out on this one. It's probably going to grow on me. I don't know about naming a CD "MP4" at this point in time.
What in the world is this all about? Is this going to be real football? In this age of salary caps, I would imagine that the talent pool for the NFL would be susceptible to a well financed competitor league. I just wonder about the source.
This evolt article and the recent CERT advisory on non-validated dynamically inserted HTML seems pretty common sense to me. Data validation in input is critical. The scarier part of this is the part about poisoned cookies and persistent attacks.
Speaking of Monkeyfist , it has rapidly become a site I look forward to reading every day. It's a mature Weblog after only a short time of being active. They are turning out content faster than I can read and digest it.
I started using ICQ again today. You can now tell if I'm online by looking at the flower at the bottom of the page.
Somehow I missed the fact that today is Groundhog's Day . I've made the pilgramage to Punxsutawney, PA twice to see Phil on his big day. There's nothing better than spending all night in below freezing weather in a clearing. I had a great time on both trips. There was alcohol comsumption involved(how else would I have been able to stay outside in the freezing cold all night.) Thanks to Mirasol for reminding me.
Willie B. dies . I was just at the zoo four weeks ago and saw him. He sat, ignoring the obnoxious humans, proud and regal. He's been an Atlanta landmark for years. There's a picture gallery of him up on the Web too.
Oh yeah, there's a Weblog for this year's SXSW.(I'm going.)
Quite a lot of buzz today over the new home page design that Amazon.com is testing.(According to this News.com article ) You might or might not get the new design when you log onto their site. Personally, I like the previous, tab based(and oft-copied) design better. IMHO it was warmer and more innovative.
Speaking of redesigns, Version Tracker , the best place to stay up to date on Macintosh software releases, has redesigned and added an email notification service. Not surprisingly, I don't really like the new identity or navigation.
I'm not sure why redesigning has been such a slow process, but I'm not going to talk about it here any longer. Somepeopleseem to have no problem getting a redesign out the door, but I think I'm struggling with deciding what technology to base things on.
After what seemed like months of waffling, I finally bought a digital camera this weekend. I'm really pleased with it so far, and I splurged and picked up a 48 Mb Compact Flash card, which allows me to take 79 high quality images at a session. The only negative(and very wasteful note) is that it comes with a single disposable battery. It burns through these rather expensive jobbers in about 60 pictures. I can't afford the rechargeable kit yet, so I'm going to have to use the camera sparingly in the meantime.
All of our local news agencies have been predicting a winter apocalypse for the last four days. Nothing even close to a real winter event has occurred.
It turns out that Jorn is having ISP problems. In the meantime, you can reach Robot Wisdom at [64.6.45.65/RobotWisd...](http://64.6.45.65/RobotWisdom/.)
Something that might interest people who want to link to a particular post on this site:
There is an anchor in each day's post with the date in six digit format(so today would be http://bumps.wpengine.com/index.html#012600). I put them there for my own use, but realized that, when Jorn linked to me last week, he had no way of going right to that particular day's entry because I hadn't posted this. They don't go back all the way to November 1997 because I haven't had the time to insert them all yet.
I have an Apple eMate 300 that I have used very little. I'm interested in trading it for a Newton 2100. If you know anyone who might be interested in negotiating a deal, please contact me.
This major label(BMI) sponsored site , in its Internet awards, honored the RIAA with its "Best Organization" award. This organization has done more to set music on the Internet back than any one other group thus far, how can you give them an Internet music award? Talk about bias. Let's cowtow to the big money's thugs. Oops, the winners were chosen by members of the public. Who voted for RIAA?
MacCentral is reporting a color Palm device about to be announced which is already in CompUSA's inventory system.
I'm not fond of MacAddict's recent redesign . It's not very usable. Everything is all jumbled around. It also doesn't seem to render properly on the most recent version of Netscape for the Mac OS. It's especially evident how lacking it is when you compare it to the recent O'Grady Macintosh portal, Go2Mac.com . I wasn't happy about this site at first as a long time reader of The Powerpage, but I've warmed up to it as they have improved the design over the last month.
For some reason, I never noticed The Onion's archive page . It's at least an hour of laughing endlessly.
On the subject of ecards for unusual occasions and themes, Waferbaby, home of Pixhell has a great page of cards too.(Many of these are not appropriate for children, and if you are easily offended by sexual imagery, you might want to pass.)
As if no one learned the horrible lesson of DIVX, here's someone trying to do the same thing.(via Looka)
The Super Bowl is coming to town this week. I work about 300 yards from the Georgia Dome, so I'm sure I'm going to see some interesting things in our neighborhood this week. The first signs were giant ABC trucks getting off the highway en masse this week.
VerticalNet brokers a deal with Microsoft . Traditional business to business publishers had better take notice of this, they are quickly losing this battle through inactivity.
This kind of thing is the beginning of the end for the notebook computer. I know it's very expensive now, but it's no more expensive than notebooks generally were less than five years ago. I, frankly, want one. I especially like the fact that it supports portrait or landscape.
Barnes and Noble is working on a credit card that allows you to earn points towards books when you use it.
In case you live under some kind of technology free bubble, Transmeta announced their new processor today. It is x386 compatible and aimed at the mobile market.(Do you see a theme developing here?) Their first product to market is designed to run a special version of Linux and last for a full day on one battery charge. For an insane amount of detail, go to the Slashdot report .
The lack of updates over the last four days can be attributed directly to the installation of Quake 3 Arena on my home machine. If you smoke and intend to quit, you might find that extended video game forays help you take your mind off the gnawing sensation of your body weening itself from addiction.
Four days and still cooking along on the not smoking thing. I'd like to thank everyone for all of the encouraging emails. It's helped me out quite a bit, in fact more than once I got them while I was craving a cigarette and they encouraged me to push on.
It's been a very focused week at work. We're pushing a project out the door early next week, and we have all been putting in extra effort to get the development done. One of the aspects of this project is an edit interface, and coding it made me appreciate Manila all that much more.
I don't know how many of the same readers we have, but does anyone else use a Netscape browser to access Scripting News ? I get blank pages about 90% of the time with either Communicator 4.7 for Mac or Windows. It just started happening recently. It's one of those sites that I read often enough that I find myself firing up Internet Exploder just to read it.
MacCentral has an article today on the USB Kritter Cam from iRez. I got one for Christmas to go with my iBook, and have been quite pleased with it so far. I still haven't decided if I want cam type pictures of me up on this site though.
I started down a better path today. I'm quitting smoking. It's a nasty disgusting habit, and I want to be rid of it once and for all. I'm using the NicoDerm CQ patch. A little background: in 1997 I quit smoking after almost eight years. I succeeded and remained smoke free until 1999 when I broke down slowly. I made the mistake of thinking I could have the occasional cigarette without breaking. I then slowly spiraled back into the life of a smoker. I put the patch on this morning(I started with the 21 mg version.), and the first thing that happens is a really itchey feeling where you put it on. Now I'm feeling a little spacey, probably because it's more nicotine than my body is used to. I'm not craving a butt now, but I will as the day goes on. It's a wrenching feeling as your body craves the substance it's addicted to. What the patch does is allow you to seperate the two different aspects of the addiction and break each down as a unique battle. I'll keep you informed of my progress. Feel free to encourage me.
The Slashdot interview with Steve Wozniak was posted today. He shares his very perceptive opinions on a variety of subjects.
I'm pretty close to 100% after a brutal bout with the flu. I hate being sick, but when I get better I am always more motivated and focused than I was before I was sick.
There's a hilarious net based matrix spoof going on at this site . He adds panels every day.
I found Apple's Internet strategy announcement's today a little disappointing. The new services they are providing are far from remarkable or unusual. The only thing they did that I think is neat was to integrate the free drive space on their servers directly with the Mac OS Desktop. Since I've got mac OS 9 going on here, I signed up for the free services tonight. The Kidsafe service takes a better approach to keeping things safe for kids than other similar packages have, and the free Web page doesn't seem to be available right now.
It's that special time of year again for Mac users. MacCentral has pictures from setup day at MacWorld SF. One of them makes me think we may see Internet Explorer 5.0 for the mac tommorrow.
Jane and Ted, the closest thing Atlanta has to a royal family, are separating .
Macintouch is reporting that SuSe will be demonstrating a version of their Linux distribution for the Power Macintosh at this week's MacWorld conference. It's interesting to me, because it won my recent five distribution face off as the easiest to install(on my hardware) for Intel. I'm running it on my fast Intel machine at home right now. It would also mark the first major Linux distribution to have a Power PC version.
Bill Parcells retires. Bad day for Jets fans. Probably a good day for Mr. Parcells though. He read a great poem to his team yesterday which is published in the article. It's a good read in the beginning of the new year.
If you look at this page , you can see(until they change it), that Amazon.com doesn't know how to subtract.(Look at the list price versus their price on the first two items.)
Feeling a bit better today, but not good enough to make it through a whole day of work. I came home early and took a nap. Perhaps I'll be 100% tommorrow.
I spied Twernt in my referrer log, and I like it quite a bit.
Well, here we are, safe and sound, power on, phones working. I was prepared for the worst.
My New Year's wish for everyone is self examination. Look at the date at the top of this entry. It looks strange, doesn't it? We are at the start of something new as a group. A chance to wipe the slate clean and begin again. Here's your chance to look at yourself, and change for the better. I have great hope for myself.
I went to see Any Given Sunday last night. I loved it, but I'm into the whole football thing. The Flash on the site is pretty good too. A friend of mine had told me earlier in the week that he thought it was Al Pacino's best performance to date. There were some great cameos in the movie, including Oliver Stone, the director, posing as a television announcer during the several games that were featured in the movie and Johnny Unitas as an opposing coach. A great cast including, besides Pacino himself, James Woods, LL Cool J, Jamie Fox, Matthew Modine, Cameron Diaz, Lawrence Taylor, and Bill Bellamy. A North Dallas Forty for the nineties with better undertones.
