Can you just imagine talking to a friend you were picking up for the first time? "I'll be in a Stay Free Maxi Pad mini-van that says 'Heavy Flow' on the hood." Methinks this free stuff with advertising thing has gone too far.
My office is really really cluttered and messy.
I've been using the betas for a couple of months and I like it quite a bit in comparison to any of the existing browsers on the Mac platform.
So, I've spent $500 on something that I had for three days and won't have back for the foreseeable future. I requested a new unit, but they claim they won't have any until after the first of the year. They are, however, shipping units into the channel. They would rather sell units to new customers than take care of people who are already customers, who have already plunked down their hard earned cash. Shame on you Compaq. I am no longer a customer of yours, and I will tell anyone who will listen how awful you are.
My life is about to change in some major ways. My priorities are much clearer to me than they were only a few weeks ago, and I recognize that there is much work to do if I'm ever going to be the person I truly want to become. If you are reading this, ask yourself if you are an active participant in your life. Ask yourself if you are telling those around you how you feel about them. Ask yourself what you could do to make things better in your relationships. I sure wish I had been asking myself those questions a few weeks ago.
I should point out that their site doesn't really do a good job of communicating the service to potential customers.
I'm very much looking forward to 2001 from a career perspective, despite the current climate for Internet companies. The industry is being punished for people with questionable business ideas who overhyped the value of those businesses, with the help of the venture capital and investment communities. The inevitable chain reaction through the companies that feed off the failed dot-coms has lead to the demise and devaluation of the service companies that make up the next rung of the food chain. The only thing I have to say/can say to everyone is to not throw the baby out with the bath water, to not follow the hype back in the other direction. There's a middle ground there inhabited by companies with good ideas and value propositions for their customers. There are whole realms where the networked world is going to impact things in our lives in far reaching ways that we haven't seen yet.
Dave asks for a comparison between Manila and Blogger. Not a subject to be taken lightly for me. To start, here are some screenshots of the editing environments(kinda big): Manila Bump Blogger Editorial Interface Existing Desktop Editing Enviroment
First, where I think they are the same. Both provide a Web based editorial environment from which to update your site. Both allow you to do this within an HTML framework of your own choosing. Blogger allows you to edit and upload regardless of where you are and where your site is hosted. Manila, today, is strictly limited to editing pages that are on a Manila server, but you can do that from any Web connection just like Blogger. I'm sure that Userland plans to add the ability to use Manila to update sites served on non-Manila servers from static HTML, or even possibly other types of dynamically served environments. Both editing environments are compelling, but Manila's supports as many pages as you create, where Blogger is focused primarily on pages that contain Weblog entries. This ends up meaning that Manila has much wider reaching applications and can be used for every page of a site rather than just the actual Welog page. The entry interface on blogger is seperate from the actual page of content you are posting(see screen shot above.), and I think that it makes it a more friendly interface for the daily entries that it is focused on. Both environments support multiple author sites.(Which I won't be using, but others might want to know about.)
The editorial environment on Blogger 2.0 is also more mature.(Thus the 2.0 in its name.) It features a search engine that allows you to pull up your entires with certain strings in them. When I have two hundred daily entries in this new site, it would be really useful to have this feature. Manila provides the same functionality, assuming that you have the search engine turned on and indexing your site. Blogger also allows you to preview and then edit your posting before actually publishing it to the site. I would like to see more customization of the editorial environment in both apps. I would like to have one place as a site editor with all of my links to frequently visited sites and the edit interface for the site. This is possible with Manila through some template customization, but I haven't gotten to that stage yet.
My recommendation right now is determined by your situation. If you have an existing Weblog type site and already have a hosting environment and space, you're better off using Blogger. It will take far less reworking to get things up and running, and you won't have to sacrifice any other server side stuff you currently use such as PERL, Cold Fusion etc.. If you don't have these things, the space on Userland's Manila server offers you a chance to set things up from scratch and benefit from Userland's ongoing improvement of their offering. If you have your own server box, you can buy Frontier and set up your own Manila framework for your self and others.(I have a retired desktop machine serving 9 sites) It's worth mentioning that Userland has been improving their software on an almost daily basis. I have my copy of Frontier automatically update itself over the Internet every night, and those new features will appear in the interface seemingly out of nowhere. I love that.
Now, my dilemma. I like both environment's, but I have more content on my site than just the Weblog entries, and I have some plans to add to that content so I like the fact that Manila offers me the full site editing functionality. I'm not currently using anything server side with my site, so that's not an issue. Bump has been hosted by Mindspring since before I even had the domain name, and the hosting includes mail and dns. In order for me to move Bump to Manila, I'll either have to bite the bullet and build that stuff for my Manila server or continue to pay Mindspring for the space without actually using it. Another issue that I haven't touched on are my legacy Weblog entries. There is no easy way to move the two years of entries that I already have into either system's framework. I could do this with Manila by doing it by hand in the Guest Database framework that Manila is built from, but the amount of labor that would take seems pretty monumental. So I remain undecided, but leaning towards using Manila.
Comments, Corrections, rebukes? Email meAfter my personal absence, I had a business trip and then a busy week of work. This week, I'm traveling again. I'm wishing that I was going to SXSW, but I need a real vacation with beach, sun, and relaxation. I'm hoping this will occur in late March.
One thing I find myself wishing, now that I have this home box to play with and work from, is that either Frontier or Radio Userland were available for Mac OS X so I could have them up and running on that box with the fixed IP.
I'm constantly amazed by the imagination of fantasy and science fiction authors. They have the added burden of making up a new world as a stage for their story. If you have never done it, try the exercise of trying to think one up for yourself. It's challenging to come up with something original and compelling.
Finally, I've made a lot of headway over the last year in terms of the whole exercise routine. It's become a regular part of my life now, making it much easier to maintain. Now some stats, I started out weighing around 230-235. Today, I weigh 185, and my waist is 8 inches smaller than it was before. None of my clothes from a year ago fit me now. To be honest, I've weighed 185 since January, and in the months since then, I've been lowering my body fat at an average of 1.5% a month. It feels good, and once you get going, it gets a lot easier. Now if I could just stop being such an idiot all the time....
I also much prefer the Google model of providing related but sponsored links in another section of the page. In the end, if I were advertising, I would rather have this sort of placement with a search engine that delivers solid information than an entry that has been slipped in by the site on a second rate engine.
Scratch, which is a history of turntablism, was the best of the three in my opinion, and it did a really solid job of covering this one angle of the hip hop community. The history of the art of scratching and DJing in general was really solid. All of my favorite DJ's like QBert, Mixmaster Mike, and Cut Chemist were featured in the movie, and DJ Faust and DJ Shortee were actually at the showing. If you have any interest in this sort of thing, and an opportunity to see this movie, go see it.
Next, we went to see Burning Man: The Burning Sensation. Since I haven't been to Burning Man yet, it's hard for me to judge how well this film captures the spirit of Burning Man. The film did contain some very interesting art pieces and happenings at Burning Man, and there was excellent discussion with the film's director afterwards.
Finally, I went to see Revolution OS, a documentary about the Free Software movement and Linux. While I think this film did a great job of capturing the personalities of people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, I did not think that all of the people that they chose to focus on would have been my first choices. I would have liked to have seen some mention of PERL, and more coverage of Apache in the movie because I think that these two things, more than any other, have contributed to the success of Linux as an operating system. I also would have liked to have seen more coverage of individual distributions rather than the focus on a VA Linux, a hardware vendor. Finally, I think that this documentary went out of its way to position Microsoft as the evil empire. I would rather have been provided with the raw data and then been able to form my own opinion rather than having the situation framed in such a biased manner. Still, this film was well worth seeing no matter how much or little you know abotu the Free Software Movement. Oddly, I was unable to find a live Web site for this movie.
Frankly, this is too little too late for this market segement. Microsoft managed to kill off any real viable alternative to Internet Explorer. Hold on, I know you are thinking "there's Mozilla, iCab, Opera" Well think about it this way, think of all the improvements that could have been made to Netscape if they had been able to charge for their software. Think of the innovations we might have seen had they been able to sink a huge, revenue based, R & D effort behind their browser. Well here we are in 2001, and the browser hasn't really moved very far from 1998-9. This is Microsoft's fault, and we need our government to step up to the plate here and not cave and settle.
I should note that I'm something of an idiot. You probably know this if you have read this site on a regular basis or have met me in person, but rest assured that I'm not exaggerating a bit when I say that. I didn't read the install notes, I just burned a CD of RC1 and began my install. If I had read them, I would have noted that installing XP over Windows 2000 is an irreversible process. You can't go back without starting over from scratch.
So I installed. At first, everything seemed normal, then I noticed that my sound card, which is the newest component in my machine, wasn't working. After some surfing and a couple of emails, it was clear that the card wasn't going to work for at least a month. Then, suddenly, the ethernet card, the second newest component, stopped working altogether. Haven't been able to figure that one out yet. So that hampers my use of the machine a little. Then blue screen of death, blue screen of death, blue screen of death. Then constant rebooting without my interference. So now I'm debating whether I should make the huge migration back to Windows 2000 or wait for RC2 and the component vendors to release drivers and see if I can salvage things from where they are. It's a good thing that this machine is more of a test bed for me than a machine I actually do work on.(I was saying the same thing late last year when I installed the Mac OS X beta.) Developing a working operating system is not an easy task.
This brings up a bigger issue that I have been wrestling with about movies this summer. It seems like the overall quality of movies is declining to me. It seems like Hollywood is getting even more formulaic than they already were, or maybe there has been some change in me that makes the existing level of predictableness no longer acceptable. I've seen all the big blockbuster movies this summer and I wouldn't describe any of them as good movies with compelling stories.
I spend hours a day on the Internet, surfing through content, news and reference materials. I can't ever remember, in the many years I have been doing this, looking at a banner ad and then clicking through to buy a product. To be frank, I don't even see the banner ads anymore, nor has making the ads larger and more intrusive increased my awareness of advertising in a positive way. Even on the page that the article appears on, I didn't acknowledge the ad in the middle of the article until I went back and looked for it. I can't really draw any conclusions beyond the fact that there is very clearly a void here, a business pain that is seeking a solution.
"OS X is based on Unix and is probably more stable than Windows. Stability is an important feature that Windows just doesn't have. The average user can counter the instability by saving often."
Using Windows ME on my laptop currently, I watch in horror as my 384 Mb of RAM dwindles throughout my use. As the day goes on, the amount of free memory gets smaller and smaller regardless of what I am doing. Finally, I either blue screen or reboot. Since I switched to Mac OS X on my other laptop, the only time I ever reboot is when I have installed software. My Windows XP (now RC2) machine is a little better in the memory usage department. In fact, now that I have gotten past the hiccups I had, it has been downright stable.
The narrator in the book is a woman, and I've always been amazed by authors who can switch sexes in narration believably. Her husband is sort of the main character, however, and he begins the book as a consumate angry guy, something I can relate to quite easily. I'll leave the plot of the book to your reading of it, but the transitions that he goes through struck a very personal chord with me.
Update: I signed up for the plan and I'm finding all sorts of good stuff on their site. I'm listening to the Herbaliser's first album right now. This is the way this should be done, no micropayments, freedom to get the music I want and only keep the stuff I'm actually going to listen to. I'm cleaning up one of my extra computers and I'm going to stick it in the back of my walk in closet and store all my music on it. Perhaps I can move the bulk of my CD collection into storage in a couple of months after I've ripped them all to one of the four drives in this machine.
I've been thinking along exactly these same lines. I hear people making all sorts of statements about what we are doing, how it is wrong, how we should be doing this or that instead. I hate to say this, but I find that it's mostly people in the pacifist camp making these sort of statements. We haven't done anything visible yet, which I think is very telling. I give this administration, which I disagree with on almost every domestic issue, all the credit in the world in this situation. Are you mad because they haven't released their proof about who is involved/culpable in the act? Well, do you really have enough information about the investigation and our strategy to be mad?
hehe. Why don't you come talk to me about your "league" when your team has won half the World Series that mine has? Oh, perhaps it is difficult to get a good perspective when your team has only been around since 1959? When your team has been around for another 56 years you might have the perspective to understand what a real league is. Heh.
As far as design and interface goes, this is, without a doubt, the best MP3 product I have used to date. The integrated scroll wheel makes it quite easy to navigate through the large amount of music that the device holds, and the simplicity of having only five buttons and a hold switch made learning to use the device a snap. The only thing really lacking from the device management interface is the ability to construct playlists on the fly. You are expected to do this using the iTunes 2 application that manages the music stored on the device. The use of the Chicago font has made the interface really easy to read, and the "now playing" information screen scrolls to allow you to see beyond the limits of the screen size when song or artist names are very long. No such option exists in the song list view, and I wish that they had done something to allow you to see the full title of the highlighted song scroll. The backlight is bright and makes the screen very readable in low light conditions. In comparison to the Nomad Jukebox, and the RioVolt, two other devices I have owned which need to navigate through similar amounts of music and settings, the iPod is much more readable and usable. The back of the device is a chromed stainless steel that is so shiny that it can be used as a shaving mirror. The downside to that is that it smudges really easily. The front of the device is incased in a quarter inch thick plexiglass shield that protects the LCD screen. Again, this will scratch really easily, which will lead to my being more protective of the device than most of my portable audio devices. The top of the device, which contains the Firewire port, headphone jack, and hold switch is easily accessible, and the device will stand vertically. I do wonder why they didn't include a cover or bumper for the exposed Firewire port. It seems that someone who is careless with their iPod could unintentionally damage this very important connector.
The device charges when attached to the computer via the same firewire connection it uses to synch the mp3 files. Additionally, the device comes with a dedicated charger that plugs into an electrical socket for charging without a computer. I haven't used the device for longer than two hours thus far, but the battery still showed a full charge after the two hour listening session. Charging seems very rapid via the firewire connection, but I have not, as yet, doen any tests to see just how long it takes to charge an empty or close to empty battery.
The iPod comes with no user manual, but a quick start guide is provided. The iPod help file, which installs with iTunes 2, is pretty comprehensive. Again, the device is so straightforward that the only thing I have actually had to look up was the location of the iPod options within iTunes 2. The CD included contains only the installers for the Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X versions of iTunes 2. I was surprised by this because Apple ships all of their machines with a bunch of MP3's pre-installed now. In addition, the device had no MP3's on it out of the box. They missed an opportunity to push some stuff on us there, which is not something I would expect from Apple.
The earbud heaphones that ship with the device are very nice, and they sound great. They are slightly larger than most earbud style headphones I have used previously. They are comfortable in my ears, so much so that I managed to fall asleep on a plane yesterday with them in my ears. I would imagine that the level of comfort with them will vary with the size and shape of an individual's ears, and people with smaller ears may find them a bit large. They ship with a straight "stem" rather than the L-shaped most audio devices ship with now, and this makes fitting the device into either a vertical or horizontal case with the headphones plugged in more difficult. The device, in general, sounds very good, as I would expect it to. I don't feel that there is a large difference between any of the devices I have used in terms of sound quality. The iPod doesn't have controls that allow you to adjust the bass and treble of music you are listening to while you are listening to it. Again, this is something that you are expected to do with the iTunes application. This is one case where I really think it would be helpful to have the feature built into the device. It's quite difficult to judge how things are going to sound through headphones without going through them using the headphones on the computer first.
Setting the device up with my computer, a first generation Powerbook G4/500 running MacOS X 10.1.1, took only a few minutes. I had already installed iTunes 2 when it was released by Apple the previous week, and no additional software was required. Upon attaching the Firewire cable to the iPod, iTunes launched and asked me what name I wanted to assign to the device automatically. The initial synch of my music, which at that point was only about 300 songs, took about three minutes. In comparison, my initial synch of my Nomad Jukebox took well over an hour. The difference makes the addition of new music to the device much less of an ordeal. Since the initial synch, I have ripped and added about 300 additional songs to the device, with the synching part of the process being neglible in comparison to the time it takes to rip from the CD's. Aside from the interface and size, this is, to me, the hugest selling point of this device. While listening to music, the device buffers a large chunk of music to it's RAM, so that it is unusual to feel the hard drive spinning. Another huge upside to this is that there is not a huge pause in between songs like the other hard drive based players I have used. iTunes allows the user to either synch their entire library, specific playlists within their library, or manually manage the transfer of files without iTunes doing the transfers automatically. I find iTunes 2 to be clean sounding and easy to use as a desktop player, and the integration with the device is flawless.
Finally, a quick tweak of the iPod settings in iTunes (accessed by clicking on the iPod options button) allows you to mount the device as an external hard drive. This does not give you access to the music on the device, probably to keep the RIAA happy, but there are already hacks out there that allow the user to see and transfer the music. (See the free file access link below for one.) I have not, as of yet, used the hard drive feature beyond just mounting it and testing a file transfer, but I can imagine that it will come in handy in the future, and makes the device that much more flexible and useful. Personally, I think Apple has differentiated this device from its competition enough to justify the price. If you have questions about the above, or are curious about something I failed to mention, please feel free to email me, and I will update this posting with additional details in response to your questions.
There were many more Yankee hats and shirts in Boston than vice versa.(I saw the two teams play in the Bronx in May.) It seemed a lot safer for those people than the people I saw in New York with Red Sox hats etc... The game was a great time.
Three weeks ago, I went to the doctor complaining about some pain I've been having in my side. The doctor took some X-Rays, and informed me that I had something in one of my lungs. I would have to get a CAT scan of my chest to see what it was. God I was scared. I was a smoker, I worked for an environmental engineering company that oversaw asbestos removal projects for a year, it could be anything the doctor said, it could be scar tissue, it could be a shadow in the xray, he didn't mention the other thing it could be because he didn't have to. I had to wait a whole week for the appointment. One of the longest weeks of my life.
They put me in this machine and ran this solution through my body that made me fell warm all over. it was over in about fifteen minutes, then I had to wait two days for the results. Two very long days. Finally, the doctor told me that it was nothing, a shadow in the xray perhaps. If you smoke cigarettes, think for a minute about what could happen to you as a result.
"I am not here to argue for or against the use of Napster, but I will say that since getting on board the MP3 revolution I have purchased more music in the last seven months than in the past two decades, and maybe my entire life"
- David Strom
Some of the people and sites that influenced me in this design were Derek, Matt, Jack, Heather, and Jason. Big thanks to all of them.(Especially since I met all of them in person last week, aside from Jack who I already worked with.)