.: Archives :.

Friday, June 13, 2003

Crickets @ HPANA? - [3:23 PM]

One of my favorites feeds comes courtesy of HPANA, The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator. Problem is it seems to be down. Does anyone know what's going on over there? None of the big potter sites makes mention of it being down. Is it just me?

UPDATE: So much for that declaration! It appears to be back up.

Do you see the irony? - [11:20 AM]

Scobleizer: "I use Microsoft stuff 12 to 16 hours a day..." - Obviously we're not doing our job if you're working that many hours per day. Remember, work isn't life, life isn't work, get outside, go to a movie, take your wife to dinner. Make better use of that computer, work smarter, not longer. Computing was supposed to improve performance at work but it seems like it's never really delivered on that promise to some. I'm just giving Scoble a bad time. He's probably not at work that many hours of the day, and if he is then shame on him.

No, I'm not a typical 'Softie. I don't like to live at work, yes I still put in some wicked long hours at times, but I try to keep balance in my life. As a Visio guy this is one of those things that bugs me most. Jeremy Jaech, Visio co-founder and CEO, believed in balance and believed in people. It spoiled me.

American's still haven't figured out how to live.

I'm not sure what caused me to write this? Just been doing a lot of thinking lately, especially about the important things in life, of which work ranks about fourth.

Local boy Potter connection - [10:44 AM]

Modesto Bee: "'I'm into Harry Potter big time, and I don't care who knows it,' he said. 'I may be a dork, but I'm a dork who's going to London!'" - WOW! A kid from Modesto, just North of here, won a trip to London to hear none other than J.K. Rowling read from Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix. Congratulations Thomas! I'm green with envy.

e-mail is becoming useless - [10:02 AM]

I have a morning e-mail ritual, it goes something like this. Start Outlook Express; which connects to my Crabapples and Hotmail e-mail accounts, allow it to download all e-mail, select the Crabapples Inbox and look for mail from people I know, repeat with the Hotmail Inbox, and finally get on with the day. I'm certain you all do the same thing each and every morning unless you've discovered some wonderful SPAM blocking software.

This morning I decided to count the number of SPAM mails I received. I had 21 messages in my Crabapples account, 19 were SPAM.

A note to lawmakers: I want legislation like the upcoming "Do Not Call List". I would like that law to either include SPAM or write a new one that FORCES SPAMMERS to only send e-mail to people that opt IN. PERIOD, end of story. Thank's for listening.

Another good option, allow pissed off receivers of SPAM access to the personal addresses of SPAMMERS so we could lynch them. A nice tar-and-feather job may make them reconsider their line of work.

Is that too harsh? Maybe, maybe not. Leave my inbox alone. It's for my personal use, not YOURS!

Movie line of the week answer - [9:20 AM]

Yesterday's movie line was good enough to get five responses, all correct! Our winner this time out is J.D. "Gimpy" Roth. J.D's recovering from major knee surgery and I'd imagine he's still really, really, bored. Congratulations J.D, and take care of that knee.

The correct answer is...

The Crow

Thanks to all who played!

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Interesting... - [12:07 PM]

James Snell is jumping back into school! I think it's a great idea James, and it's one I've been toying with for quite a LONG time. I'll be following this one closely, especially since you chose The University of Phoenix. That one is on my list as well.

RSS as a mechanism for SPAM - [11:52 AM]

Technology Marketing [via Scripting News]: "IDG's InfoWorld yesterday became the first publisher to incorporate advertising into its RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed, an important step in the medium's commercial viability." - When RSS becomes a vehicle for SPAM I don't know what I'm going to do. I HATE SPAM. Don't people get it? I don't want a bunch of crap in my RSS feeds. Make a separate SPAM feed if that's what you want to do. I will abandon any feed that included advertising, period.

I love the quote from the marketing stooge, "However, in 24 hours, we haven't seen any complaints." DOH! Consider this a complaint.

Can't people just leave stuff alone? Why screw a good thing up? Having said that, I know who does and doesn't include SPAM in their feeds so I'll just un-subscribe from anything that begins including such nonsense.

So in response, even though his feed doesn't have SPAM in it yet, I'm no longer subscribed to Jon Udell's wonderful feed.

Fresno, the new jet city? - [11:22 AM]

MSNBC: "City officials acknowledge that having a Boeing plant here is something of a long shot for this city, which is competing with many others in the country to lure such a plant." - This would be very nice. Listen up Fresno, try to attract some more tech companies to the valley. What about Apple Computer, Adobe, or even Microsoft? Why not have a presence in the San Joaquin Valley? It's right in the middle of the state with access to the coast and the mountains. Companies with manufacturing facilities would be a natural for the valley because of it's central location so maybe Microsoft and Adobe wouldn't be good choices. Apple has to assemble computers and ship them to various places, I'm not sure where they're currently doing it so maybe central California would be a bad choice. However, distribution facilities located in and around the Fresno area would make sense for folks like Amazon for instance. I also wonder about infrastructure companies, like Exodus. Why not locate here in the valley where it's super cheap to live? Why spend mega bucks on facilities, and salaries, to keep the company in the Silicon Valley? Remember, on the net nobody knows where the data is coming from and they probably don't care.

Movie line of the week - [10:05 AM]

Howdy-ho net neighbors. It's that time of the week when I waste a few brain cells trying to come up with a unique movie line for all two of my readers to guess, you know who you are!

Are you ready? Here she is...

It can't rain all the time.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

It may be a bit too subtle but if you saw the film that line will stand out in your mind.

We should seriously consider doing something about it... - [9:56 AM]

Zeldman: "In other words, for the next two years, 85% of the web using population will have buggy support for CSS float, no support at all for adjacent sibling selectors, and no hope of PNG transparency unless developers are willing to write proprietary, IE-only code or deploy sophisticated JavaScript workarounds to make IE/Win do what other modern browsers do natively." - I think the IE team should consider taking care of the few items outlined in Mr. Zeldman's post, then we could put it on the shelf. I'm sure there are good reasons why we've decided not to upgrade the browser until Longhorn ships but for the sake of moving site design forward we really should make the changes, right?

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Has it been ten years? - [9:46 AM]

Ten years ago today the face of movie special effects turned a corner and movies haven't been the same since. I'm talking about the release of Jurassic Park on June 11, 1993. ILM's virtual dinos coupled with Stan Winston's life size T-Rex and Raptors made for some very thrilling moments. The release of JP rekindled my fire for blockbuster summer, something I lost shortly after Return of the Jedi in 1983.

It's hard to believe it's been ten years.

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Thanks for the feedback - [2:38 PM]

I just wanted to give a quick thanks to Steve Peters for letting me know my Summer 2003 Movies and Philosophy 101 pages were busted in Netscape 4.8.

Since I had to fix them up I decided to add a new movie to the list, 28 days later.

Three pane tools - [11:03 AM]

Here's a question for anyone using the latest round of RSS readers. How many triple-pane tools do we need? The correct answer is... One really good one. We have this great blogging community that's responded to the need for RSS readers and it should be taken to the next level. The triple pane view is very popular for e-mail, blogging tools, and RSS readers so why hasn't someone created a nice reusable framework to plug in to? Given the right programmable interface I should be able to plug my e-mail tool, blogging tool and RSS reader into a common shell. You could do all sorts of cool stuff with that type of framework. You could replace Windows Explorer for browsing files; you could even jam your favorite MP3 player into the mix, right?

If someone does take this challenge on they need to make sure it's programmable from more than one or two languages. A .NET based framework would be awesome but it doesn't have to be. I'd like to see it written in something that performs fairly well, a .NET language such as C# or even unmanaged C++ should suffice because someone could write a stub component that knows how to load .NET assemblies and communicate with those assemblies back up the food chain.

Is there anyone out there with the time and patience to pull something like this off? This is without a doubt my dream tool. A true digital dashboard.

Monday, June 09, 2003

Whoops.... - [2:05 PM]

Looks like I missed Steven and Hilary's anniversary!

Happy anniversary you wild kids!

The Vantage Group - [11:01 AM]

Some of our local boys have redesigned their site and are starting to push a product they've developed over time! WebWys Publisher makes creating web content easier for the average Joe, like me for instance, that just wants to publish something new and wants to maintain a consistent look and feel.

I'm not too sure what you'd call this app? It's kind of a mini-CMS. It also looks like it could be adapted for use as a Blogging tool, hint, hint.

Is it Monday already? - [9:55 AM]

Had another weekend of softball. We traveled to Paso Robles for the third leg of the CCMSA series. We had a great time but finished in fourth this time which was a major bummer. We tanked our first game to a team of guys we've played with in the past, one of which plays on our league team. We were 2-2 on the day. The biggest problem I saw was us allowing one team in particular to get inside our heads. We didn't play well against them and we're 0-3 when facing them. We need to stop getting so uptight and just start playing ball against. You can push so hard on occasion that you make mistakes and don't do well at the plate. We need to relax then we'll do better.

All in all it was a great trip and I had a good time as usual. The ballpark was absolutely marvelous! The City of Exeter needs to seriously consider doing something like this at our ballpark, Dobson Field. The layout was perfect and the fields were in great shape. There was a great snack bar between the fields and every field had a nice scoring tower. It was so nice I think we need to get their tournament schedule and travel over again.

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