A happy man

An explanation is overdue. I am still alive and well. Nothing's changed in my life - married, two dogs, still consulting and traveling a lot all over the country. I have several other web-based projects of my own and I am supporting various others. They come and go.

This LJ started out as a journal. Then, as I always do, I started writing out topics that had been on my mind for a long time - essays, really. But writing an essay takes a lot more time and prep than just keeping a journal. So that slowed me down a few times. And then I tried to make this into a true web log, linking to and commenting on cool sites or news I'd found on the web. Ultimately that wasn't very satisfying.

Starting July 15, 2006, all the entries here have been private. Not 'friends-only' but 'private'. I still update frequently, but it's really kind of a current events warehouse, for my eyes only. That makes this a journal again, but with the added dimension of quoting and linking to various news stories of the day. We forget too easily, and we are too swayed by current events to connect the dots. The only way to make connections in history is to take a long view. So I record stories here that I don't want to forget, and that will disappear from the web all too soon. It's my own personal archive of important and notable events.

That's how things stand. Since it's been over a year since I started doing this, not only have I kept it going this long but also I update fairly frequently. So I think I've finally settled on what this journal will be from now on. See ya around.

This is so freakin' cool I can't hardly stand it. You have to see it to really get it. And don't forget to watch the demo video.

Availabot is a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications. Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. It’s a presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy… and because the puppets are made in small numbers on a rapid-prototyping machine, it can look just like you.

This is Availabot (Schulze & Webb)

Blogged with Flock

Scott Adams wrote about tipping and doormen and valets in his Dilbert blog. It sparked a ton of comments from readers, as you'd expect. Tipping is somehow a controversial subject, I guess. I am a generous tipper, by nature. And I travel a lot and eat out a lot, so I get plenty of opportunity to practice. I've experienced the same kinds of situations Adams describes here, and sometimes I'm caught unsure of who or how much to tip. There are going to be situations where someone expects a tip and you don't think so.

I love how he starts this blog entry. Great first paragraph! :-)

Yesterday I gave a speech at a hotel in San Francisco. Afterwards, the hotel valet was retrieving my car as I waited out front. I guarded my tiny carry-on sized bag against the two drooling doormen as their eyelids made cha-ching sounds. You could almost hear them thinking “If I can touch his bag, he’ll have to give me money.”

The Dilbert Blog: Night of the Living Doormen

Blogged with Flock

This is SO wrong. There are certain fretting adults who think people in general, but children in particular, must be protected from life itself, lest anything at all ever hurt them or not go their way. In other words, we'd better keep children safe from childhood.

Some traditional childhood games are disappearing from school playgrounds because educators say they're dangerous.

Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., banned tag at recess this year. Others, including a suburban Charleston, S.C., school, dumped contact sports such as soccer and touch football.



In other cities, including Wichita; San Jose, Calif.; Beaverton, Ore.; and Rancho Santa Fe., Calif., schools took similar actions earlier.

The bans were passed in the name of safety, but some children's health advocates say limiting exercise and free play can inhibit a child's development.

Groups such as the National School Boards Association don't keep statistics on school games.

But several experts, including Donna Thompson of the National Program for Playground Safety, verify the trend. Dodge ball has been out at some schools for years, but banning games such as tag and soccer is a newer development.

"It's happening more," Thompson says. Educators worry about "kids running into one another" and getting hurt, she says.

In January, Freedom Elementary School in Cheyenne prohibited tag at recess because it "progresses easily into slapping and hitting and pushing instead of just touching," Principal Cindy Farwell says.

USATODAY.com - 'Not it!' More schools ban games at recess

Blogged with Flock

This is from the U.K. While I've not taken Latin, myself, I have friends who learned it in school and, to a person, they have no regrets. They all say it helped them a lot.

Regardless of subject, however, I generally object to teachers discouraging students because they think it's "too hard".

Education experts raised fears over the future of Latin in schools, warning that teachers were telling their pupils to avoid the subject because it is too hard.

Pupils told to avoid latin because it's too hard | the Daily Mail

Blogged with Flock

Really interesting Q&A with a someone who studies trends and marketing among young people (teens). She's got insight on why MySpace became so popular (which isn't really any big secret), how young people view trends, fads and fashion, marketing mistakes, what's important now and what will be important tomorrow. I love stuff like this.

Question: Typically, how long does a “young-people” fad last?

Answer: It depends on the country and age group, but generally young people do not think something is a fad. It’s just what’s happening right then. A 15-year-old’s sense of history is about three years, which explains, for example, why they think they’re creating punk rock, even though their parents may have listened to the Sex Pistols.

Signum sine tinnitu--by Guy Kawasaki: Ten Questions with Kathleen Gasperini

Blogged with Flock

I don't know why, but I really want one of these.

The FUNKit serves as an iPod cradle and speaker system that shines LED lights, “scratches” his turntables and dumbfounds spectators by interrupting the musical experience with catchphrases such as “Drop the Beat!”

Popular Mechanics - Too Cool For Old Skool

Blogged with Flock

This is the funniest thing I've seen all month. It's The Ten Commandments remixed into a trailer for a modern teen comedy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs

Completely anonymous. I'm just curious. I saw this at violetdaisies


Track Your Visitors on a Map!

I took one of our dogs to the vet today so they could draw blood to do heartworm and thyroid check-ups - it's that time of year, time to start the monthly heartworm pills. Hard to believe there's some kind of weather system coming in tonight. Today is an absolutely perfectly impossibly beautiful day here in Denver - at noon it was only mid-70s°F, everything's blooming and sprouting, super clear views (I could make out details on Pike's Peak, no haze or anything to obscure the view in all directions), and not a cloud in the sky literally from horizon to horizon 360° around. it's 1:45 now, though, and the wind has kicked up - the downhill slide until Wednesday.

Daylight Savings Time started two weeks ago. That night, I flew to Minneapolis for the first time. I spent the week there on business, flew home Friday afternoon. Back the next Monday night, home last Friday afternoon. That's it for a while. Minneapolis has a very cool downtown. It's also the farthest north I've ever been - previously, the farthest north I'd been was Bar Harbor, Maine. Even though I was so far north, it didn't feel weird or anything. ;-)

In October we had some dead aspen trees removed from a corner of the backyard. That's what aspens do at this elevation - everybody wants them, but they don't necessarily thrive like they do up in the mountains. And they have relatively shorter lives than many other trees down at this altitude. So they start to turn blackish and produce fewer leaves each year. I miss them this spring, now that everything else is sprouting new leaves and flowers every day.

In February, someone rear-ended our station wagon while my wife was driving it. She's fine, but the car didn't make it. I mean, the car was drivable, but the SUV-driving jackass smacked it hard and bent things that should never bend. Finally, Volvo and Allstate agreed on the cost of repairs and we all agreed it wasn't what we wanted to do. So we took a big fat check instead (nice) and I get to keep driving my company Ford Freestar (whoop-dee-do, but it's 100% free everything so I can't complain). Still, I really miss that car - not a damn thing wrong with it until that dumbass in too big of a hurry screwed it up. I was angry for a day, then got over it.

We've started selling things on eBay. I sold my first item on eBay ever last month - my first-generation Bose Quiet Comfort acoustic noise-cancelling headphones - and we've sold various other things since then. Good way to get rid of excess stuff, and so much nicer than a garage sale. Setting up a free eBay account as a buyer was simple way back in 1999. Going through the steps to make that into a seller account was harder than it should have been. Same thing with PayPal - it's a snap to set up an account in order to buy things or send someone money. Harder than it needs to be to set yourself up to receive payments. And considering eBay owns PayPal now, you'd think it'd be easier to hook those two systems together. Don't get me wrong - it's all set up now and it works very slick and easy - getting to this point was a royal time-consuming pain in the ass, however. But now we're set and rolling.

Spring never fails to bring new changes, does it? So much going on!

A couple of months ago, my wife asked me to finally install Mac OS X Tiger on her PowerBook. But she wanted me to back up her data, and do a format-and-install to start completely clean, then restore her data. The whole process was easy, and as I was testing out the fresh installation, I noticed her Mac seemed snappier with the new OS. So I decided to do the same with my PowerBook, which already had Tiger on it.

I love how easy it is to install or upgrade Mac OS X. I hooked my PowerBook to my Power Mac via their built-in gigabit Ethernet, then backed up my entire laptop drive to one of the internal drives in my tower. Then I did the format-and-install option when I laid Tiger back down on the laptop—that was too easy. We're talking a brand new installation and it took, what?, 20 minutes? Five clicks? Installing the OS is a total non-event.

I shift my OS X Dock around a lot, loading new things in and out of it on a fairly regular and frequent basis. Before doing the complete reinstall, I decided to take note of what was in the Dock as I backed it up. So here are the icons that were in my Dock at the time, in standard Mac fashion from left to right, Applications first, then documents and folders. (My PowerBook's Dock doesn't look like this anymore, but that's for a later post. It's much smaller now, and half of it's just got things I'm trying out for a while.)

Applications left-to-right
	Finder On every Mac, this is how you work with the file system. It is primary and will relaunch if you quit it. It holds down the far-left spot on the standard Dock. I tend to use it mostly in Column View, but there are times I miss the usual spatial Icon View, so I set some folders to always open that way.
	Terminal Because Mac OS X is Unix, one of the first programs I played with was the Terminal. Please note its name is 'Terminal', not 'Terminal.app'. You only sound stupid if you say 'Terminal.app'. Just like Windows users don't say 'Word.exe'. Anyway, I had fun with it when Mac OS X went pre-beta, but since then I rarely touched it. I am a Mac OS X power user and I steadfastly hold that using the Terminal is completely unnecessary on a Mac. I pop open a shell occasionally to satisfy my own curiosity, or to SSH to one of my web hosts. And while there are fine FTP programs available, I tend to just use command-line FTP - but that's just a preference, not a necessity.
	Skype I'm playing with Skype because it's free, secure and got some decent features. For free voice and video chat over the Internet, I like Apple's iChat and an iSight camera. Skype works fine for voice, and I know more people with Skype than iChat, so this icon will stick around for a while.
	iCal Apple's calendar program suits my needs just fine. As usual, I love the interface, it just works so easily. I also like that it's already part of .Mac syncing and other people can subscribe to my calendars over the web with live updating.
	AddressBook The ease of use and built-in .Mac sync support got me again. I love how it's hooked all through the OS so it's available in other applications. I keep my laptop, my desktop and my cell phone contacts all synced with AddressBook.
	StickyBrain As its name implies, StickyBrain is kind of a smarter form of Stickies, the long-popular little utility that comes with every new Mac. StickyBrain can act purely as stickies, but the big advantages it's got are the kinds and formats of information you can store, advanced display, navigation, search and privacy features, and of course useful hooks into the Services menu throughout the OS. A handy multi-function hot-keyed database.
	Stickies The standard. I use Post-Its offline, and Stickies online. I always liked them on Mac OS 9 and I was glad they were on the first version of Mac OS X. It's quick and easy to make a new sticky note, jot a thought down, then get back to what you were working on. I really should pick one or the other, though - StickyBrain or Stickies. The former does more, but that's a plus and a minus, and maybe some day it won't be supported anymore. The latter is simple and has limited features, which can be kinda nice, honestly. But it's already included with Mac OS X and likely always will be, so I should never have to worry about support.
	BBEdit I'm using BBEdit version 6.5, which I think was the last free version. As a text editor, it just kicks all kinds of ass, no wonder it's always been the favorite of developers and geeks since forever. I don't really use all its hardcore features, so I didn't bother to upgrade when they started charging for it. BareBones had released TextWrangler, which a lot of people just swear by. I tried TW right when it came out, then again last month on the latest version. It's OK, but missing some of what makes BBEdit so powerful for me.
	TextWrangler Yeah, so here it is. This is the free follow-up to BBEdit. It's okay, but I've got at least four other text editors installed and this one is sort of middle-of-the-pack.
	Smultron Smultron is an open source text editor I found and I really like it. It's missing a few very nice features of BBEdit 6.5, but overall it's got what it takes to make it my most-frequently-used text editor.
	Word Microsoft Office on the Mac is very good, and Word is the only word processing tool I really need. I'm not so anti-Microsoft that I won't even install Office or Word!
	OmniGraffle Omni Group makes terrific Mac OS X software in Cocoa, and OmniGraffle is a diagramming application that shows off their chops. It's XML compatible with the latest Visio Pro, which is handy. But it's great for fast but beautiful diagrams of all kinds! I use it plenty, and not even for formal work but just because it's fast and fun.
	OmniOutliner Since forever, I've been an outliner fan. My great notetaking in college was because I wrote in outline form. The best thing about the Apple Newton to me was the great built-in outliner. I could outline in Word, but have you ever tried that? OMG, it's a pain in the ass. OmniOutliner can be as simple or complex as you need it to be, and it's even programmable. I use this constantly.
	Dreamweaver It's an awesome web builder, thousands and thousands of designers swear by it. I love it. I haven't recently had a reason to break it out and design anything major, but if you set about your site design with a project mentality, it's a huge help.
	ArtRage ArtRage is just a simple little free natural-media painting program. Choose from a variety of media - oils, pencils... - and colors and have a blast. It's not nearly so feature-rich as Corel Paint, but fun anyway.
	FlySketch This is a screen capture and drawing program that has some very unique approaches that set it apart from the pack. Another fun example of how a Mac makes you more productive. I use this for quick sketches and note-taking/red-lining on web sites or anything else.
	VoodooPad How does one explain VoodooPad? It's kind of an eletronic notepad, into which you can write or drop or draw anything. It's like a personal wiki, complete with hypertext and everything to build self-contained web-like note decks. Nothing else like it. Only on the Mac.
	Tinderbox I only was using the demo version of Tinderbox, because the full thing is kinda pricey. Tinderbox can be used in lots of ways, but I think primarily it's a way to do mind maps and/or concept maps and automatically generate cool web sites from them. Very organic and very powerful. I wish this would catch on in a much wider market, but I doubt it will ever get a critical mass.
	Pages Apple's text-centric half of iWork, I keep this around to play with. The first version leaves much to be desired, but it makes beautiful work easy, and promises many great things to come. Also, how many ways is Apple going to release to easily build web pages, anyway? ;-)
	Keynote Now this, this is power. This is the presentation half of Apple's iWork, it's quite mature, and simply a brilliant example of how Apple makes standard software needs simple and beautiful. While it still encourages the bad habits of bullet-dependency, it's just so much damn fun anyway.
	DeerPark DeerPark is just a PowerPC G4-optimized version of Firefox. Everybody should have Firefix, even Mac users happy with Safari. It's got some neat features, and certain sites really only want to work with it. And it's practically required if you want safe browsing on Windows.
	Camino Another Mac web browser based on Mozilla code. Boring, but I keep it around to try it on sites that otherwise don't act right.
	Safari Obviously, Apple's own web browser, it comes standard on every Mac. I love this browser, and use it for 99% of everything.
	Mail I'm also happy with Apple's Mail. Please note its name is 'Mail', not 'Mail.app'. What is it with people who can't call things by their proper names? Anyway, I know a lot of people like Entourage or Thunderbird or any of a bunch of others, but I like Mail because it looks good, works well, and is totally hooked in with the OS and Address Book and iChat and on and on.
	NetNewsWire Lite I still haven't found anything better for an RSS reader, on any platform. Nothing that's free, anyway ;-) I am not often in a web browser any more, since nearly every place I go publishes a feed - all personal blogs and journals, news sites, any and every site I want to go.
	Photoshop Duh.
	iTunes I've seen and used a few music jukebox programs - to play, manage, organize, burn, download, stream all kinds of music and other audio - and in my opinion nothing comes close to iTunes. I spend most of my time in Mail, NetNewsWire, and iTunes.
	iPhoto I like iPhoto, I use it to import and manage all my digital camera photos. It's fast and simple and has always worked really well for me. Because I have Photoshop, I don't touch iPhoto's editing and enhacing tools. Like everything else in iLife, I depend on the great integration between music, photos, movies, dvds, mail, addresses, instant messenger...
	Before You Know It Lite This is a really great language-tutoring flash-card system. I'm trying to learn Italian, and this is helping a lot. I've also loaded it up with French, but I'm trying to tackle that yet. This program combines rapid-fire flash cards, all the practice you want, and audio.
	FreeMind FreeMind is an open source free mind mapping program. As many programs that are both Java and open source, it's a little slow and it's got a few bugs. But it's OK when it's working well.
	CMapTools This is a concept mapping application. Where mind mapping emphasizes quickly getting your thoughts out in a rapid, self-organizing manner, concept mapping is a much more deliberate effort at knowledge modelling. I am basically using this app as a learning tool. I think it will help me think about lots of things better, personally and professionally.
	View Your Mind Another decent, free, open source mind mapper. Like FreeMind, it's got a few bugs, and actually the latest version kept crashing on me, but I like it well enough and it's usually my first choice when I need to do serious mind mapping. (Note: View Your Mind doesn't seem to have its own icon, and it's just a JAR file anyway, so this icon is the generic Apple application icon.)
Docs and Folders
	A saved SSH session A handy feature of the Terminal in Mac OS X is you can save SSH sessions and then just double-click to re-open them later. This one is a link that logs me into one of my domains - saves me from having to type so much. Also, I can save the terminal size, font and color settings.
	A URL link I don't remember what web site this linked to. But I use this kind of thing often. Just drag any web address from your browser's location field to the Dock (or the desktop, or lots of other places) and you've got a one-click nice big icon to hit for frequent destinations. I use this most when rapidly developing a web site that I need to go to a lot.
	The Applications folder This is one way to kind of do a Start Menu or the old Apple Menu. Drag any folder to the Dock and boom - instant menu. When I first started running Mac OS X, I made various folders full of aliases in order to group my web design apps together in one menu, all my graphics apps together in another menu, all the files for various projects in each of their own menus. It's really great. But I don't have that same kind of need right now. What still is very handy is having the entire Applications folder right there, a click away. I have to admit, I launch apps mostly from the Dock, with a quick Spotlight search coming in a close second. In third place is using the Applications menu, or popping open the Applications folder.
	Trash Yep. Pretty standard. And it's always going to go at the very end of the Dock. Nothing much else to say.

I'm here. While I've not been updating this journal in way too long, I have been busy elsewhere. I've been commenting on lots of blogs, uploading pics in various places, setting up new domains, shifting and moving and recording and ... not writing here.

I bookmarked this post called "Small Ideas" months ago, because it closely resembles part of the explanation why I don't post here as often as I'd like. I've done lots of different kinds of writing here—daily journaling, blogging of cool new things, full length essays, etc. I can't seem to just stick one- or two-sentence entries up, like some bloggers do, including even famous ones. I don't know that I even want to, although I've been considering it. I like writing essays, but there are just too many things I think about and/or bookmark because I want to write an "essay", when I really should just spit it out.

Something else is what to do with this journal. It's fairly anonymous for me, and that's a plus. But I've staked out my name in lots of places around the web and I want to start using that, but I have different requirements that I'm trying to sort out how to handle. I've got another LJ that I suppose will be primarily a photo journal. I've got other blogs in other places, including multiple domains of my own, but ... I do have to consider my employer potentially finding one and not liking it. Oh, and we also have an internal blogging option, so I've written some there, too (strictly work-related). So maybe one will remain anonymous (but not here). One will host my podcast. Who knows? Too many options. :-)

So, here we go again. I don't know exactly where this will go from here. But for now I'm writing some more, and if/when some big move happens I'll write it up.

Every now and then someone will delete their journal and then reconsider and undelete it later. Is that what's going on with violetdaisies? Anybody know what happened? I sure hope she comes back. :-(

Nicole tagged me for this meme of fours. So here goes.

Four jobs you have had in your life:
1. Dishwasher at Village Inn in Lakewood, Colorado. This was actually my first job, ever. I bought my first non-hand-me-down electric guitar with what I made on that job.
2. Manufacturing Engineering clerk - my first permanent employment once I moved to Colorado. A glorified gopher job that nevertheless opened the door to my career as a...
3. Unix system administrator. Yes, I was uber-geek #1 for years and years, until I moved into management. And then I was geeky in other ways.
4. IT consultant - the job I have now.

Four movies you could watch over and over:
These are just off the top of my head - movies I've already watched 'over and over'.
1. The Matrix
2. Sunset Boulevard
3. The Wizard of Oz
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
5. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(So I cheated.)

Four places you’ve lived:
1. St. Tammany Parish, LA
2. Jefferson County, CO
3. Douglas County, CO
4. Arapahoe County, CO

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Man, I don't love anything on TV now, most of it's garbage. Let's see, I regularly watch...
1. The Apprentice (Trump)
2. Desperate Housewives
That's about it. Everything else is just 'catch an episode here-and-there'.

Places you’ve been on vacation:
1. Bar Harbor, ME
2. Sydney, AUS
3. St. Helena (Napa Valley), CA
4. Chicago, IL

Four of your favorite foods:
1. hot blackened salmon on a caesar salad
2. cannelloni con spinaci from Cafe Jordano
3. tuna melt with swiss on rye from Deli Tech
4. warm pecan pie with hot black coffee

Four places you’d rather be right now:
I can't think of any place I'd rather be. Maybe up in the mountains.

Four sites I visit daily:
This is a little misleading because I keep up with hundreds of blogs via RSS, but I don't 'visit' many sites.
1. Yahoo!
2. Google Groups
3. Technorati
4. Flickr

And I’m tagging…
1. Monica

FilmLoop is pretty damn cool. From the website: "FilmLoop is free software that lets you broadcast, find, and share photos. It's an instant way to share your photos with your entire social network, and have everyone get involved."

Another great start to another great year.

Today is our 14th wedding anniversary. It's been a great week and an even better weekend, yesterday and today. :-D

Yesterday we had lunch at Pasquini's, then walked down the block and bought a new dog bed for our Chow mix. Then down the block a little more to our friends' antique store, where we bought matching rolling rings. They are sterling silver. Mine is 3 rings and my wife's is 5 rings. They're looped together but not quite Turkish puzzle rings, that have to go together a certain way. Then we went to dinner where our friend (the one we had Thanksgiving with) was supposed to be working but there was a last-minute schedule change so he wasn't there.

Today was Panera for bagels, then the Neighborhood Bookstore for their 25% off sale and cat-petting. After that, it was the every-two-weeks massages. Later tonight we're going out for a nice dinner. It's been a very fun and relaxing few days.

Merry Christmas, everyone. My wife arrived back home from Japan last night, so this Christmas is just perfect.

Dinner at my oldest brother's was very nice. I met one of my sister-in-law's sisters there who promptly told me it was obvious I was the youngest of the three brothers. She asked how old I am and I told her 'guess'. She didn't hesitate and said, '25'. I smiled and said 'you're right, I'm 25.' My brother chided me and I grinned and readily admitted 'I'm 40'. That blew several minds and the talk around the room for the next hour was how young I look and how I'm a vegetarian (but not really - I eat eggs and dairy and all seafood). A bunch of guests were like, 'aha, so that's your secret'. I bet half of them turned vegetarian that night. ;-)

This afternoon there's a get-together at my mom's house, with turkey and so on. We're going, and I'm looking forward to it. Then tonight we'll probably watch Olive the Other Reindeer and 'bask in the glow of each other's majestic presence'. ;-)

First there was my birthday party on 11/19, then we attended a Thanksgiving get-together at our friend Blake's apartment on 11/24. Today I attended my nephew's 1st birthday party, had a good time. Then this Thursday is a Christmas get-together at my other brother's house. And finally on Christmas Day there's a big to-do at my mom's. This is a lot of family time all at once. :-\

I woke up at 3:00 this morning to drive my wife to the airport for her first trip back to Tokyo in the last year and a half. They're at a critical point in the schedule and need her abilities on-site in Japan, so she had to go. She is scheduled to return on Christmas Eve. I know how these trips go, though. They're always extended, either a little or a lot. In this case, extend it one day and she misses Christmas. As it is, she's missing today's party and Thursday's. I miss her. :-(

Good news. LiveJournal is giving us Free Account people 6 userpics now. I haven't added any new ones yet, but I will. :-)