Monday, January 27, 2003
Crazy? Or child of a tech generation?
At lunch today, I walked past a lady sitting on a bench. As I passed, she said, "Can you feel it?" When I turned to ask, "Feel what?", I noticed that she was staring in a different direction and not talking to me at all. She continued, "She's driving me crazy!" and then started laughing.
Ten years ago, I would have assumed she was certifiably insane. Today I assumed she must have been talking on her mobile phone. There was no physical evidence to lead me to that assumption other than the fact that her hair was covering her ears. I want to believe there was a phone earpiece hidden in there somewhere.
Thursday, January 16, 2003
Gear lust...
The web site I've been working on for the past couple weeks just went live today. Open Labs is an Austin company with a great idea for live performance gear. Check out the eKo, the first release in their new line of products. I can't wait to run VJAMM or MidiVid on it.
Monday, January 13, 2003
The mailman brought a late Christmas present in the mail today: a Fuji FinePix 3800 digital camera. Thanks Mom and Dad.
I used Apple iPhoto for the first time today and I rather like it. It's a convenient piece of software and another example of how Mac OS X "just works." Let's see if I can work it's capabilities into the plan I had in mind for my photo portfolio. I'm running out of excuses to post more images on my site. ;) It should take me a few months to catch up to Yimay.
Friday, January 10, 2003
New Job
I took a job at Bearing Point today. The office is on Third and Congress so I'll be working in downtown Austin again and I can ride the bus. Woohoo! I'll also be working with Patrick Fox again, who, by the way, needs to update his website. :)
To be or not to be... employed...
Today's the day I have to decide one way or another what to do with my employment situation. Chances are I'll be an employed nine-to-fiver... er.. I mean, nine-to-sixer by EOB today. I'll let you know.
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Surfin' Safari...
At MacWorld today, Steve Jobs announced Safari, Apple's new web browser. I downloaded it and gave it a try earlier.
Safari does have some cool features, like popup blocking and a cache-clearing hotkey, but my overall impression was much lower than I expected compared to existing Mac browsers such as Internet Explorer 5 and Mozilla. The Cocoa capabilites are impressive, but Chimera was the first in that realm and it's CSS support is better. Most of Safari's DHTML and CSS support is fantastic, but there are several errors, specifically with complex CSS and XHTML, that cause certain pages to be unusable. Full keyboard access is especially lacking. I've already sent in close to 20 reports. However, it is in public beta stage and hopefully these bugs will be cleared up first. Come to think of it, the public beta of OS X left something to be desired, too, but the latest release of Jaguar is fantastic, I have faith that Apple's finished product will be a great browser.
I'm really impressed with the other new Apple releases today. I especially love the fact that the Macintosh platform has multiple Microsoft alternatives for Office (OpenOffice, Appleworks, etc.) and the like. Now if they could only integrate Mail, iCal, and Address Book into one application... I could really use one of those huge PowerBooks, too. Wow!
Sunday, January 05, 2003
Accessibility update...
With some recent changes to my log page (specifically the removal of the 'comments' reliance on JavaScript), this site now once again compliant with the W3C/WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Level Triple-A. If you're feeling bored and think you can find some errors. I'd love to hear about them if they exist.
Open Office for Mac OS X
A public beta of Open Office for Mac OS X has been released. Open Office is 100% free and contains open source full-featured replacements of programs like Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. This is great news for the open source community and people everywhere who don't want to pay for Microsoft Office but still need to conduct business with those who do.
More exciting for me is the fact that it also includes the Gimp, a GPL application comparable to Adobe's Photoshop. The Gimp is also fully scriptable from the command line or a programming language so this open's up several possibilities of dynamic image creation for people running an OS X web server.
Friday, January 03, 2003
Happy Birthday Professor...
First of all, Happy New Year!
Second, did you know that J.R.R. Tolkien would have been eleventy-one years old today? Hat tip to C9 for the link. (I'm a dork, too. err... I mean geek.)
