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I'm interested in starting up a golf blog. The only existing (from what I can tell) one has no RSS feed, is rarely updated, and sees very little traffic (based on the comments). I've inquired with the owners and authors if they might like to do more, and I can await a response for only so long before moving ahead with my own plans.

I envision a blog that covers news items from the major tours. Equipment news. Tips and Help. Opinion articles. Television coverage. I imagine a "staff" of about five writers, and I've got some domain names picked out. I imagine that, if kept up for a four to five months, loose affiliations with The Golf Channel or Golf Digest or Golf Magazine may be possible, and advertising revenue may be attainable shortly before that.

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Question: What is your system's highlight color? (System Preferences -> Appearance -> Highlight Color on Mac OS X)

My Answer: Mine is currently green, having been orange for quite awhile. I grow tired of blue fairly readily - Mac OS X is very blue, after all, and it's easy to lose the selection amongst the other blue elements. I sometimes use gold as well, alternating among those three and a custom color every few weeks.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

When I golf, I always keep my own scorecard. I keep track of more than just the score, though, by documenting every shot so that I can later translate the results into a cohesive whole. This guides my practice, my focus, my swing thoughts, and course management in later rounds.

Pars result from one good shot and birdies from two. While I believe it's important to focus on the score and not the shots, I also believe that quality shots tend to lead to lower scoring and sound course management always leads to better scoring.

Documenting each shot in a round, particularly on a course you play frequently, also helps me build my own risk/reward tables and provides personalized "what club do I need" distances to the necks of doglegs, water hazards, fairway bunkers, and more.

My scoring technique is illustrated to the right. Alphabetically, we have:

1. Score for the hole. Nothing fancy here - this is my score. Birdies get a circle, bogeys a square, and "others" get a square with a thick border.
2. Putts for the hole. I count every time I use the putter, even if it's from the fringe. If there's a significant break or hill, I draw an arrow near the number to illustrate the break.
3. Putt distances. If the first putt is from the fringe, I'd write something like "32f, 1" instead.
4. The club used. The boxes below the score I use for each of my non-putter shots. In this example, I hit a driver from the tee.
5. Shot pattern and results. You can see that I drew my driver a little bit too much. As you can see in the next shot with the 8I, I'll also write things like "F" for fat ("T" for thin, "t" for toe, "h" for heel) and "Sh" for short ("Lo" for long). I don't need to write the lateral direction, because the arrow takes care of that for me.
6. The lie and any other conditions worth noting. I'll write "W" with a down arrow to note the wind into my face, or so on. Here, with "LR," I was in the light rough. "FW" is fairway, "FB" is fairway bunker (or "B" for bunker), "GB" for grass bunker, "R" for rough, "HR" for heavy rough, "HP" for hardpan, and so on.

Going over this hole, I can accurately tell you what happened: I hit a driver off the tee and started it a bit too far left to allow for the draw I was hitting that day. From the light rough I hit an 8-iron a little short and left because I caught it a tad fat. I was still on the green, though, and hit a fairly flat 32-foot putt to tap-in range for a par.

Microsoft to Gut Longhorn to Make 2006 Delivery Date precedes WinFS Axed From Longhorn Client and Server.

The end result? Longhorn is going to be a lot more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary Windows release.

The end result? Even more time for Mac OS X to beat Windows to the punch. 2006? That's a Tiger + perhaps another release away.

<rant>I have never been late for work. I've never been late for school. The times I've forgotten or been late for an event I planned with a friend - avoidably or otherwise - can be counted on the fingers of two pairs of hands.

Perhaps it's for exactly those reasons that the unreliability of others seems so obnoxious to me. If, at 1:30, you tell me that you'll call me at 4:30 so that we can set up dinner plans, and then for no real reason you fail to call, I am bothered. If you're 30 minutes late for no real reason, I'm bothered.

Far too many people don't seem to understand why behaviors like those bother me. They don't understand why I claim that forcing me to wait 30 minutes for a friend's arrival or indefinitely for a phone call to set up dinner plans demonstrates a lack of respect for my time. Apparently, those minutes, hours, and days could not have been better spent than in waiting for someone.

I don't care if plans change. If I plan to meet a friend at 5 and he calls at 4:30 to say he can't make it, that's fine. Shit happens and I'll find something else to do. However, if at 5:30 I give up waiting and calling to check on him, that's just rude.

Most of the time I let behavior like this slide. If I did not - if being repeatedly, habitually unreliable disqualified someone from being an acquaintance or friend - I think I might have very slim pickings.

What's so hard about being reliable? What great difficulty is there in simply remembering to call someone, in respecting their time? Why, after I've told people how I feel, does the behavior continue? It's selfish, it's obnoxious, and it's certainly not the way I treat people.

Fuggit.</rant>

Three days remain in the PulpFiction drive for the EFF. You can read all of the details here, but the summary goes as follows: donate $50 or more and your blog will be included as a default subscription in PulpFiction for at least six months.

We expect to release PulpFiction 1.0.2 within a week, and so your donation will be put to immediate use for the many, many PulpFiction users. We'll have French and German translations (and we may sneak Spanish in there as well).

Donate today, here or at DropCash (a campaign we set up quite late in the month).

Question: Should the US basketball team be embarrassed?

My Answer: Basketball is a team sport, and like other team sports, chemistry is underrated. If anything, this year's Olympics taught us this. However, that doesn't answer the question. Yeah, they should be embarrassed. Not because they lost, but because they talked so much smack and then lost. Repeatedly.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: Do you believe that military experience is a necessity for POTUS?

My Answer: No. I think, very much so, that it depends on the person. I also think, depending on the person, that military experience could be a negative. I can imagine a situation in which a President, for no other reason than having seen war first-hand, hesitates to send men into harm's way. Military experience seems to be a huge plus for POTUS candidates, but what about killing, seeing people be killed, or worse yet - training but never actually seeing combat or whatnot - makes a man more fit to lead? I don't know.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Question: Where do you want to see the next innovation in computing, big or small?

My Answer: I want to see hard disks that are 10x faster than they are today. Hard drives are by far the biggest bottleneck we see today. After that, I'd like to see everyone's Internet connection become 10x faster.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Sometimes it's fun to check out domain names that are about to expire.

DUMBJOKES.NET - Gee, that'll get the traffic!
WILLYOU.NET - If you're proposing via a web site, probably not.
KIDSWAP.NET - Uhhh… isn't that illegal?
ELECTRICFLY.COM - Sounds like a cool name for a movie production company or something.
DOGCOOLER.COM - For those countries where dog is considered a good meal?
CREAMYSKIN.COM - Message board for "Silence of the Lambs" fans?
BABYFIGHTS.NET - Cockfighting and pit bull fighting has been outlawed, but not baby fighting!

And my favorite…
TIGHTCHICK.COM - A community site, blog, and forum for thrifty women? 🙂

Question: How do you author posts on your blog?

My Answer: I've been trying to get used to ecto lately. Now I see that 2.0 (currently in a closed beta) fixes a few of the things I dislike and adds some other useful features. Plus, like PulpFiction, more inspiration is drawn from Mail! Cool. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it.

It's also nice that when I hit cmd-S, as I do habitually, ecto does the right thing. Safari does not. 🙂

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Yep. It's pathetic.

We (FSS) are in need of a dns resolver library for Mac OS X that has a timeout, resolves MX records, is mt-safe, and optionally supports IPv6. We've found FireDNS, but it's GPL. There's also c-ares but it lacks the ability (seemingly) to handle IPv6.

Suggestions, anyone?

Thinking "out loud" here…

I have the Sony DCR-PC101. I'd like to create a monopod that can be shoved into the ground so that I can film myself (primarily filming my shots through a round of golf). I think that the construction should be in two parts: a base and a part that attaches to the camera. I envision one of two possibilities here:

1. A pole I'd push into the ground with a flat "shelf" on top. I'd set the camera on there and go.
2. A pole for driving into the ground with some sort of attachment mechanism to attach the camera (most likely through the tripod attachment screwhole on the bottom).

No sort of permanent attachment of camera-to-pole is acceptable, because I may have to push down on the pole to get it into some firmer ground now and then. A pole of 3' is acceptable. If there was some place to which I could attach a small level, well, that'd be even cooler. 🙂 I seem to recall seeing a pop bottle (20 oz.) camera stand recently, somewhere… (Ah, thank you PulpFiction search! Here it is!)

Any suggestions? Besides wandering around Home Depot looking for inspiration, I'm not sure what to do.

Have you ever seen an empty Apple Store?

Of course, this is the old variety: wood floors, corian tables. The new (slate/wood) is soooo much cooler.

P.S. In case you couldn't tell, I'm trying to help Chris find a bug in Photon. I like it but have a few suggestions, including a template to edit the string, and an option to add content of your own (like what I'm typing here) to the post as well. This could all be solved, perhaps, with an "Ask" option in the "Entry Creation" menus.