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My team wasn't in the Super Bowl, but at least I can make fun of the teams that were.

After Tampa Bay won Super Bowl XXXVII, hundreds of Oakland Raider fans took to the streets of the city, setting fires, breaking windows, and throwing rocks and bottles. Though three firemen were treated for minor injuries, none of the 400 police officers on hand to control the crowd were injured.

Apparently, Raider fans can't throw any better than Rich Gannon. [seen on rec.humor.funny]

From this entry at the unusually named "Better Living Through Software" (the guy is a Microsoft employee) comes this quote:

Many geeks like to point out "sysadmins who haven't updated their patches for six months" as the cause of worm outbreaks like this. If everyone had updated their patches within the last six months, this worm would not have spread; but I think that misses the point. Sysadmins don't keep up with patches; just as the sun rises in the east. Blaming sysadmins does nothing to solve the problem.

It may not solve the problem, but hiring good sysadmins and firing the incompetent ones might go a long way towards solving the problem. Way to make excuses for your fellow Microsoftian morons. And yes, I'd react the same way if some Unix bug took down a lot of Mac OS X machines when a patch had been available for six months.

I love finding quotes that show just how clueless otherwise smart people can be:

"In my opinion, shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software (no sources) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches). I simply do not believe in the shareware market at all." -- Linus Torvalds, 1998

At least he acknowledges that his own steaming pile of poo (I exaggerate) lacks "finishing touches." What he fails to acknowledge, of course, is that "shareware" ranges the gamut from 5-minute AppleScripts and Web services to full-on software that competes directly with commercial software, but has a downloadable "demo," plopping it into the "shareware" category in the minds of many (and let it be understood that we can't actually make fun of Linus without knowing how he defines shareware. Is MailDrop shareware? DayLite? Audion?)

David Hyatt's recent blog entry on RSS aggregators, NetNewsWire, and Safari touched off an interesting little debate that I'd like to take further and perhaps broaden. But first, I'd like to state my understanding of a few things.

1. David is not saying Safari will add RSS aggregating capabilities. He's just broached the subject in public, that's all.
2. Even if David wanted to put RSS into Safari, he might not. He's on a team. He's also employed by Apple. He'll do what they want in the end.
3. Almost all of the comments you read at his blog or on any other blog are, by definition, not very indicative of "the general user." Most users don't have blogs and don't even read blogs. Not yet, anyway.

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It's tough for me to conceive of US males who don't understand football. However, it seems that these strange mutants do, in fact, exist. If they don't understand football, can they understand hockey? Baseball? Every sport has complex rules; the complex ones are only, at most 10% of the calls. 90% of the calls are simple. Holding? Easy. Pass interference? Simple.

My mom understands the rules of football, as does my dad (my mom's the bigger fan). And now there are men who don't? Men from the US? Non-gay men from the US? Aaaarrrrggghhhh! Civilization is crumbling! I mean, I don't care about cars, but I know how they work and what the parts do, their names, etc. I even understand how cricket works, and I'm not British. Okay, I'll shut up now.

I had the same dinner last night that I always have at Outback. In fact, I've never ordered anything but the same food at the Outback: the Melbourne, rare, baked potato with tons of butter and bacon, and cinnamon apples instead of the salad. Sometimes I get wings, bacon cheese fries, or a drink.

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Still looking for some more tabbed Safari mockups? Check out this page, then, to get your Monday fix.

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It struck me today while reading an article about Douglas Englebart and his mouse how different the world might be if ol' Dougie had patented his mouse. Surely Fruit Company would have paid him, right? After all, they first used it on a $10,000 computer. Surely they would have? Right? I don't know…

Says Steven:

I think there should be a programming language called Subjective-C. Boolean operations would return different results depending on who was using your program.

I sometimes wish I could remotely disable my software on a customer's computer, offer the customer a refund, and say "thanks for being the stupidest customer alive - we don't appreciate the business!" Of course, that's entirely brutal of me, but at what point do you refuse support to someone? I haven't hit that limit yet, and I've spent 5 hours on the phone (several calls) with a customer before at my expense. I'm a big believer in customer support, and building a loyalty through excellent support. But man, sometimes it'd be so easy to just say "we've issued you a refund… please leave us alone!" 😀

David Hyatt, former Mozilla/Chimera über-nurb and current Safari nurb-extraordinaire, ponders the merging of RSS aggregators and browsers. It's awesome that David - in public view no less - is considering these things. And to you tabbed browsing fans, David gives you some hope, saying "tabs provide one with a means of efficiently handling a lot of information."

My own personal take: rss:// should be a protocol. NNW should grab an RSS link and add the subscription. Simple as that. It happens when I click an rtsp: (QuickTime) link. It happens when I click an aim: (AIM) link. It certainly happens when I click mailto: ftp: http: https: and others. It used to happen when I clicked gopher: links too :-).

P.S. I think it's funny that David says "news" when he really means RSS or something like that - news, after all, has its own protocol: NNTP. C'mon now David, I'd hardly call this site news! Heh heh.

The Steelers aren't playing in today's game, so I don't really feel like watching. I've got a date and I'm going to go eat steak (is that a bad first date thing to do?), then probably come back and watch a movie or something. I've been talking to this gal for awhile now, so, don't think I've got some swank "hey, baby, wanna head back to my place" thing planned. It's not my style, and I couldn't pull it off if I wanted to.

Progress on Bookie is proceeding. I'll mention it probably tomorow or Tuesday. Then Brad and I are working on another "mystery product." Regular readers of my blog might be able to guess what it is…

I saw that an Apple Store opened in Houston or something, and it's freaky how similar all the stores look. I know that's on purpose, but man… it's still freaky. The pictures looked like the ones I took from the Wellington store. I'm not the biggest fan of the 30' stores - the 45' stores are so much nicer, and have a theater - but I'll take what I can get, I guess. Hmm, speaking of taking what you can get, I've gotta chill some booze for later tonight. Hee hee hee. 😉 (Again, just joking.)

I've just spent a few hours playing around with the public beta of Terragen for Mac OS X. Terragen, as you can see to the right, is a 3D landscape thing. If you remember Bryce, you'll understand Terragen. Though pretty simple (i.e. no trees), Terragen offers a wide variety of options. The interface is a bit quirky, with windows scattered everywhere, but once you grok the basic principles it's very easy to work with.

Here are three scenes I've created.

• Scene 1 (640 x 480)
• Scene 2 (1200 x 900)
• Scene 3 (1200 x 900)

I'm no 3D scene god or anything, so don't make fun of me too much.

Heh heh heh. Too much fun. If you want to create your own 's day hearts, head on over to the Acme Heartmaker for hours, errr, minutes of fun. Of course, if you want to buy these kinds of candies, get them from Despair.com.

I'm quite certain my 's this year will be spent alone, as usual. Even when I was dating Jessica for five years we had all of one V Day together. The guy in me wants to rebel against "romantic" crap like V Day anyway, but the sensitive guy wants to say "every day should be like V Day for the one you care about." Guess I gotta worry about finding the one to care about first, right?

Shit happens… usually to Windows. Today's little MS SQL exploit - for which a patch was issued last July - just goes to show how amazingly incompetent and/or lazy the average Windows sysadmin can be. Please, show some respect for yourself, your job, your role in life. If your server was vulnerable to this attack, you should be fired.

Shawn writes in this entry that he doesn't intend to buy iLife. Why? Because he only uses iTunes and iPhoto. I'm going to buy iLife... but I use iDVD (not so much iMovie, since I've got Final Cut Pro). In fact, my project this weekend was going to be to archive some West Wing episodes to DVD. Maybe next week…

I've never "supported Apple" for the sheer sake of "supporting Apple." They're a company - they want my money. I love their products, and I buy what I need. QuickTime 6? $30? That's less than half an hour at my billing rate. Did I buy it? You bet. iLife? Less than an hour - how can I not justify these purchases? That's cheap.

I've got four copies of Jaguar, but I gave two away and I own two machines. I bought them because I didn't want to wait for my two free copies - that $129 to be an "early adopter" was just that: to be an early adopter, not "to support Apple." I wanted Jaguar on my machines from day one (the seeds I had installed didn't quite satiate me - I like the CDs! :-D)

It's not that I question the sanity of anyone who wants to "support" a company… but can't you find a better reason than that, like "I might some day use iDVD, and it's worth having around so I don't have to go to a store to buy it, and hope they have it in stock, or wait 3-5 days to get it from the online store."?