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As some people know, I work part time at an Apple store. It's a good way to keep a pulse on the "community" of Mac users (and believe me, if you bought as much Apple hardware as I did in a year, you too would work 5-10 hours a week for the discounts). A community that's been expanding, lately, due to an influx of PC switchers. A community that's having its pride restored, gradually, by the mass population's realization (again: gradually) that "yeah, you were right all along... Macs are pretty cool."

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I've gotta blog this page before I forget it: http://www.aim.com/wireless/aolbuddy/.

AOLBuddy is a screen name that interfaces with an AIM "bot." If you type "w 33445" you get the weather forecast for Delray Beach, FL. If you type "q aapl" you'll get Apple's current stock price. Looks interesting. Hopefully they'll add some more things to that list, because news, sports, weather, movies... short list. I guess I'll build myself a custom text-heavy page for getting directions to places and stuff for my HipTop... I should get it Monday! 🙂

From this article on kuro5hin.org comes this quote:

Personally I don't know why Microsoft doesn't just offer a bounty for bugs. Say $10,000 for each one found, on the condition that Microsoft be notified with a week's warning. Even if 1000 bugs are found, that's only $10 million, which is spare change given what Microsoft spends developing Windows. Make the offer apply to its own employees too, and the eyeballs scanning the source code will be a lot more attentive than they are during enforced code reviews.

What developers would actually trust Microsoft to actually pay them? My guess is that Microsoft would send 80% of the people who sent in bugs a note saying "sorry, one of our employees actually found that first" or "Joe Schmoe found that one already." They'd disperse money to 20% of the real bug submitters so that people thought that maybe they were being fair. Their own developers submitting bugs might get similar treatment.

In other words, how many people would actually trust Microsoft, including their own developers? For the chance at $10k, perhaps more than less, but that's a pretty sad state of affairs…

OSU are the national champions in football. Great. I was rooting for them. When I was going to school in Ohio, of course, I rooted against them. But now I live an hour from Miami.

I like the "status quo" team to lose so that I can rib everyone else. Is that wrong of me? Is it too competitive? I dunno... OSU was the underdog. Most teams that played OSU were the underdog when I was in college... Whatever. How does this affect my life? It doesn't. I got to poke the ribs of Gabe last night after Miami lost, and now it's all done.

"If gas prices followed the inflation rate, we'd be paying $4/gallon these days. So shut your piehole and stop yer bitchin'." I consider that some of the sagest advice I ever received (especially the piehole part). It's advice that pops into my head every time someone chooses to whine about the cost of owning a computer.

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C|Net and News.com (.com) are not really known for their "stellar reporting." The latest proof that they've got "great consultants" comes from this article, entitled "Apple Preparing New Upgrade Fees." Let's have a look at the first quote:

"Windows users are not making the switch as Apple had hoped, and now the company is pulling a Microsoft-like move by bundling popular applications and pasting a 'premium' price tag to them," said analyst Tim Deal of Technology Business Research.

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Quick, here's a trick. Grab some letters - three or four should do it - and try to make a disorder out of it. Then, claim that you've got it! Let's try "SAD". Hmm... "seasonal affective disorder" sounds good! So good, people might even buy it! Oh wait, they have already.

I'm pretty sure that when my grandparents were children, the number of "disorders" were significantly lower. I'm fairly certain that people who were down in the dumps were told "get off your ass and make yourself useful." I'm fairly certain that if you felt like shit, it would pass.

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Want a quick way to gauge just how popular Chimera is becoming? Just look at the number of Mac sites that are sporting "favico.ico" files. Favorite icons - previously a Windows IE-only thing - are now available to Mac users via Chimera.

This site doesn't have one (yet), but http://cocoadevcentral.com/ and http://freshlysqueezedsoftware.com/ do.

Quark and NeverWinter Nights (for the Mac and Linux) made Wired's "Top 10 Vaporware of 2002" list. My personal list includes the Mac version of Unreal that shipped for Windows and Linux a few months ago as well as real online gaming for my GameCube. Maybe next year…

When I was in college, I listened to the professors to whom i wanted to listen, and ignored those which I wanted to ignore, keeping half an ear on them for things that may be on a test. I taught myself Calculus 3 because the professor was such an entire bore I considered att class at all to be a waste of time, and simply showed up often enough that the prof didn't utterly despise me.

This article from the New York Times talks about professors competing with WiFi students (or rather, students with computers and access to a WiFi network). I don't rememeber how many emails I sent or how many AIM conversations I had during my classes the last two years i was at school, but the numbers were fairly high. Just one hint to students: make sure your computer is muted…

I am blogging this just so I can go back to it and look at how many things they got wrong.

An iPDA? Apple buys Xerox? Those seemed the most laughable. But we'll see who's wearing the egg in a week or so...

I wish I was going. The shows are always interesting, after all. But I should be (again) at WWDC this year, and that's far more practical an event to attend than a trade show. Will I go to Miami to watch the stream or do it on the Web? I'm not sure yet...

I totally changed some things about this site today. I sat, frustrated, for about five hours after the design was done due to some weird ass bug in Chimera (and, as it turns out, Mozilla itself). The bug is simple: view my December 2002 archives and look at the black 1-pixel border that should go around all the "white stuff."

Instead, the bug causes the black line to draw upwards through the red area at the top, here, and fails to draw it at some places along the white area (not at other points though). The bug is tied to how long some lines (from various posts - for instance the "Miami-Dade" line from my Waiters post) are. Changing font sizes (via Chimera, not in source) does not fix the bug... but modifying the entry to remove some plain old text (even if it's a bunch of  's or "blah blah blah") fixes the bug.

WTF?

Anyway, further changes will be coming shortly. It's pretty boring as it is right now... so we'll see what i can do to spice it up a little.

Two articles, this one and this one talk about Microsoft's Longhorn. Apparently (go figure) it's run into some problems. The second article mentions the fact that thousands of engineers are working on Longhorn. Thousands. I guess each is responsible for writing their own major bug, with incentives going to those who take the time to wrote two or more… 😉

At any rate, moving the filesystem to a database (would there still be "files" per se? I dunno) has proven more difficult than they initially expected. Maybe we'll find out in 200…8?

Apparently I'm an ISTP. My "Meyer-Briggs" personality type, anyway. I encourage you to check out your own type at that link...

As to ISTPs, well:

People of this type tend to be: logical, pragmatic, and matter of fact; quiet, unassuming, and autonomous; realistic, pragmatic, and aloof; impulsive and curious about the physical world; flexible and resourceful; objective and unemotional. The most important thing to ISTPs is the freedom to act independently and follow their impulses.

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Not mine, but from TextIsm come some 2003 predictions, including:

JUNE In a coffee shop, a woman with a BA in English will admit her affection for J.R.R. Tolkien, causing her companion, whom she will just have met after a lengthy exchange via an online dating service, to glaze over and think about dinner, which he will consume alone.