The Norman family took the weekend off, and threw Evan a party for his 3rd birthday. Had a bunch of family over to our house for a birthday party - Evan had fun playing with his cousins, and got his Thomas the Tank Engine obsession taken care of for awhile.
Then, we headed north to Edmonton, to hang out at West Edmonton Mall - staying in the Fantasyland hotel right in the mall. Sounds lame, but it’s the largest indoor shopping mall on the planet (for now), and staying in the mall hotel meant we could hit the amusement park and water park without commuting. Evan had a blast - the wavepool was a bigger hit than the waterslides. There were manmade waves that must have been 2-3’ high, with surf and everything. He didn’t want to get out of the water.
That “Big Magazine” I mentioned recently was Business Week, and they published a small snippet from the phone interview I gave. Pick up the next Business Week, and check out the “Gearworld” section, for an article/sidebar written by Elizabeth Woyke and Peter Burrows. I don’t come off sounding like either a raving lunatic, nor a drooling fanboy, so it’s not too bad. It’s a much shorter article than I was thinking it was, based on the information Elizabeth was asking (and suggesting that she had already interviewed several others).
I got home today to find this postcard in my mailbox, sent by a local church for a series of chill-out workshops coming up this fall…
So, along those lines, I’ll try to finish up what I can tonight after The Boy goes to bed, then I’m going to be mostly off the grid for the weekend. Breathe… :-)
From the “well, that’s one way to take an afternoon and evening off” department…
There was apparently some kind of chemical (or biological? nobody seems to know anything) spill in the Bio Sciences building shortly before noon today. Since the Learning Commons is on the 5th floor of BioSci, that means we all got to make the journey down the concrete stairways to get the hell out of the building.
Last night, it totally hit me just how fried I am. I’ve been fighting off burnout for awhile now, but I think I may have finally succumbed to it. I realized this when, at almost midnight, my family was upstairs fast asleep, and and I continued to work on my PowerBook to try to catch up on the backlog of bugs to fix - not feeling like I was making any progress anyway. I’m having to keep working this late so I don’t have to essentially abandon my family, which I refuse to do.
I am a total Battlestar Galactica junkie. Fell in love with the previews of the miniseries, and have been watching every episode since. Absolutely great stuff - some of the best scifi on tv. I love that it avoids the formulas as much as possible, and doesn’t treat the audience like lobotomized droolbots that need constant spoonfeeding. It seems like, by and large, each episode is better than the last - and that’s hard to do for 1 season, let alone 2.
I won’t say the name of the mag, in case it doesn’t get published - no need to add pressure to the writer - but I was just interviewed out of the blue by a writer for a Big Magazine (you know the one). She is researching an article on the iPod battery life issue, and found my blog entry on it. In the interest of not being used out of context, what I basically said was:
So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).
I’m still amazed at the quality of photographs coming through Flickr - through the “Interestingness” filter, as well as through some of the more specific tag feeds I subscribe to.
Here’s a snapshot of my Flickr Favorites - and this only holds the last 4 days or so of new additions.
We had a great hacking session today, with Josh piped in over iChat and VNC from California, and King and I hunkered around his collection of Cinema Displays. We managed to replace our krufty jGenerator-powered flash file wrapper class with one based on JSwiff, in under a day.
JSwiff takes care of the nastiness of dealing with the .swf file format, and provides an extremely helpful XML intermediary - you can convert any .swf file to this xml format, modify the xml, then render back as .swf. Very handy for what we need to do.
Now, the RIAA is claiming that it would be totally fair, and that the consumers would support or even demand, that the record labels get to charge more for songs sold via iTunes, and to get a cut of iPod sales. Even though they have to spend roughly $0 to market music via the iTMS, and spend exactly $0 to sell music through it. And they spent exactly $0 to design, manufacture, market and distribute the iPod. But, they need a cut of the pie.
I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).
K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.
Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie - just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.
The Norman family took the weekend off, and threw Evan a party for his 3rd birthday. Had a bunch of family over to our house for a birthday party - Evan had fun playing with his cousins, and got his Thomas the Tank Engine obsession taken care of for awhile.
