Today marks the conclusion of six years of blogging at Retrophisch.
Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three entries.
Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three bits of myself, revealed for passers-by. Two thousand, two hundred, sixty-three things I thought you might find interesting. Or funny. Or serious enough to care about. Or to do something about. Or just for me to think about. Or to do something about.
Now to press forward in to the next six…
So today marks the eighth year I’ve done the blogging thing. I won’t go in to any great recap, as I did two years ago. (And I completely failed to note the seventh blogoversary last year.) Needless to say, some things have remained the same, and some things have changed quite a bit.
For one, I’m blogging less, mostly because of Twitter, and if you want to know what I’m up to, or what I’m thinking, in short snippets, you should definitely follow my Twitter account. For another, I’m paying slightly less attention to politics, which used to constitute a good amount of posts. Finally, some days, I just don’t feel like I have much to say in a blog form, so why bother with some drivel to the blog that’s better suited for the 140-character limitation of Twitter, or not for public consumption at all?
Still, I have hopes for more thoughtful posts. I just don’t know when those might begin appearing, though I can guarantee it will be some time in the next eight years… 8^)
Oh, did I forget to mention my wife’s become a blogger?
And that she did so last year?
Whoops.
Well, that takes me out of the running for Husband of the Year™.
(And if you think that’s all I’ve done to take myself out of the running, I have some beachfront property in Scottsdale I’d like to talk to you about.) <rimshot> But enough about me…
The missus began blogging last May as an outlet for the angst and excitement she felt as a result of our seeking to add to our family through adoption. She’s also been talking about our struggles with infertility as we seek to add to our family on our own. At some point she began sharing little tidbits about our life at home, missing her mom, and other things outside the realm of adoption, and I suggested a name change for the blog.
In private conversations with friends, nearly all online, I’ve often referred to our home in general, and the study, from where I compute, in particular, as “the Phisch Bowl”. Seeing how I have no intention whatsoever of allowing the fish (phisch?) meme, courtesy of my anagramed moniker, to die, my abrupt suggestion to her was, “Life from the Phisch Bowl”. So there you go.
A small word of warning. The missus tends to use some shorthand and acronyms she’s picked up from motherhood/pregnancy/infertility forums over the years, and some might not be readily decipherable. Trust me, there was a time when I was constantly asking her what this acronym or that one meant. Should you need similar help, drop me a line, or better yet, drop the missus a line over on her blog, and ask her. Better still, just drop her a line and say hi.
Her latest post also deals with an issue near and dear to our hearts. Once again, Kel will be participating in the March of Dimes’ March for Babies, formerly known as WalkAmerica. Due to a commitment with the little phisch, I won’t be walking this year, but Kelly will, and she’s raising funds.
(Much to my chagrin, she’s already raised more funds for this than I need in total for my mission trip to Juarez, to build houses for the poor there, in June. This includes monies from my own mother, who was asked, along with several friends and family members, to support my trip prior to Kelly beginning her fund-raising. Hrmmm. Perhaps I should outsource my own fund-raising to the missus, since we all know she is far, far more charming a person than I….)
So, drop by her blog and say hi, and if you’re led, help us with the March for Babies.
I love you, sweetheart.
So I got off my duff and finally got around to putting in to place the redesign (realignment?) of the blog that I’ve sat on for the better part of two years. Those of you who normally read the blog from the RSS feed can click over to see the new look. (If you care, that is.) Those of you who read the blog by actually going to it may have noticed the new look over the past couple of days. (Or maybe not, and if that’s the case, I’m left to wonder whether or not that’s a good thing or a bad thing.)
One thing you might notice on the main page is the Twitter section at the top, marked “Recently”. If you are a regular reader of the blog, you may have noticed that my blogging has taken a huge dive in recent months, with most posts consisting of the daily links posting from my del.icio.us account. The reason for that is I’m doing a lot of micro-blogging over on my Twitter account. I say micro-blogging, because Twitter limits each post to 140 characters. (This is largely due to the number of character one can put in to a SMS message, and Twitter has excellent SMS compatibility.) So now you when you visit this blog, you can also see my latest on Twitter.
There’s further tweaking ahead. I likely won’t leave all of those links in the sidebar. They’ll get spun off to a separate page, like the reading list and photos. I’d like to integrate a linkblog in to the main page, a la John Gruber and other bloggers, instead of relying on my del.icio.us account to automatically spit them out each morning. The linkblog would allow more immediate posting, and any comments about the link wouldn’t be limited to del.icio.us’s text field.
The biggest tweak, however, will be under the hood, as I upgrade to Movable Type 4. Hopefully, this will be transparent to you, dear reader, but will empower me and make my blogging life easier in the long run. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another two years for these various tweaks to be made reality.
I have quite a few people to thank for their input and help over the past two years. So many, in fact, that I dare not name them all here out of fear of leaving someone out. Needless to say, those of you who fall in to this category know who are. You occupy prime positions in my instant-messaging buddy list and e-mail address book. You are my friends, and for putting up with my endless questions of “How does this look?” and “What do you think of this?”, or the myriad times when I failed to even ask a question and just IMed you a link with no backgrounding of any sort on my part, you have my sincerest thanks.
If you absolutely hate the new look of the blog, well, that’s your opinion, and you should place any blame for your dislike firmly at my feet. If you absolutely love the new look, it’s because of the wonderful people, mentioned above, who took time out of their lives to share part of mine with me.
Oh, and if you happen to be nostalgic for the old look, you can still find it here, for a little while.
My favorite blogging client has now been revved to version 2. I’ve been using MarsEdit ever since original developer Brent Simmons rolled out the 1.0 product, and I’ve been very happy with it. A couple of months ago, I began beta-testing new owner Daniel Jalkut’s upgrade of the client, and wow, was I ever blown away. Brent never really had the time to devote to MarsEdit, what with the popularity of NetNewsWire, and Daniel has definitely taken MarsEdit to the next level.
One thing I’ve noticed, being on the beta test lists of a few independent and small-shop Mac developers, is the level of responsiveness from those developers. You’re talking directly with the individual responsible for the product, not some project manager or mid-level flunky who really doesn’t get what’s going on with the application. Daniel is no exception, encouraging great participation from those on the beta list, and he always maintains a professional, and very friendly, attitude. It sounds like the the upgrade release is a hit so far, and no wonder, because MarsEdit 2 is a great product.
Great job, Daniel!
(The obvious answer is “Flash sucks, that’s why”.)
We all know that the iPhone doesn’t include Flash. Various theories have been aired.
I have a theory that I haven’t heard yet: Flash wasn’t included because it crashes so much.
I detest Flash. It’s a resource hog, and there are very few Flash-based sites that are well designed to begin with. I hope Google moves YouTube to H.264 video for the “regular” Internet, not just for the iPhone’s access.
Roughly Drafted makes the case that the iPhone is a threat to Flash, as well as to Windows Media and Real. Why? Because H.264 is an standard video codec that doesn’t rely on a software processor, for one. In laymen’s terms, by using H.264, your system doesn’t have to work as hard, because it likely has a hardware processor capable of decoding H.264 without having to hit your general processing unit, which means you get more battery life, use less power, etc.
If you’re a content provider, you don’t have to worry about providing multiple video formats. You can simply output a single, MPEG-based H.264 video that you know users won’t have to have a plug-in for, like Flash, Windows Media, or Real. The other upside is that you don’t have to pay any licensing fees for those three formats, either. Sounds like a win-win to me.
[Wave of the phin to Lee for the Roughly Drafted link, via IM.]
I believe genealogy fascinates a lot of people. We’ve all thought about “Where did I come from?” Most of us have no memories of family beyond our grandparents, maybe our great-grandparents. (I was able to know two of my great-grandmothers, both on my dad’s side, as a child.)
I came across Geni through some random blog readings, and I started a family tree with myself, in the hope I can help my son understand our family history a bit when he gets older.
The cool thing about Geni is that as you add people to your tree, you can invite them to sign up for the site (it’s free, at least for now), and they can add to their own tree, which in turn adds to yours. Think of it as MySpace meets the family tree, social networking making genealogy more practical. After all, my dad knows a lot more about his grandparents and great-grandparents than I do, and he can add a lot more information himself that I might not even think of.
I won’t go in to the whole spiel, because why say what’s already been said? Suffice to say, postings of a certain nature will increase in frequency here, because they are no longer being posted there. Links which appeared in the side bar there will be appearing in the side bar here. Some of you won’t care, some of you will. That’s just the way it is.
I confess I’ve been sucked in to the world of Twitter. It’s kind of addictive, watching what folks like John Gruber, the Iconfactory boys, Maury McCown, and even Darth Vader, are up to.
I’d love to know if my friends have accounts, so I can add you as a friend to mine, and please feel free to add me as a friend to yours. Ping me via IM, drop me an e-mail, or leave a comment.
One cool thing Twitter did last week was they created a Macworld account. By adding this account as a friend, you could follow the postings of those at Macworld Expo as Steve announced the latest and greatest tech from our favorite fruit company. There were so many messages coming in to Twitter through AOL Instant Messenger that Twitter exceeded its allowable AIM traffic, and that service was unavailable for about a day. (To clarify, you couldn’t post to Twitter via AIM; Twitter and AIM were each unaffected.)
You can post to Twitter via your Twitter page, by instant message (Jabber or AIM), or by text message from your mobile phone. (Text message charges from your mobile provider apply, but there’s no charge from Twitter.) If you’re a Mac user, you can also use Maury McCown’s TwitterPost, or the just-released-today Twitterrific from those aforementioned boys at the Iconfactory. Both apps are freeware.
So the question remains, what are you doing?
I’d say something pithy like, “All the news you can use in one spot”, but for quite a few folks, it may not, in fact, be all the news they could use, and it may not include all of the news they may want to use. Be that as it may: The News Right Now.
TNRN is a news aggregator which combines “Old Media” with “The Blogs”, their titles, not mine. The sources are divided on the page, with the former being on top, and the latter on the bottom. There are preferences to switch this, and to even exclude one or the other from being displayed. Another preference to tweak is the displaying of news by the source, or by topic, by source being the default. These preferences are in handy drop-down menus at the top of the page.
In the Old Media wing, one can find the headlines from The Wall Street Journal, the AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, WSJ’s OpinionJournal, Philly’s Inquirer, the LA Times, the Washington Times, and a few others.
The Blogs range from Washington Monthly to The Corner (National Review), The American Prospect to Townhall.com, Eschaton and the Daily Kos to Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt. Joshua Micah Marshall, The Plank, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, and Ed Morrissey round out the featured bloggers.
There is no way to delete or add an individual news source or blog, but for a lot of folks who may engage several of these sites per day, The News Right Now is a good way to get an overview of the latest news from a single source.
Four years ago today, the first post appeared, and a new blog was born. I moved my blogging efforts from my first site to this one, and I’ve been here ever since. Well, this and another place or two.
My thanks to my small—very small—but loyal band of readers. You all should comment more!
For you baseball aficionados, Tiff has a great story on what happened when she gave tickets to some coworkers, and how they thanked her.
Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, affectionately known as the MacBU, has its own blog.
Via The Iconfactory
Someone took the house I, and I’m sure thousands of others, would love to live in—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater—and put it in Half Life 2.
Via del.icio.us
If you read this blog mainly through my news feed, please note that I’m now using FeedBurner to supply the site’s RSS feed. The old feed is still operational, and will remain so for a while, but I would like to discontinue it in the near future.
So in your news reader of choice, please update the Retrophisch news feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/retrophisch.
You can also click on the feed link on the main page, or the RSS button in Safari’s address bar, or that of your auto feed-detecting browser of choice.
Michael has announced that C-Command now has forums for all of its products.
I helped him do some testing with the forum boards—which means we spent about ten minutes on it—and if you’re a SpamSieve or DropDMG user, I hope to see you around the virtual water cooler.
Dear God in Heaven.
[Via Firewheel Design.]
Just when I thought there was never going to be anything interesting on Yahoo’s corporate blog, they have races with toy babies triggered by the licking of lollipops.
It wasn’t much of a first post, just kind of a “Hello, world, this is me…” sort of thing. Really feeble, looking back on it now. But it’s been six years; the blogging portion of my self is now a first grader. Though, given how rapidly the pace moves in the blogosphere, I’m sure we have something akin to dog-years multiplication to determine the “true” age of our blog-selves.
A lot changes in six years.
Since that first post on August 1, 2000, there have been four national elections, including two presidential elections. The first was bitterly contested, though even so, still showed the world how the rule of law can prevail and the change of power in a nation can be handled without violence and bloodshed. Our nation was brutally attacked on September 11, 2001, and a vast majority of our citizens finally realized the fact that we had been at war with radical Islam for more than two decades. I pray we continue to realize that fact, and what it means to maintain resolve for the next two decades.
Six years ago, not too many people had heard of Google, now officially a verb as well as a proper noun. Now, it has supplanted Yahoo as the number-one search destination on the Internet, though the latter still reigns as the top portal site. Microsoft has managed to ship only one new version of its flagship operating system. In six years. One.
Steve Jobs’ return to Apple has reversed the company’s fortune. Though our favorite fruit company may not be shipping any more Macintosh units now than it was prior to Jobs coming back, it has changed the face of the computing and music industries. The iMac. The G4. The G5. iTunes. The iPod.
Six years ago, the words “Macintosh” and “Intel” would never be found in the same sentence together, except for a Mac zealot excoriating the chip maker, or vice versa. Even more outlandish would have been the notion of a dual-boot Macintosh: one that can run the Mac OS or Windows. Pull that off, Michael Dell.
The weblog has become a serious element of what is called “New Media”, the power of the blog leading to, among other things, the exposure of Jayson Blair as a fraud, the ouster of Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader, and, ultimately, the end of Dan Rather’s career as a major network news anchor. Web designers and programmers are able to do things now they could only dream about six years ago, as we witness the rise of “Web 2.0”. Six years ago, RSS (define it however you will) wasn’t a blip on anyone’s radar, and Atom wasn’t even a seed in the minds of its creators, yet today “feeds” are an integral part of the online experience.
Six years ago, I had one site. Today, besides this one, I maintain two others.
Six years ago, my wife and I hadn’t really been on a vacation in the previous five years. Since then, we’ve been to the Hawaiian Islands three times, Santa Fe, San Francisco, New York, the mountains of Arkansas, New England, and Wyoming. Six years ago, I was beginning to renew a love with photography, thanks to my first digital camera. My father planted the seed of this love, giving me his old 35mm camera when I went on the yearbook staff my senior year in high school. I was looking through my senior year book a month or so ago, and was fascinated by the number of photographs therein that were mine. Now, I don’t have to wait for photos to be printed to display them.
Six years ago, I was still in the beginnings of online friendships that are now deeper than I thought could be, having met, in person, these guys only a few times. Lee, Michael, Rob: my life is richer because of your being in it. I have invested in new friendships, and hope to grow some more.
Six years ago, a guy at the office was just a coworker who happened to be a fellow Christian. Today, he is a close friend, who helped me come in from the cold, get grounded and real about my faith. He helped me rediscover a love for baseball I had left behind in college, and has been a steady confidant. FranX, you embody the principal of iron sharpening iron, and I cannot tell you how much I value our friendship.
Six years ago we were in one house, in another city within the DFW metroplex. Today, we’re in a bigger house, in a slightly smaller town next to the city we used to live in. Six years ago, close friends from college were a fifteen-minute drive from our old house; today, they’re a two-minute walk away. We have new friends, who have changed our lives in profound ways, as we have witnessed the births of children, the failures in marriage, and the changing of jobs, both for them as well as ourselves.
Six years ago, my wife was on the road to partnership in a major Dallas law firm. Now, she’s working for the subsidiary of a Fortune 500, an in-house counsel with better hours and quality of life. Six years ago, I was employed by a Fortune 100 telecommunications company. Now, I’m three years past being laid off from that same company, the skill sets I thrived on there deteriorating as I struggle within myself to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I left behind coworkers who had become more than that, they were friends, and I thank God I am still able to keep in touch with them, even if for the most part it is through instant messages and e-mail.
Six years ago, my wife and I were beginning the long, hard road to become parents. Three years ago, we were handed a little miracle, and I mean that in every sense of the word: born nine weeks early, you would never know it to look at our son today. We are truly blessed.
Six years ago, we were still wandering in the wilderness of faith. We did not have a church home, and my walk with God consisted mainly of reading Christian literature and listening to Christian-branded music. Thanks to some of those new friends mentioned above, we now have a place to call home, and my own walk has been deepened as a result.
Six years ago, I was not as happy as I am now. I like to think I was pretty happy then, but in six years I’ve grown in many ways (while staying pretty juvenile in others). I am closer to my Lord, I am closer to my wife—my best friend and love, who puts up with and accepts me—and I am closer to friends, of which there are more today than before. I have this beautiful little boy in my life whom I love more than I ever thought was possible to love another human being.
Jobs come and jobs go. One career is left for one in another field. Scenery changes. Technology changes. The majority of the people in your life will pass before your eyes as if vapor. Six years ago, I didn’t have as clear of a focus on the really important things of life, and today I do.
A lot changes in six years.
I’m so looking forward to the next six.
The iPod cases from ifrogz look very nice. I like the customizable aspects of the design, but would love to be able to upload my own image for the Screenz. A Retrophisch-branded iPod case in “Gun Metal” Wrapz and “Thick Black” Bandz would rock.
Amazon Grocery is now out of beta after more than 200,000 people have used it to shop for food staples.
One of the recent winners of a Flickr Pro account speaks to my childhood.
So the calendar feature for Backpack launched today. I like how easy it is to add items to the calendar, and I realize this is a 1.0 release (Note to Google: it’s not a beta.), but I’m greatly disappointed it didn’t roll out with repeating events as part of the feature set. I was looking forward to using iCal solely as the desktop conduit between an online calendar I can access anywhere, and my mobile devices with which I would like to sync calendar events.
Sure, I can do that with Google Calendar, but I’m already in Backpack so much, and I like 37signals’ implementation and interface better. Besides repeating events, other features I’d like to see added in a future update, ranked in order of personal importance:
Events added to Backpack’s Calendar do not show the scheduled time within the calendar. Mark Gallagher notes this in the announcement’s comments, because to see an event’s time, you have to click on the event, instead of just being able to glance at the calendar and seeing all of the times in context.
The ability to toggle the time on the reminder. For some events, I need more than 30 minutes notice, my parents’ anniversary, for instance, which I need a few days notice so I can buy a card and put it in the mail to them. Yes, I know I can use Backpack’s Reminders feature for this, but it would be more productive to have this built in to the Calendar side of the house. It seems like overkill, and double work, for me to enter the event of my parents’ anniversary in to the calendar, then have to switch over and enter a separate reminder to buy a card days in advance.
Commenter “D” notes: “Quick hack to get repeating events: enter them as reminders and then subscribe to your reminder feed within calendar.” This is working well for me, so far, but then you’ll get in to the situation of all of your reminders being in a single calendar, when you would like to have reminders in different calendars: Personal, Work, Pet, and so on.
In the Backpack Calendar forums, 37signals’ own Jason Friedman notes that they weren’t happy with the repeating events implementation, and decided not to include it the 1.0 release. So at least for now, the best way to get this function is D’s suggestion, but it’s nice to know it is being worked on, and we can expect it in the future. I hope this upcoming implementation allows for the setting of a time other than thirty minutes before.
Single, all-day events should be displayed in the same way as multiple-day events. This was a suggestion by Ryan Christensen in the announcement’s comments. This would distinguish the all-day event, like my aforementioned parents’ anniversary, from a time-specific event, like “Give the dog his heartworm pill at noon”.
To-do list implementation for the calendar. Again, from the comments to the announcement, Jeff Croft asks about this, specifically that supported by the iCalendar format. Probably ninety-five percent of what I personally use Backpack for is some sort of to-do list. For short-term stuff, I would love to see this implemented in the Calendar, but have lived without it this far. I would much rather see 37signals devote developer time to repeating events and print styles, something they still need for Backpack’s regular pages.
All in all, the Calendar function in Backpack is simple and elegant, and on par with what I would expect from 37signals. It took them two and a half months to arrive at this point; I hope the next two and a half months result in usability improvements which put the Backpack Calendar over the top.
Mucho gracias to sysadmin extraordinaire Jim, who was up late last night with the server transition.
There is nothing like a fast server on a fast pipe to give you the warm fuzzies in your little geek heart.
We’re moving servers, thanks to the efforts of Jim, our sysadmin extraordinaire, so this site and its related entities will be unavailable for a while, beginning around 8 PM CST this evening. This includes e-mail, so if you try to send anything to my e-mail address at this domain after 8 PM, you may want to wait until tomorrow.
If you’d like a first-person account of the Hezbollah attacks on Israel, and the Israeli response, head over to David Dolan’s site and subscribe to his e-mail list.
David is a Christian pastor and author who has been resident in Israel for many years. Last year, David spoke at our church, and even for someone like me, who has followed the Mideast conflict, and the region’s history, for many years, it was eye-opening.
I love the build names for Ubuntu Linux: “Breezy Badger”, “Dapper Drake”. Are they all alliteral?
[Via Paul.]
Though I don’t do nearly enough of either, I love hiking and camping, and could see myself as a flashpacker.
Stephen H. Wildstrom has the latest idiotic move by the recording industry, which is suing XM Satellite Radio over its Inno portable receiver/recorder. Even though there’s no way to get the XM-specific music files off the Inno (yet), and despite the millions and millions of dollars in royalties XM already pays the music industry, the Inno is obviously a threat to the future of music as we know it and it must be stopped.
In other news, consumers welcomed more artists as the latter left the major music labels…
Entrepreneurs should check out the WSJ’s StartupJournal.
Guy mentions the web telephony service Jajah, which looks interesting, especially when compared to Skype. Unlike the latter, Jajah doesn’t require you to download any software, and you use your own phone.
This is just about as dead-simple telephony as you can get. You enter your phone number, then the number you’re calling, then hit the Call button. Your phone rings, you answer, then it rings the number you’re calling. That’s it.
So, like Skype, you can call internationally really cheap. Unlike Skype, you can dial Guadalajara, then chat on your mobile with the golf pro who took three strokes off your game, all while you drive to your local course.
Personally, I’ve never had much use for Skype. I haven’t called internationally in ten years, easy. Calls within the borders of the U.S. are covered adequately by my mobile phone plan. And if I were calling internationally, I may not want to be tied to the computer when doing so. Should I have the need, I can certainly see myself favoring Jajah.
Speaking of Tom, he’s authored a great paper as part of the Master’s program he’s enrolled in. Titled “Weblogs, Pamphlets and Public Citizens: Changing Modern Media”, in which he compares the citizen journalists of today’s blogosphere to the pamphleteers of pre-Revolutionary War America. I got a sneak peek during the drafting and editing phase, and I think it’s really good.
Some choice quotes:
The effects of blogs in a new media environment are twofold: Weblogs cover stories that their mainstream media counterparts, for editorial reasons or other gatekeeping practices common in modern professional media, omit or miss entirely; and weblogs also bring to bear an ever-vigilant group of diverse problem solvers that fact-check the work of many reporters and journalists in the mass-media arena. This makes the blogosphere an excellent addendum to mass media, operating as both appendix and errata to the main compendium of stories that the mass media puts into the public sphere using trained reporters and journalists.
and
As technology had advanced further, producing Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a distribution method that allows for easy and automatic syndication of new additions to weblogs, it has become possible for a consumer of media to add weblogs to their daily news diet. This allows for readers to mix and match their media, creating a new media outlet that is personally tailored to their interests and to their pursuits. Using an RSS-reader application on a personal computer, a sports fan can have a forty-page sports section and a one page local section, or a political junkie can have page after page of differing commentary from a variety of sources. The reader becomes their own editor and gatekeeper, combining multiple weblogs and conventional media sources, which have also adopted RSS, into their own personal fountain of news and commentary.
If you’ve read Dan Gillmor’s We The Media and/or Hugh Hewitt’s Blog, some of Tom’s piece will sound familiar, especially in that he cites the former as a source, but I say the familiarity makes Tom’s arguments stronger. Good work, my friend!
I know Lee will be interested in Anil’s observations on web site comments.
Stop wandering aimlessly through that phone tree, and get a human on the line.
“This is hot.” New fan-created Firefox ad that’s really good.
Love coffee? Love cafes, but don’t want to support the corporate monstrosity? Then use Delocator to find local shops near you. And please, if you know of a local cafe that’s not listed on Delocator, add it!
[Waves of the phin to John, Paul, and John at FD.]
While I think it’s probably the third-best browser for Mac OS X, I would have to say Firefox is the best browser for those who insist on using Windows. Some of the more rabid Firefox fans are making their own commercials for the browser. Give Me The Soap is my favorite.
[With a wave of the phin to dealnews.]
It’s too bad I have no design experience nor web programming skills. The guys at Firewheel Design sound fun to work with, and they’re about fifteen minutes away in Southlake.
Dan needs some of this furniture in his pad.
Cableyoyo’s new Pop is a good idea, but most folks I know with iPods keep them in some sort of case.
What happens when you shove an iPod Shuffle in to a NES controller?
[With waves of the phin to the Firewheel Design blog, and Macsimum News.]
To get back at phishers (as opposed to a phisch), use PhishFighting. It’s certainly a much better use of CPU cycles than looking for aliens that don’t exist.
[Via IM from Lawson.]
Lee has no sense of adventure.
Memo to Skip Bertman, Director of Athletics, Louisiana State University: in the future, Final Four-bound teams are not allowed to come back to Baton Rouge prior to the semi-final game. Apparently, there’s something in the water that results in “chucking”, better known as “the shooting of bricks”.
It was painful enough watching the men’s team lose the game last night due to their inability to put the ball in the basket (as opposed to UCLA’s winning by making it difficult for the Tigers to do so), but the ladies seemed to have the same problem tonight against Duke, a team which was making it difficult for the Tigers to put the ball in the basket.
Two shots at a championship, two shots blown. Kudos to UCLA and Duke. There’s always next year.
And it’s baseball season.
I’m sure some of you will respond to this revelation with a “Well, duh!”, but CompuServe is still around.
One of the ladies in our minichurch has a cs.com e-mail address, and suddenly curious as to what that domain was, I punched it in to Safari’s address box. Lo and behold, it’s CompuServe.
Which is now owned by Netscape.
Which is owned by AOL Time Warner.
Weirdness.
Given Ellyn’s column this month on Wikipedia, I thought this Penny Arcade was apropos.
[Wave of the phin to Dan.]
So the gang at 37signals have launched an affiliate program for Backpack, and, of course, I’ve signed up. You will note the link graphic in the side bar, under the “Support” heading.
37signals is doing something a bit differently with the Backpack affiliate program: you don’t actually receive cash, but rather credit toward your own Backpack account. Theoretically, your own Backpack usage could be completely free if enough people sign up for a paid plan through your referral link.
You can use this link to sign up for and use the Backpack web service. The default plan is free, so it doesn’t cost you a thing to try the service out. Backpack affiliates don’t make a dime unless you upgrade from the free plan to one of the paid plans, which start at a mere five dollars a month. (This is the plan I am currently on.) Continued use of Backpack is one more reason I will likely not renew my .Mac subscription next year.
I just wish the affiliate program had been up and running last month, when I upgraded. Then Tom, who got me hooked on Backpack to begin with, could have earned some coin.
Backpack won’t be for everyone, just as with any other tool, but as with any other tool, you won’t know if you’ll like it unless you try it.
Do not leave your Gmail In box open in your browser window, as it inevitably will consume mass amounts of real and virtual memory. Get in, do what you have to do, and get out.
Adam Engst details the plan for retiring the Info-Mac Network, noting that it has outlived its usefulness given the Internet’s current climate.
The retirement will not be immediate, though the ceasing of new software acceptance will be. The Info-Mac server will remain online for a few months, as mirror sites make the necessary decisions regarding supporting the now-frozen archive. If you want your very own mirror of the Info-Mac archives, you’ll need a mere seven gigabytes of storage and a simple Unix command.
You have to love the ode to Douglas Adams on Tim Berners-Lee’s new blog. (Hint: bottom of the page.)
[A wave of the phin to John.]
Now that Yahoo! has absorbed another social-software site, maybe del.icio.us’s import feature will get fixed. I’m hesitant to really dive in to the service, or Furl, until one of them can import all of the bookmarks I have loaded in my browser.
Michael now has a dedicated blog for C-Command products. Since the illustrious Mr. Tsai has not yet posted feed links, allow me to help you out: RSS, or if you prefer, Atom.
[Big wave of the phin to Lee for the pointers to the feed links.]
With thanks to John for the post title and link:
Rich Siegel, of Bare Bones fame, is finally blogging.
As if it weren’t enough that Rich is responsible for two of the applications I use the most each day, he is a fellow scotch and peanut butter lover. Rich, drop me a line when you’re in Dallas; there’s 12-year Glenfiddich Special Reserve in the pantry.
If you care to get Retrophisch posts via e-mail, now you can, thanks to Bloglet. Scroll down, and look for the Bloglet subscription box in the right-side column. Enter your e-mail address, hit the subscribe button, and that’s it. Enjoy!
Need to send an e-mail to a loved one’s or friend’s mobile phone, but can’t remember the confusing phonenumber@anameotherthanthecompany.something e-mail address wireless services set up? Use Teleflip, a free service. You can use it from any e-mail client or web-based e-mail. Just send a message to phonenumber@teleflip.com, and that’s it. Be sure to use all ten of the phone’s numbers.
(Note that any fees your wireless provider charges for receiving e-mail/text messages to your phone will still apply.)
Backpack and Writeboard, two excellent services by 37signals, both use Textile for text formatting. I have nothing against Textile; I used to use the plug-in for Movable Type on my blogs.
When John Gruber released Markdown in to the wild, I was intrigued, and soon after, made the switch from Textile to Markdown, and I’ve used it for online formatting ever since. Like Merlin, I’ve found myself using Markdown syntax in other areas, but unlike Merlin, only while typing.
Now I want to have my cake and eat it, too: Markdown for Backpack & Writeboard.
After using the latter for a couple of days, I e-mailed 37signals with my request. I figured it would be something not-too-hard (I hesitate to use the phrase “fairly easy,” because I am, for the most part, totally clueless about backend web server type stuff) for them to implement Markdown formatting for Writeboard. My suggestion was to make it a preference a user could select, leaving Textile as the default.
The reply I received from 37signals honcho Jason Fried was encouraging. While he made no promise as to future implementation (not surprising, standard fare), it does sound like something they’ll toss around the conference table. A whiff of hope is better than none at all.
Google’s version of Bloglines, Google Reader, is now available as a public beta. The first feed I put in was for Jon’s GoogleRumors, since that’s where I found out Google Reader was live. I echo Jon’s sentiments, and will also note, based on my own feed, that Google Reader doesn’t recognize HTML tags in post titles. It doesn’t seem as zippy as Gmail does, either.
I’ll keep my eye on it, but it won’t be replacing NetNewsWire for me any time soon.
No, the Defense Department isn’t shuttering personal blogs of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, but it is asking them to be more careful. I can understand the frustration some of our active-duty milbloggers must feel, but for security reasons, it is better to err on the side of caution and not post something the enemy could potentially use and exploit.
Tom’s not happy with Brent and Sheila’s sale of NetNewsWire to NewsGator. I’m going to chalk it up to the fact that he’s literally on drugs.
If you’ve spent any time on the Ranchero beta lists, exchanged e-mail with Brent, or read his blog posts on development, you know Mr. Simmons does not go off half-cocked with major business and development decisions. Despite Tom’s dislike of NewsGator, I’m sure Brent and Sheila were quite careful with whom they chose to sell NetNewsWire. After all, this company is Brent’s new employer. He would have to be convinced the company would foster the sort of development environment in which he would have the freedom to make NetNewsWire all it could be.
As he notes, there are things he’s wanted to do with NNW that he has been able to not get to, having to deal with the business and support aspects of being an independent software developer. By going in-house with NewsGator, Brent is now free from those other constraints, absent anything he may wish to do on the side with Ranchero’s other products that NewsGator did not purchase. With regard to NetNewsWire, all Brent has to worry about right now is programming. One would reasonably believe this is a Very Good Thing™.
I have no opinion about NewsGator, as a company or with regard to any of its products. They have never been on my radar before. Perhaps Tom knows something I do not, but again, I believe Brent would have done his research regarding the company before making such a commitment.
With regard to selling out to Apple, I don’t see that ever happening. Apple’s nod to RSS is the feature built in to Safari. I don’t see a standalone news reader in Apple’s future, nor do I see Apple devoting the depth of features you can find in NetNewsWire in to the RSS cabinet of Safari.
In the end, it appears this is a good thing for the Simmons, and a good thing for Mac users. NetNewsWire simply rules the news reader market, on any platform. No doubt this is the number-one reason NewsGator was interested in it, and I don’t see any other product, much less an open-source initiative, knocking it from that perch any time soon.
Gruber points out that Ranchero Software has sold NetNewsWire to NewsGator. Big, big news in the Macintosh community it is. It appears this is a good move for Brent and Sheila Simmons, and will not affect NetNewsWire aficionados, yours truly included. I am a little concerned about MarsEdit, which Brent says, in the above-linked interview, they are searching for a new home for.
I’m sure Brent will take some heat from certain zealots in the Mac blogosphere and beyond, but he will get none from me. He and Sheila have to do what’