Axodys

Webmonkey has a nifty new article discussing the sweet new features version 4 is bringing to PHP land.

While listening to some talk radio during my lunch I got an interesting perspective on the six year old Cuban boy situation. The guest on the program I was listening to was a Cuban American woman who had immigrated to the United States back in 1960. Her feeling was that any parent, especially one living in Cuba now and that truly loved their child, would sacrifice their happiness if it meant their child could have a better life and the freedoms the United States provides. Her speculation was that the boy’s father was a pawn Fidel Castro was using for his own polical machinations.

The thing that keeps going through my mind is that his mother made the ultimate sacrifice and if Elian is returned to Cuba that will have been in vain.

The Quake 3 Arena vs. Unreal Tournament debate continues! Shawn McClung, the 23 year old teenager responsible for Slightly North of Tomorrow has his take on the whole deal.

It’s looking like this weekend is going to be a big Christmas shopping weekend for me. With high school basketball practice or games immediately after work (I volunteer coach at the high school my dad coaches and teaches at) Monday through Friday it’s been hard to find the time to shop. I can’t believe we’re halfway through December already.

For the XML inclined Mac users out there, simple/CHAOS has released an alpha version XML editor called SixPack. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to play with it this afternoon.

Everything seems to be up and running in Blogger again. I definitely like having a bigger space to input my entries, and being at the top is of the page is better as well. Unfortunately it looks, like IE 4.5 for the Mac isn’t handling the new upgrade very well.

Coolnesss! Blogger is getting an upgrade around 12pm PST today. Hopefully everything will go smoothly and they’ll be back up around 3pm PST as planned.

It’s time for a new MacOS X DP2 review on Ars Technica.

I spent Monday evening out at my parents’ house watching Gonzaga take on the University of Washington. It ended up being a fairly close game although the good guys prevailed in the end.

Gonzaga’s point guard, Matt Santangelo, has a new web journal entry. He also had a two handed reverse dunk in tonight’s game. Not bad for a 6′1″ little guy.

Here’s an interesting space oriented site I stumbled onto recently. Lots of articles covering everything from beaming power from orbit to space tourism. I wonder if I will travel into space in my lifetime?

Actually, I don’t think travelling in space really interests me anymore at this point in my life.

Ah, how northwest sporting fortunes can change from day to day. Yet another bad outing for the Seahawks as San Diego pulls of f a 19-16 victory at the Kingdome.

Ahh, yeah! Gonzaga managed to humiliate UCLA at Pauley Pavillion in a men’s college basketball match up this afternoon. It’s actually being broadcast on a tape delay basis here in Spokane which I didn’t realize until game time. I had to settle for listening to a live radio broadcast which was okay, but fairly unsatisfying.

It was especially great to see Gonzaga bounce back from their back to back losses against ranked teams (Cincinnati and Temple) and put the hurt on the Bruins.

My Manila site has very little differentiation in focus from this site right now, which I’m finding is somewhat of a problem. Obviously I want to play with Manila more, but I don’t want to neglect Axodys.com either.

I must figure out a solution soon. I suppose one solution I could look at would be to double post daily entries to both locations. Of course my site hosting contract for axodys.com will be coming up for renewal in January. Perhaps I should start looking into the companies that are offering Manila site hosting.

My current situation reminds me of all the Spider-man comic books the folks at Marvel Comics used to have running simultaneously. It’s different now (they relaunched I think), but way back when I still collected comic books there were three titles, Amazing Spider-man, Spectacular Spider-man, and Web of Spider-man.

Dave Winer has decided to make Manila available to anyone for a free sixty day trial. That’s incredibly cool, but I’ve also noticed a slow down in my site’s responsiveness in the last day or so. Hopefully they’ve got enough horsepower to support the thousand plus sites they’re going to have a week or two from now. I thought Manila was going to be sweet, but I don’t think I came close to realizing how significant it’s ultimately going to be until today.

Uh oh, yet another first person shooter coming to the Mac. Actually I have to admit Aliens vs. Predator looks pretty cool.

No snow in Spokane yet. I wonder how it will look in the morning.

Cool! IBM has just released ViaVoice for the Macintosh. This is definitely nifty technology, but I’m curious to see what it will be like five years from now. A standard integrated feature of most operating systems? That’s what I would like to see.

Looks like IBM also has a version of ViaVoice for Linux and is also working on VoiceXML, an XML-based markup language for distributed voice applications. I wonder if there are any open source voice related projects out there?

Yep! There are a number of projects listed here. Open Mind Speech is a Gnome and KDE oriented project listed on that page that looks interesting.