Axodys

I’m playing with a new Toshiba Satellite 1200 with XP installed. I’d forgotten about XP’s built-in ClearType support (or whatever it’s called). It seems nice enough although fonts seem a little fuzzy around the edges. I suppose it improves overall readability though.

XP seems okay, although a little obnoxious. I haven’t quite figured out how to set up Microsoft Networking to login to the local domain yet. Well, there are a bunch of things I need to work on still. I think I’ll probably take this home for the weekend to play with it a little bit.

I’ve been spending some time today reading about and fiddling with Eastgate System’s Tinderbox. I downloaded it a while back, but set it aside and didn’t get back to it. Reading about it again over at Aaron Swartz’s weblog inspired me to take another look.

Today’s explorations left me with a much better grasp of things. Notes are the basic unit of content and besides holding text each note has Attributes that you allow you to store additional data. Agents allow you to perform operations on Notes based on their Attributes. On top of that you can export any collection of Notes into text or html files after filtering them through templates.

At this point I’m fairly interested in buying Tinderbox, but with a house purchase pending and money fairly tight I’m probably going to have to put it on my list of things to buy down the road (alongside Fireworks MX now that I think about it). Hopefully the MacOS X version will be available to play with soon.

Barnes & Noble Book Browser

Fink announces KDE for MacOS X

It’s actually kind of nice to be back to work after a relaxing weekend. Things are going to be pretty hectic from here on out with summer basketball starting up.

Yesterday morning Mary and I watched the classic disaster film Earthquake starring Charlton Heston. It was cheesie at times, but overall fairly enjoyable and it was interesting to see how far special effects have come in the last 30 years. My main complaint would be that I didn’t think much of Stewart’s last decision.

Nets Hang On This Time

Today’s game was far more satisfying then Saturday’s Nets debacle.
The three charges Jason Kidd took in the fourth quarter were defensive daggers and his play overall was outstanding.

While Kidd isn’t the best shot in the world, I love his passing and defense. I remember watching him in person down at WSU when he was a freshman at Cal and there was one play he made that really sticks out in my mind. I believe Cougar guard Eddie Hill had the ball firmly in hand in the backcourt and was just thinking about turning and bringing the ball upcourt when Kidd darted in and plucked the ball cleanly from his grasp. For most defensive players that play would result in a tie up and a jump ball. You just don’t see that combination of strength and quickness on the basketball court on a regular basis.

I hope both Sacramento and New Jersey end up making it to the finals. I’d love to see Mike Bibby and Jason Kidd go head to head. These guys are my favorite 20-something point guards in the league by far.

Video Game League on the Verge. The Cyberathlete Professional League receives a much-needed $45 million cash infusion, a commitment from Intel and exposure from ESPN. But will anybody watch? [Wired News]

The CPL sounds fairly interesting to me, especially when you consider how realistic games are getting. On the other hand for this to take off I think they need to add some kind of Reality TV aspect so that we get to know the teams and players. In real life professional sports the personalities and emotions of the players really come across on the athletic stage and add to the drama; computer screens and pixels lack that much needed element. If they really want to get people from outside the gaming scene interested they’ve got to find a way to capture the human element.

Go Robert go.

Watching New Jersey snatch defeat from the jaws of victory today was sickening. I hope the Nets can get things righted by Tuesday because there’s no way they should be losing to the Celtics. In some ways I put the blame on their coach, Byron Scott, because he wasn’t able to get them to execute any semblance of an effective offense out of the three timeouts they took in the final minute. Ultimately the blame falls squarely on the players though as they completely folded in the fourth quarter.

Lakers lose. As Marv Albert always says, Yes!