Mary was watching the Today Show when I got up this morning. I was working on getting packed up for my ride into work and not paying too much attention, but I did notice when they started talking about the iPhone. Suddenly there was a clip of a familiar looking kid answering questions about his iPhone. Hey that’s Patrick Scoble isn’t it? Yep, a moment later they identified him with a title on the screen.

Now I’ve never met Patrick, but I know who he is because I’ve read a few of his blogs and heard about him tangentially via posts from his dad Robert and Dave Winer over the years. A year or two back he did a couple podcasts with his dad that I enjoyed as well. Needless to say he seems like a pretty cool tech savvy kid and I enjoyed seeing and recognizing him on national television this morning.

Dave Winer has a lot of useful links on the software patent issue today on Scripting News. He points to a very informative article on the issue in the MIT Technology Review. This whole issue just makes me boil.

Great! Blogger, just ate one of my post attempts for the day. Luckily I’ve still got it in my memory banks.

At one point I had a URL for a simple little web application that would take the ISBN code for a given book and list the pricing at several online bookstores (including amazon.com). I’ll have to see if I can track that down again.

No More Pesos For Senor Bezos. I decided to stop shopping at amazon after the One Click patent lawsuit reared its head and anyone who thinks giving a company a monopoly on e-commerce is a bad thing should do the same.

The SVG stuff (simple vector graphics) that Dave Winer has been talking about recently on Scripting News is fairly interesting, but also kind of depressing. Oh boy, yet more cool technology that will take at least another year or two for widespread browser adoption and integration.

I went to Angela’s Ashes this afternoon with my girlfriend and her parents. It was fairly good, but the word from Mary and her mom is the book (as is often the case I think) is far superior.
Hmm, the weekend is nearly over.

Today I acquired a brand new (box and everything) copy of MacOS 9.0 from a friend in exchange for working on his computer yesterday so I’ll probably install that sometime this weekend. Hopefully that will fix my PowerBook’s sleep issues (it has a tendency to freeze while waking up that developed a month or so after I bought it. I investigated the issue a little bit, but rather than spending the time to solve the problem went to the work around of just shutting it off when I transport it.

Dave Winer has posted his latest DaveNet over at Scripting News. It’s a fairly long piece, but it has a lot of interesting stuff on this year’s WEF at Davos and finishes with Dave’s recipe for making money on the Internet. I’m thinking that the plan he discusses is taken directly from what he’s looking to do with EditThisPage.com.

It looks like scientists have made a breakthrough in electro-active polymers that could lead to improved performance in things like, “pumps and motors, valves and generators, robot actuators, inkjet printers and flat-panel loudspeakers.” Even cooler, these same materials could eventually be used to create things like a next generation artificial heart.

Hmm, Saturday’s almost over. But then I suppose that’s obvious.

I think hearing about Dave Winer’s experiences at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland has been pretty cool. A lot of people in weblogging circles are pretty down on him, but I have a lot of respect for the guy and what he’s doing for webloggers and the Internet as a whole.

It’s going to be fun watching the Super Bowl though. I always enjoy the new commercials, since they’re usually a step above the typical television advertisements we’re bombarded with.

Barber Shops may be in decline (thanks Mr. Barrett), but it’s not for lack of my business. I’ve been going to the same place for the last ten plus year at least. I don’t know if my preferred shop has an actual name- I usually just refer to it as “the brothers” since it’s owned and run by two gentlemen siblings. I’m not sure what I’ll do once they close up their business and retire.

While attending college I had the privilege of getting a couple haircuts from a venerable barber by the name of Clarence. He maintained a small barber shop in Moscow, Idaho and I think he had been cutting hair for over sixty years at that point. He finally retired or perhaps even passed away within a year of my visits, but I’ll never forget the clackety clack of the old fashioned vibrating massager that he would run over his customer’s shoulders just prior to finishing a haircut.

It’s a little weird to go to Scripting News and not find it updated. Obviously Dave Winer is probably still on his way to Davos, Switzerland, but I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t been able to get to a web browser to post an update.

Oops! I totally forgot to update yesterday. Weird.

I successfully installed Windows 2k Professional Beta 3 on one of the computers in my office Monday. I haven’t done anything much beyond web browsing to this point, and I doubt I’ll be doing anything that will really stress test the system, but it seems to be working well so far. I definitely like the default colors a lot better than the old NT 4 ones.

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.

If you want to see when the latest and greatest weblogs have been updated check out the weblogMonitor over at Userland Software. Hurry up and release Manila already Dave!

A lot of cool stuff is brewing over at Scripting News. For instance today Dave Winer announced a manila based weblog called Qube Quorner. It will cover the Cobalt Qube of course.

I’ve got an old Mac clone sitting around that I’m hoping I can turn into a Qube equivalent. I just want a Linux box that I can remotely administer and do stuff with and that’s exactly what Cobalt’s products are.

I’ve started fiddling with the sidebar and I’m running up against the ever so annoying browser implementation differences. IE 4.5 for the Mac doesn’t recognize the fact that I’m overriding the sidebar link color (it should be white, not blue), while Netscape Navigator 4.07 gets that part right, but munges the sides of my nested table. As Dave Winer always says Still diggin’!

Found a fix for things.

Tonight at 5:30pm Ferris plays G-Prep in the Spokane Arena.