I bought Fireworks 3 and Dreamweaver 3 just prior to my trip, so I now have absolute no excuse for putting off the old site redesign. Looks like there should be plenty of time tomorrow to get that taken care of.

I can’t believe I missed posting on Thursday. I’m definitely slipping.
I have now returned from my whirlwind trip to Salt Lake City. There’s nothing quite like two 12 hour road trips (bookending a 60 hour span) squished in the back seat of a truck that really only seats two comfortably. It was actually a pretty fun trip.

The new PowerBook G3′s definitely look appealing. Obviously I’m not going to go out and get one since I’ve only had my Lombard for four months now, but I’d love to have one. The good news is that I will get to play with one fairly soon, since I’m ordering one for one of the faculty members in my building.

Well, Apple finally announced the new PowerBooks. The low end model is now a 400 MHz G3 and the high end sports a 500 Mhz G3. Both come with DVD, two firewire ports and the RAGE mobility 128 chipset. Surprisingly enough they seem to have kept the Lombard enclosure.

What is X10 you say? Andy Ihnatko tells all about his new addiction over at Mac Central. I have to admit my curiosity is piqued.

Hee hee! I found this gem over at deepleap. Takes me right back to those early 80′s days of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

<!–secret message #2 — You’ve unearthed the secret treasure chest! Turn to page 292 to pick the lock. Turn to page 135 to hack at the chest with your axe.–>

Hey, Bump finally has a new design. I’d make snide comments about how long it took after Robert said he was going for a new look, but obviously I need to get my own act together.

Blogger does seem to be a bit more refined when you’re working from a PC with IE 5 as I am now. Lots of various keystroke shortcuts and a windows-esqe gui. I wonder how IE 5 for the Mac is going to be in this regard?

Looks like iCab does indeed work with Blogger. I checked my iCab preferences and discovered that InScript is not activated by default. Turning it on allows you to publish. Cool!

The new version of iCab is out and it supports JavaScript (or InScript in this case with trademarks and such being what they are). Unlike IE 4.5 for the Mac, it actually seems to work with Blogger as I’m using it right this moment (got to love that German engineering). Oops I spoke too soon, I can post stuff, but the publish button dosen’t do anything. That and there’s still no support for CSS. Still, it’s great to see some third party competition for the big two and it is still in Beta.

In the tradition of EvHead, Megnut and countless other weblogs, I’m hoping to do my own redesign sometime this week. This will of course have to be fit in between work, basketball practice, basketball games, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, eating, spending time with my girlfriend, Ferazel’s Wand, updating my weblog, riding my bike, and everything else. No Mary, those items were not listed by order of importance!

Bye-bye free time, my copy of SMAC for the Mac has arrived.

Ferazel’s Wand, has been sucking up a fair amount of my free time since its arrival in the mail earlier this week. In my opinion it’s by far Ambrosia‘s best work to date. Great characters, great graphics, great music, great… well you get the idea.

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri for the Mac shipped yesterday. Is my copy in one of these vans? I hope so.

This is completely ridiculous. Linus Torvalds can’t get a green card because of INS beuracracy. But it gets even worse. According to a recent San Jose Mercury article: U.S. immigration law sets aside 140,000 employment-based green cards each fiscal year. But because of the green card backlog, about 40,000 cards were issued in fiscal year 1999. The approximately 100,000 unused spots don’t roll over to this fiscal year, so they’re lost.

It’s just not a good thing when you’re forcing valuable tech workers out of the country when more and more the economy is being driven by the very industry they work for.

Internet Week has a pretty informative article on migrating your existing Windows NT network to Win2k. This is an issue we’ve been exploring here at Gonzaga for a few months now. Thankfully, since my building is highly Mac-centric I only have a few PC workstations and a couple servers to deal with. I will say the Win2k Professional Beta 3 installation on my office PC went very smoothly and it has a fairly obscure network card.

This San Jose Mercury article has the lowdown on all the Super Bowl commercials. And that one with the stupid ad that I couldn’t remember was lifeminders.com.

I was certainly pleased to see this rumor on Apple Insider yesterday. I love my PowerBook and would definitely prefer being able to just upgrade it to buying a new one.

I was starting to think Etherlife was never going to be funny again after the last couple weeks. Thankfully Zach came back strong this week and allayed my fears. I especially enjoyed today’s bit of geek humor.

Mozilla Milestone 13 is ready to rumble. Hopefully this version will have fixed some of the keyboard command issues for the Macintosh.

I’m still annoyed that IE 5 for the Macintosh isn’t ready to go yet.

I was pretty into the original Everything when I first heard about it on Slashdot (created over 100 hundred entries I think), but I stopped going regularly some time ago. I was vaguely aware that there was some kind of Everything 2 in the works, but I never paid much attention until this week. I’m looking forward to playing with it further.

I’ve been playing the new mac Alpha Centauri demo the last couple days and it’s definitely pretty cool. I definitely prefer strategy games (whether real time or turn based) to first person shooter games like Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament.

Looks like there’s a new Macintosh Python IDE in development called Viper. I haven’t played with the product yet because it seems to have a very limited release at this point, but it certainly sounds intriguing.

I’m hoping to find some time this weekend to play with Python a little on my own. I think I’d also like to start working on a site redesign as well.

Today I found out that we had already received the three iMac DV Special Editions I ordered last week so I’ve been playing with them a bit. The first thing I noticed when trying out the included Bug’s Life DVD was that the Harman Kardon speakers are excellent. I’ll bet with the addition of an iSub it’s just phenomenal.

On a purely aesthetic level the iMac DV SE’s graphite case is very pleasing and because it has no built in fan it’s eerily quiet. It actually made me resent the fan noise of a couple nearby computer’s that I had previously had no problem ignoring.

This strangely bitter column in mymac.com ripping on MacOS Rumors strikes me as a little bizarre. I definitely read MOSR on a daily basis and although I find it useful and informative I have never been under the impression that it was completely reliable.

The nifty MindControl application launcher from MindVision has definitely won me over. It’s basically a pop up command line for the Mac and besides launching apps it lets you run scripts. All for only $20. Don’t just take my word for it, Tucows gave it 5 cows!

Well, it’s not quite Dick Tracy, but it still sounds really cool. Casio is coming out with a black and white digital wristwatch camera. It will be able to store up to 100 images in the built in 1MB of RAM. Of course we can probably expect a color one a year after they release this one, so maybe I should hold out.

Ether Life, another Internet comic that I like, is back for the new year with version 2.0.

Cmdr Taco and Hemos over at Slashdot tell all about going public.

Mindvision has a new application launcher out for the Mac called MindControl. I’ve been trying it out this morning and I have to admit that I like it a lot so far. I love being able to launch everything simply by typing in a few keystrokes.

Macintouch has a review of the new Apple iTools. They look fairly cool, especially for new users. Unfortunately they require MacOS 9 and I’m sticking with 8.6 for now (with MacOS X coming out this summer I’d rather spend the $80 on something else).

The live webcast is working surprisingly well. I guess that Akamai network technology really works. The new iDrive technology is fairly intriguing. Looks like they’re going to be rolling out Mac OS X throughout the next year with sales starting during the summer (presumably around MacWorld).

Wow! MacOS X looks great! Makes me want to run out and become and Apple Developer so I can get the new betas later this year.

The only disappointing item in the presentation was that the Microsoft Rep sounded like IE 5 for the Macintosh won’t be out until the end of January. I guess their official press release will be in a half hour.

One new IE 5 feature that is definitely a good thing is that there is a mode to make pages render at the 96 dpi industry standard and end the micro font rendering woes that occur when reading PC generated pages. I noticed Mozilla build 12 for the Mac does the same thing a while back as well. Standardization is always a good thing!

Boy, I take the day off from work and it just disappears on me. Of course I did do some reading for a while, but the biggest time eater had to be a certain couple first person shooter demos…

Got to see a new G4 first hand yesterday. My friend Steve’s dad picked it up as a little Christmas gift for himself. Very nice refined machine. I definitely prefer the graphite gray of the case to the G3′s blueberry.

Fast Company gives their analysis of five major web news sites (Slashdot.org, wired.com, RedHerring.com, and The Industry Standard) in concise table form . I only read two of the five regulary myself.

Another day, another weblog entry…

My friend Steve is in town so it’s time for some network computer gaming! He’s been talking up the Mac release of Heroes of Might & Magic III and based on Inside Mac Gaming’s preview it looks fairly appealing to me.

Tycho and Gabriel, two fellow Spokane-ites best known for Penny-Arcade, have a new take on Dickens’ Christmas Carol over at Gamespy. Amusing reading for the computer inclined as usual!

It’s looking like we’re going to miss out on the classic white Christmas here in Spokane based on all the weather forecasts I’ve been hearing and seeing online. For some reason I was expecting quite a bit of snow this year during the winter months, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.

One interesting thing I noticed about Mozilla Build 12 for the Macintosh yesterday is that it seems to render font point sizes at the same size most Windows machines see things. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature. It does make reading a surprising number of sites easier, Eatonweb being the first that pops into my head.

At last Friday is here! Work was pretty dead today (finals are over), but I got a really great meal (excellent value) at Cafe Roma, a local Italian restaurant, when we had a goodbye lunch for a staff member who’s leaving.

In gaming news the Mac Quake 3 Arena Demo has finally arrived. Download all 45+ MBs at your leisure. It also looks like the retail version should be available in early January 2000.

A Penny-Arcade solution to the UT vs Q3 debate!

Have you made your Y2K preparations yet? I’m planning to do full backups of our two main NT Servers at work before shutting them down for the weekend, but I’m not planning to be in the building that weekend. I heard on the radio this morning that 70% of people polled planned to stay home on New Years Eve and hotels have had to drastically discount the pricing on their holiday packages just to attract guests. Two weeks to go!

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.

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.

The PowerCenter is alive! I’m pleased to report that my new ram and processor upgrade have worked out quite well. I now have three G3 based Macs at my disposal! Wahoo!

Here’s a cool PHP oriented site I’m looking forward to perusing more when I get the chance.

David K. Every has a new column on MacWeek discussing, “the i-Bench, a new benchmark for measuring Internet performance that PC Magazine recently deployed to prove that PCs are dramatically faster than Macs when tackling some Web-related tasks.”

I haven’t had a chance to check out the i-Bench myself, but I’m somewhat curious about it. I know that on the Mac Communicator is quite a bit quicker at rendering pages than Explorer. Of course Communicator on LinuxPPC blows both away.

REALbasic is definitely a nifty development tool for the Macintosh. I’ve been playing with it off and on since it was first introduced, but I hadn’t worked with version 2.0 until today. Cool stuff!

I may have to pick up Matt Neuberg’s new book.

I’m looking forward to the release of Frontier 6.1. I’m hoping to use it at work for the School of Education’s web site. The manila “edit this page” functionality is definitely intriguing.

Today was Jason discovers Ars Technica day. Lot’s of useful information on BeOS, PC motherboards, and even Windows NT there. Plus they even talked about Macs in a reasonable fashion in several of the articles I read.

When I get a chance at work I’ll have to go over some of these tips on the server in my office.

Here’s a Washington Post review of MacOS 9. I’m not in any particular rush to upgrade from Mac OS 8.6 as it’s been working just fine. I’m much more interested in the MacOS X client that should be coming out sometime next year.

Here’s a recent Q&A regarding MacOS X in MacWeek.

I got in a fair amount of computer gaming this weekend which was pretty fun. I actually finally advanced to the Protoss levels and beat the first couple of those.
We had four of our Macs networked together out at the lake, but we never actually got around to networked StarCraft. We did get in some serious Marathon action though.

Mary made it home safely last night, now we just have to figure out what we’re going to do tomorrow.

Today was Jason saves the day for his family and friend’s computers.

First I went out to my family’s house and got their iMac working again. That was fairly painless since I’d already started the previous day before leaving for more pressing engagements.

After I got done with the iMac I headed back into town to take a look at Brian’s computer. He’s never been able to connect at speeds greater that 21.6kbps with his internal modem. After fiddling with settings and running 3Com’s phone line test we determined that he has two problems. His phone line and the internal modem itself. So I’m not sure what he’ll end up doing.

I ate at Taco Bell twice yesterday, mainly because they’re having that Phantom Menace contest and I want to win. Yes, I know I have no chance.

The strangest thing happened while I was waiting in the drive through while getting my dinner at Taco Bell. I looked in my rear view mirror and the girl driving the car behind me totally reminded me of Mary. She had similarly cut red hair, and although her eyes and nose were in shadow her chin, jaw, and mouth seened amazingly similar.

Strange coincidence… or something else entirely?

While fiddling around with Kristen we discovered that I had managed to get a little sunburned yesterday during my 15 minute walk from Speedy Auto Glass back to my office. I was wearing a white t-shirt and the rays must have gone straight through to my shoulders and neck.

Steve is in town for the weekend so we tried our hand at multiplayer StarCraft this evening with mixed results. Basically the computer would either completely gang up on us or be really whimpy.

Steve’s dad had a multibutton mouse, and I think I may have to pick up a multi-button usb mouse tomorrow because they’re definitely handy.

Anyone notice how my site has been neglected since Tuesday? Blame StarCraft. The mac version finally came out and I’ve been playing it a lot.