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We’re very impressed you have a nice blackberry, Jawbone bluetooth headset, and brown loafers. The leather case you’re carrying is pretty snappy. I think it’s particularly fascinating how you’ve managed to park yourself in a sparsely populated Starbucks, cranked up that wonderful gear of yours, and decided to CALL EVERYONE IN YOUR PHONE BOOK. I suspect there may be a small problem with your headphone, because the tree-leveling volume you’re speaking at must be needed for those obviously important customers to hear you.
Oh, and the constant revolving of your head to look at everyone around you, to make sure people notice you’re doing real live interesting cool stuff? Wonderful. Makes me want to throw down my obviously worthless career and beg for your guidance to success.
It’s particularly riveting that you’ve decided not to lower yourself to actually patronizing the restaurant you’ve decided to claim as your own personal conference room. What a star!

(Who?)
Barry Smith once drew the incredibly awesome Angst Technologies webcomic. He went on hiatus for a while, but has restarted his artwork.
I highly recommend reading through the archives – the current strip is on InkTank.com. He’s thoughtfully linked the older strips into archives.
Ya’ll can finally see the origin of the IT Ninjas.

Check it out. My nephew’s band, “The Malone” has set up their myspace page (Warning for us old farts – it will start playing music as soon as you click on that link.)
Josh is playing bass, and I can well say he sounds a lot better than I do.

Last night I wanted to sit down and listen to some RadioParadise during gaming. Unfortunately, my efforts to get a streaming ‘terminal’ available in the living room (other than plugging in one of the laptops) hasn’t gone particularly well.
I remember listening to RP via my iPhone, and since we had Cat’s Bose Sounddock on the shelf, I figured I just had to whip up a connection and dock the phone.
I ran up Safari on the phone, navigated to Radio Paradise, and lo, there was a link to a Radio Paradise iPhone app! For free!
In a blink I had it downloaded and running on my iPhone. The app gives basic functionality, showing the current track and allowing easy music control.
Score another one for the awesome Radio Paradise.

I’ve been having… unpure thoughts lately.
While I’m fairly happy with clipper running Ubuntu 8.10 as my working desktop machine, I realize that clipper is getting a little long in the tooth (I have not worn the keycaps off, but there’s a distinct ‘looseness’ in the keyboard). It’s now 4+ years old, and while it’s ‘working’, it might be time to consider an upgrade.
The macs tempt me. After setting up mom with her macbook, I had a better feel for the mac mobile experience. The latest line of macbooks has enough power in a non-bulky configuration that I can do all my development and serious work on them without making compromises.
I stopped by the Apple store to try out the new macbook touchpad (as I’m not a fan of touchpads in general), and I have to say I was impressed. The ‘glass’ touchpad implements multitouch in a good way (one finger for ‘single click’, two fingers for ‘right click’). I’d still miss the ‘nipple’ pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, but I think I’d be okay.
The last thing motivating me is the need to run some business software. I’ll be taking over more of Stonekeep’s finances, so I need to run Quicken / Quickbooks. While Intuit has done the right thing and put Quicken / Quickbooks online (though with our account with DCU, much of our banking can be done remotely anyway), having native commercial apps available, plus all the wonderful opensource / free apps – is a huge draw.
A properly kitted out laptop from Apple (250gig HD, 4gig RAM, Macbook 2.4Ghz) runs $1800-ish. This would be my machine for another 3-4 years at least – the price is reasonable, though a little daunting.
But then I look at other things that would bring me – like Time Capsule. Brilliant.
It would mean abandoning Linux as a desktop. A moral dilemma to be sure.