SomeGuy walking in commenting on Vani and I sitting next to Big Fireplace with our 12" powerbooks: "You guys were sitting here when we went to bed last night, did you ever leave?!"
faint reply: "Mmn, yeah..."
whisper to Vani: "if nothing else then to get the batteries charged"
Vani: "is there a table over there by the window in the sun?"
Ask: "yes, but I don't think we can see the screens there."
Some people need to get their priorities straight, but I'm not sure who it is. :-)
Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, Orkut... Does it never stop?
Orkut seems to be the latest rage. Robert added me to his Orkut list earlier today; less than 15 minutes after signing up about a dozen perl'ish people had added me. Busy busy! It looks moderately neat, although LinkedIn is the most fun to browse for me, maybe because the social-social type networking site seems rather pointless. But for that sort of site, Orkut looks like it will work a lot better than friendster. I don't invite people not already signed up (because surely everyone is already sick of it :-) ), but feel free to add me, dear reader, after you sign up if you think it's moderately appropriate.
update ~8 hours later: closer to three dozen now; wow -- now if I only knew how that could ever be useful :-)
update ~24 hours later: just realized that it's "invitation only". So if you are on my link list or we regularly exchange emails, feel free to send a mail and I'll invite you. :-)
David Pogue reviews GarageBand, "Recording Studio in a Box":
It won't be long before the GarageBand creations of no-name singers and players start popping up on Web sites - indeed, it won't be long before Web sites start popping up just to accommodate them - bypassing the talent scouts and gatekeepers of the American recording industry. GarageBand and the Internet give tomorrow's stars their own democratic recording and distribution channels.
That prospect of new artists growing from grass roots is probably what inspired Apple to name the software GarageBand, abandoning its lowercase i naming tradition. But when you consider both the fledgling state of the 1.0 version of this program and the immense musical and commercial forces it could one day unleash, you might conclude that there is, after all, an i-name that might have suited this remarkable software: iPotential.
And John Gruber uses GarageBand to explain why Apple gets so much attention:
PC pundits pound their heads against the wall, asking why, if Apple only sells a small percentage of computers, the company receives such a disproportionate amount of media attention. The answer is simply that they're selling the best computers, to the most interesting people. Maybe it is only two percent of the total PC market, but it's the most interesting two percent.
Last Sunday afternoon Vani and I got hit in an intersection on a small street by some kids speeding home with their Dominos pizza (does the youth have no taste anymore?!)
Their Toyota got its entire front smacked away and their airbags deployed. My Jetta got a serious hit on the side, just in front of the left front wheel. It got hit so hard that the whole front twisted enough to make the right front door unable to open and some plastic below the gear stick got bend enough to show a small crack. (And lots of broken stuff in between). The body shop estimated the repairs to $8000-9000. Yikes!! Fortunately the insurance will pay for that and much more importantly nobody got seriously hurt. When I think of it I still get this scary feeling of hearing a Very Loud bang and then quickly being dislocated to the right. I took some pictures of the car before it got towed off to the body shop the day after; I'll post them later. In the photo the wheels are turned ~40 degrees to the right which makes the impact not look quite so dramatic (for better or worse).
Yesterday x2.develooper.com which is running www.perl.org, www.cpan.org and numerous other perl.org web sites crashed too. I didn't find out until this afternoon and I've since spent the whole @#$%$#'ing evening in the data center working on it. One of the disks appear to be imploding. Argh, knock on wood. It's mostly running again and a backup have been made to one of the newer servers so I can go home again soon.
