Eight Wonderful Years

Today is my eighth wedding anniversary. I really can't believe I actually found a beautiful woman who would put up with me for that long. ;) I love you, hon, you are the best!

AngerManagement Scenario Outing

Originally uploaded by Chindi.

Thanks to 68Caliber.com, I've posted some shots of AngerManagement at our last game.

We played 'A Series of Unlucky Events' put on by NOCER Productions at Shoots and Splatters Paintball in Citra, Florida. The turnout was smaller than I was hoping for, but we had a real good time. To make the day even more interesting, our team captian was playing as the General for the Blue team, and we won. It was a hard fought win, and with only a handful of players on each side, everyone played an important role.

Our next planned event is the Free Finale at Low Country Paintball in December. I'm looking forward to that.

Flock Me

Flock is a new Firefox/Mozilla based browser that is designed to leverage 'Web 2.0'. (I'll come back to that shortly). It includes a blogging feature, that allows you to post to blogs directly from the browser, and it integrates tightly with Flickr and del.icio.us. In fact, Flock has replaced the traditional Favorites/Bookmark functions with del.icio.us integration. That is interesting, I'll admit.

Now back to the 'leveraging Web 2.0' reference. While I agree that the internet is growing in leaps and bounds, not only in the amount of traffic, but also in the type of traffic and usage, I'm not sure any one product will do a good job of capitalizing on it. I use a computer all day, every day, and I carry a Treo 650. I love the fact that I can be connected to just about anything, from anywhere. That said, I don't want a single software package that does everything. Why would I? I prefer to mix and match my software to meet my changing needs. I may not be in the majority there, however, and Flock may turn into a powerhouse web package.

Mustang Desktop

p51_a
Originally uploaded by halliman.

This shot was taken at a local airshow last spring. It's a P-51D Mustang, taken from a spot kneeling on the ground under the horizontal stabilizer. I liked the way the shot came out, and I use it off and on as a desktop background.

The primary reason this post is here? I'm playing with the blog integration on Flickr. It's cool.

The Writing Bug

It's really funny the way my mind works. As I've been insanely busy lately, I've found myself vegging out in front of the TV more and using my brain during 'relax' time less. I had to send a book back to the library unfinished, simply because I didn't pick it up for three weeks. The latest Harry Potter book is on my dresser, unfinished. It's weird.

I just picked up, and then finished, a novel and it feels better. This is the first non-tech-manual book I've finished in six weeks, and that is a serious slump for me.

There seems to be a cooresponding factor between my reading and my writing. As soon as I got into this new novel, I started to feel the need to write again. Blogging became interesting to me, and my notes on my story ideas started to grow.

So I'm back in the saddle, so to speak.

Episode 3.5?

Rick McCallum has done some talking about the upcoming Star Wars television series. Of particular interest to me was the info on the live action show, which will be set between Episodes III and IV.

McCallum added that the series will have a different tone than the features and will introduce characters that weren't seen on the big screen. "It is going to be much darker, much grittier. It's going to be character-based. [Lucas] envisions somewhere like 100 hours, [set] between Episode III and Episode IV, with a lot of characters that we haven't met, but [who] have been developed in some of the novels and other things. We're really excited about that, because I think finally we're going to have the opportunity to answer everybody's questions once and for all by the time we finish the series."

That sounds pretty exciting, though I've got my shaker of salt handy. Everyone seems to describe their work as gritty these days, but few things actually measure up. If they can get some decent stories rolling, and actually find a director that can get actors to *act*, it might be fun.

In the other hand, it might really suck. Can we get Joss Whedon on board?

Google gets Reading

If you were thinking that there were not enough RSS aggregators/readers available already, Google agrees with you.

With the launch of Google Reader (Beta), Google Labs have given us a very capable, Gmail styled interfaced, online RSS reader. I've toyed with it some, and have to say that the interface is fantastic, though it will not replace my now ingrained Sage plugin for Firefox.

There are a couple of nice features in the product, including integration with Blogger, allowing a user to instantly create a blog entry based on an RSS item. The system will also allow you to sort items based on what you like to read, which I suspect is an off-shoot of the News module in the Google Desktop Sidebar.

If you are looking for an RSS reader, I'd definitely try this one out, Google usually gets it right.

Yeah, that got my attention.

Yesterday, news services were reporting that the continuing legal troubles of Reasearch in Motion might lead to an injunction requiring them to suspend all service in the U.S. with the exceptin of government customers. That could, possibly, lead to all private sector Blackberry users having nothing more than an expensive cellphone in thier holsters.

I'm not sure if it's going to come to that, but I'll be watching it. And as a Treo user, I'm breathing a sigh of relief.

Oh my. All your credit is belong to us.

Ebay is purchasing VeriSign (well, part of it) for a paltry $370 Million. The deal includes the purchase of VeriSign's payment processing service, which Ebay plans to merge with PayPal. It doesn't appear that VeriSign's encryption/SSL services are part of this deal.

This is interesting to me because VeriSign is an old school payment processor, and PayPal was the forerunner of internet convenience payments. I think the combination of these two cultures could create some interesting products and services. Maybe this is the company that finally makes professional payment processing acheivable by small and medium businesses?

And in this corner...

While Narthex covered the two interesting infosec developments today, I was very interested to see confirmation of the OpenOffice/Google rumors hit the wire.

I can't help but wonder what impact this might have on Microsoft's office productivity suite dominance. At first glance, it's an awesome concept, but at the same time, OpenOffice is available for free today, as a downloadable installer. And while I use it at home - I don't use office software enough to justify the cost of MS Office - I can't say I'm overly impressed by it. Sure, it works, and it even opens Word docs, but it doesn't do that terribly well. Now granted, putting access to apps in the browser is interesting, but will folks actually use it? And how well is that going to work on dial up, or even low end broadband?

Time will tell.

In the meantime, I doubt Microsoft is sweating... yet.

Coming Attractions

Coming soon to this space... info on setting up CVS on Windows servers to use in ColdFusion development.

I've just finished a pet project of mine: getting some sort of decent version control working in our office. We were using Dreamweaver MX's file locking check-in/check-out, but that didn't provide version tracking or disaster recovery like the versioning systems I've used at other jobs. After playing with FreeVCS (now called JediVCS) for a bit, I settled on CVSNT and a couple of clients, WinCVS and a Dreamweaver MX plugin.

More to come as I find time to write it all up.

Tippmann Goodness

I ordered a new Tippmann A-5 with E-Grip a while back, and it was delivered yesterday. As soon as I could make up an excuse, I retired to the garage to try it out. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to remove the existing bottom line, and replace it with a quick disconnect for my remote line, but then I was ready to go.

I hooked up my Air America Raptor and gave it a spin. Oh holy hell.

I had set the E-Grip for full auto (heh) and was completely shocked at how cool it was when gassed up. I dropped a hopper ful of paint in, and took aim at a couple of cardboard boxes in my garage. The resulting racket was a dream come true. I simply cannot wait to get this bad boy on the field.

Serenity

I saw Serenity last Friday afternoon, and again on Saturday, and let me say, "wow". This film was completely awe inspiring. I could just rant and rant about this movie, but I'll refrain. If you want a review that is intelligent and thought provoking, go read this one by Orson Scott Card. And yeah, I think he's pretty qualified to comment on a sci fi flick.

To sum this all up, I'd just like to thank Joss Whedon for his vision, and for making this movie. It has restored my faith in good character driven science fiction.