New Blog awards are in! WilWheatonDotNet won a bunch of awards, and SlashDot won its category. This is the first time that the sites I voted for won--this never happens to me in political elections...

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, why wait for the DVD? Just download the Quicktime movie here. Starring Humphrey Bogart as Frodo, Orson Welles as Saruman, and Peter Lorre as Gollum, it's the film noir classic version of everybody's favorite trilogy (I'm not kidding about the cast--I laughed a lot watching this one. See for yourself!)

Hmmmm. Looks like the DVD edition of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring will contain thirty minutes of extra footage and come out in time to prime us for The Two Towers. Awesome!

OK--I just received a tech request to change an email account from a married name to a single name. Since we just changed this name to the married name a few months ago, I questioned it. It turns out that the person in question eloped, and now doesn't want her parents to know. So a person's relationship with her parents has mutated into a formal tech request requiring Tech Services intervention. You think you've heard everything...

Brad says Alanis's "Ironic" isn't at all ironic. Matt Sturges agrees.

Ironically, yesterday I sent out an email to may staff telling them not to open the "myparty.yahoo.com" email virus.

Speaking of tough days, does it take guts to say that "It Takes Guts to say Jesus" is a hoax? At least Code Adam is real, although I don't think the apocryphal tale of the half-shaven-headed child is true. Though I did hear lately that coworker Mike has strapped a JATO rocket to his Corrado....or maybe that's just the way he drives...

There's no specific incident that inspired this (that I would post on the Internet, anyway), but some people I know just completely lose their common sense when they touch technology. For no reason. They would be road pizza on the information superhighway. It's been that kind of day.

SlashDot has a mention of the Apollo 1 tragedy. As I recall, the flight was a test flight (#214?) and was renamed Apollo 1 retroactively (and posthumously). When I attended Florida Institute of Technology (near Cape Canaveral), my dorm room was 202 Grissom Hall. Kennedy said we'd put a man on the Moon within the decade, and we did. A lot of heroes put their lives on the line--literally--to make that dream happen. I'm glad to see that some of these sacrifices aren't forgotten as time passes on.

Interesting article about WinXP security and Microsoft's attitude about it. Steve Gibson posted his reaction to a meeting with MS last summer over XP security and the use of raw sockets. This kind of info makes it hard for me to move to XP this coming summer for my PC purchases....

Testing the Radio XML coffee mug.....this is only a test....

From David Weinberger:
"The importance of the weblog phenomenon isn't so much that it enables people to publish their breakfast menus or even their genuine insights. It's that we now know what our "avatars" on the Net are going to be: not graphical cartoon representations but our body of writing. You are what you write. On the Web we are writing ourselves into existence. This introduces into the self the same issues of control, inspiration, invention, deception and play as have always been present in the relationship of authors to what they write." That about sums it up for me.

Amazon posts a profit! Awesome! Catch the story at MacCentral.

GNUStep aims to place OpenStep (and MacOS X in a way) on Linux. Check out the link at OSNews.

Sources: AOL not bidding for Red Hat. AOL Time Warner apparently is not making a bid to buy Linux manufacturer Red Hat, said sources familiar with the matter. [CNET News.com]


No big surprise here. How do these things get started? We may never know the true story, merger or no merger.

Just why AOL is in negotiations to purchase Linux "packager" Red Hat?

AOL should bundle a productivity product like "Radio" with their existing hosting business and sell 'default' "rss" xml feeds to their installed base of advertisers. Now that would be an interesting platform!

[Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]


I think this hits it right on the nose. Linux is (to me) a server technology. Radio is a communications technology. AOL is a communications company. This Linux-AOL story makes no sense whatsoever. I bet the Linux installed base hates it, too. If AOL wants to use Linux servers, why don't they just buy a distribution instead of buying the distributor?

I've been using iPhoto. The features really strike a chord with how people use computers. I have a few ideas for version 2 already.


One of the most impressive features is the slide show. Watching an audio slide show with soft dissolves of some nice family portraits really tugs at the heart. I heard that a number of people at the keynote were visibly affected by the audio slide show demo that Steve Jobs did.


I want to export a set of iPhoto pictures as a Quicktime movie complete with the audio and dissolves. I can export the movie from iPhoto, but I lose the dissolves and audio. I tried the "Make Audio Slideshow" iPhoto AppleScript, but I lose the dissolves and wide pictures are squashed (I do get the audio). I can take the exported Quicktime, open it in Quicktime Player, and save it as a DV stream file, import it into iMovie, import the audio as well, and save it back out as a QT movie, BUT--I lose quality, I lose the dissolves, and the frame pacing seems to speed up.


I think that most of the issues are pretty easy except for the dissolves. You'd have to give iPhoto the ability to render the dissolves as it exports the pictures. It would be nice if the iMovie team could lift some code from iMovie and work it into iPhoto for this, but I think it just wouldn't be that easy.


Still, it's a great product.

From Go2Mac:An enterprising Mac user has begun to archive Apple marketing materials. The first entry is the 10 page (12 if you count the covers) brochure for the new iMac given out at MacWorld. The text is hard to make out, but it's great reading, especially pages 9 and 10: "A special message to Windows users: Welcome."

Hmmmm. I love the "heh" punctuation at the end of a blog entry, but it occurs to me that I lifted it from Dave Winer. Would his established use of prior art enable him to bring legal action against me? How far can you stretch this kind of litigation before it becomes ludicrous? I hope we never find out.

I was working on my other blogger site, Analog Reflection, and had to use the "Submit" button in Manila. Funny. This button would have a completely different meaning to me in a Microsoft product. Heh.

If you missed this on Scripting News, catch it here and get to this site:

"Today's Craig Burton tutorial is on channels in Radio. It's by far the best docs on our software. I hope everyone runs his latest tutorial, it's a Java window, he presses all the buttons and narrates. Craig talks very slowly and explains everything. His tutorials are eye-openers."[Scripting News] [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand]

If you want to get a great idea of what Radio Userland is all about, check out this blog by Oliver Wrede: Golden Rules for Newbies to Frontier and Radio UserLand. Thanks to [Dave Winer: Radio UserLand] for posting this link!