In the fall of 1980 I was a junior in high school. I was a good student, but had recently discovered girls, whiskey, and loud rock music. Girls were seldom available and drinking whiskey was illegal, so my time and attention was taken over by the music. 1980 was a great year to be a metal fan. We had Ozzy, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and others all really hitting their strides.

Thanks Mr. Gruber for pointing out this interview with David Foster Wallace. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ‘94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now.

Y’all know that I love Tinderbox. There a number of good reasons for this, but the one I’m talking about here (#46 apparently) is the truly great service that Eastgate continues to deliver. An example… I was unable to attend the Tinderbox Weekend in San Francisco recently, but Mark Bernstein put together a few packages with the materials and handouts from the event along with a CD containing sample Tinderbox documents and a copy of The Tinderbox Way.

Rescue Dawn has all the right things. Christian Bale, The Great Escape, Steve Zahn, Werner Herzog, 91% Tomatometer. I didn’t like it much.

I drink a lot of soda. My daughter drinks a lot of soda. Between the two of us, I’m never more than 12 feet from an empty or half empty can of Diet Coke. Trips to the store are frequent and inconvenient. Enter, Soda Club. I just ordered one. Now I’ll be able to make one of about 30 flavors of soda instantly, and easily stock enough to last a month or two.

Arriving at the office on any given morning, I might find that someone has attached a lovely portrait of me to my monitor. I love that

I’m not much into Anime, but Paprika got great reviews and is by the same guy who did Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon. The animation is gorgeous, but I found it impossible to follow and therefore I stopped caring about 30 minutes in. You might fare better.

The Aeropress Coffee/Espresso Maker is awesome. For less than $30 you can have a small, simple device that makes a really great espresso or American cup of coffee. I heat a cup of water in the microwave for 2 minutes, finely grind 2 scoops of beans and in 30 seconds I get a cup of coffee that tastes better than anything I’ve had before. I’m no coffee snob (yet) but this thing is great.

I’ve gone and done it again. Yep, my blog is using yet another blogging engine. This time, it wasn’t just because I was bored. Honest. So it happened like this. I’ve been looking for a nice, lightweight CMS solution for the office to augment our custom Rails CMS. As good as WordPress is, we never really got along very well. Besides, despite the cliams and exclamations of the WordPress faithful, it really doesn’t work that well for more than just weblogs.

Zenfolio is my favorite image hosting site and Lightroom is my Raw converter/DAM tool of choice. Finally, the toolset is emerging for these two tools. Until recently, getting photos from Lightroom to Zenfolio has been painful. Create export setting in Lightroom for images targeted for Zenfolio. Export select files from Lightroom to disk. Fire up the heavy and rather annoying Zenfolio (Java Applet) uploader.

A couple of real-world examples illustrating the advantages of using Raw vs JPG when trying to adjust photos.

My decision to invest time and money into JIRA and Confluence from Atlassian continues to prove fruitful, and the more integration I can find between them the better. One problem with the existing integration options is that authentication for showing JIRA issues within Confluence pages had to be explicit. This means login information must be stored directly as part of a page. Not great. It looks like an elegant solution is forthcoming.