I can’t concentrate. Not sure why. Too many times recently I’ve spotted a browser or terminal window and said “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was going to work on.” There is a subtle flaw in the way my brain works that simply will not allow me to focus. GTD has helped, but as a way to recover from distractions rather than helping me to avoid them in the first place. I wrote a short poem years ago that seems to indicate this is not a new problem.

I was forced to watch Last Holiday with Jessica last night. By forced I mean that she said “Please!?” It’s nice when you just know a movie is going to suck – and then doesn’t. Queen Latifah totally saves the thing. I like her, and other than a contrived and misplaced ski hill scene, I liked the movie.

I love listening to Mozart. Always have. Even when I was (was?) a die-hard metal fan there was Eine Kleine Nachtmusik right there with Motley Crue in my tape case. (We had tape cases.) Mozart is like 18th century metal. Listen to it loud and just *try* not to bang your head a little. He even had the attitude. For example, he wrote a canon (K.231) called “Lick me in the ass.

I just found a python script that will take the output from svn diff and run it through FileMerge.app so there’s a nice pretty visual diff to look at. It’s called svndiffshim.py and can be found here. To use it, copy the script somewhere (like ~/bin) and make sure it’s executable (chmod +x ~/bin/svndiffshim.py) Then add something like the following to your ~/.subversion/config file… ` [helpers] diff-cmd = /path/to/svndiffshim.py `

Flickr gets most of the community buzz, which is fine, I love Flickr. But, if you’re not so much into the community part of things, and still want a nice place to keep your photos, don’t forget about things like SmugMug and Zoto. I used to have a SmugMug account, but let it lapse. It seems they’ve added some pretty nice features for creating clean web galleries so it might be worth another look.

jess_prom4.jpg Originally uploaded by JackBaty. More photos here

I’d never even heard of Night of the Hunter (1955) before seeing it on the list of 102 Movies you must see before…. Shame on me, it’s wonderful. Standouts… The “LOVE/HATE” tattoos on Powell’s hands Lillian Gish with a shotgun The bedroom which looked like some sort of cathedral Powell singing that damn song all the time – creepy. Underwater shot of Shelley Winter’s corpse – even more creepy. It’s a terrifying, stylish nightmare of a film.

The next great video game “Revolution” from Nintendo is going to be called… are you ready…. “Wii.” That’s right, as in “We.” Of course that’s not how I see it. I see “Wee,” as in “Wee Wee,” as in, oh-my-God-that-name-sucks. How many teenage boys are going to buy something named after their grandmothers' euphemism for penis?

Jeremy left us some time ago and is doing great things in Boston (secret, magical things.) I’ve been struggling for a few days tracking down a bug in an app he was instrumental in building last year. Today, he was in town and kindly stopped by for far too long to help me find and fix that and a few other issues. Pretty good thing, that. Thanks JD!

I use Ruby on Rails every day and *just now* discovered you can run ./script/about from your Rails app root. Here’s some sample output… $ ./script/about About your application’s environment Ruby version 1.8.4 (i686-darwin8.5.2) RubyGems version 0.8.11 Rails version 1.0.0 Active Record version 1.13.2 Action Pack version 1.11.2 Action Web Service version 1.0.0 Action Mailer version 1.1.5 Active Support version 1.2.5 Edge Rails revision 35 Application root /Users/jbaty/Sites/mysite.com Environment development

Happy Birthday Zim I was just reminded by Zim's sister Zara that it's his birthday. Happy 3rd.

At any given moment I’ll have browser windows/tabs open with Basecamp, Flickr, Campfire, Stikipad, Gmail, Calendar, and that doesn’t include the internal Fusionary stuff. Quickly finding the one I want to use is becoming a challenge. Using Pyro for Campfire has made me think a bit more about how web apps can be used on the desktop. I know, I know, the whole point of web apps is that you can open them in any browser, from any computer.