I had one of those reference-quality days today. It started with watching my daughter at an academic awards breakfast. Then I finished work on a nice, clean tabbed interface implementation and committed it nicely into CVS. Following that was a successful test of a new PDF to SWF converting web service that I put together using SWFtools and PHP. Then it was on to a successful install of Netjuke to stream all of the

Someone at lunch said that there was to be a remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. My first thought was that Tim Burton should direct it. Turns out he’s in talks to do just that.

Adaption is simply fantastic. It’s one of those movies where there’s just no way you can know what’s going to happen next, but you absolutely can’t wait to find out. Strange, fun and quite wonderful.

Nielsen’s [latest Alertbox]1 discusses possible answers to questions that repeatedly come up when trying to sell usability. Like “What should you say when clients complain that there’s no reason to test the design since they hired you because you supposedly know how to create good websites in the first place?”

I haven’t seen the new Matrix movie yet, but on my way in to the office this morning I heard “Do You Feel Like We Do?” from “Frampton Comes Alive.” So what? Well, it occurred to me that both the Frampton song and the first Matrix movie contained what are probably now known as “bullet time moments.” You know, that moment when you say to yourself “Holy crap! that’s the coolest thing EVER!

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And speaking of To Do lists, I’ve got that list of books listed over there and the reason it hasn’t changed isn’t because I’m too lazy to update it. The reason it hasn’t changed is not reading. So, I’m going to prune that list soon also. I’ve gotten everything I’m going to out of Master and Margarita. I’m about 3/4 through it and it’s very good, but I’m not feeling compelled

Where the hell was I? Family Guy is just plain funny, and I’d never even heard of it until a couple weeks ago. Of course Stewie is my favorite, but the most fun comes in trying to figure out all of the pop culture references.

There must be something in the air. Jeremy Zawodny writes about procrastination and managing things to do. “It’s not a simple matter of procrastination. There’s more to it than that. Procrastination is a simple. You just keep not doing it. But I make a mental “project” about not doing it.”

I’m officially putting PHPetal in maintenance mode. It does everything I need it to do and most of the really ugly bugs are gone. I have a number of ideas and even some additional code and patches, but I just don’t have the time to implement completely. Feel free to send me patches and if they make sense and don’t disrupt existing code too much I’ll try to find time to roll them in.

A few folks were somehow inspired by Tantek’s [What to do with things to do]1 post. One of them was me. Successfully managing my time eternally eludes me. Bryan accurately noted today that I spend more time on systems to manage my time than I do actually doing things. I’ve got software, pencil and paper and a dusty iPaq—yet I continue to be about half as productive as I could be.

“All money from your purchases is split 50/50 with our artists. No major label connections. We are not evil.” Not much music there yet, but it seems like a neat idea. http://www.magnatune.com/