I spent some time looking through photos I’ve taken over the past several months and put together a new image gallery out of them. Lots of misc. stuff, the most interesting are the various shots of coastal maine and of the ultra-foggy mountain climb Andrew and I did in October of 2003, but there’s a random smattering of other subjects as well. Use the gallery link at the top of the page to check it out.

Ever catch a portion of an episode of DragonBall Z while channel surfing and wonder who the hell enjoys that show? I mean, I guess I could enjoy it if I was say 10 years old. Maybe. Anyway, tonight I stumbled across an excellent, profane parody which, if you’re familiar with the show, you should definitely check out. It’s hand drawn comic strips, no need for plugins or anything fancy.

Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. Yep, I have it in spades. Not sure if you suffer from it too? Read all about it and draw your own conclusions. My favorite quote “You enjoy the content fire hose.’ Yep, that’s me, and proud of it 😉

This week’s silly friday post comes courtesy of an old friend who happened across my site and sent along this happy story of a lovelorn geek and his quest to marry the girl of his dreams. Geek that he is, of course he looked to technology for the solution. Me? I think I would have just bent the knee and offered the ring, seems like a lot less trouble, and definitely less support issues to contend with 😉

It’s likely that you have at least one CD in your collection that has a track on it that consists of nothing but silence. Sometimes artists use silent tracks as ‘spacers’ to hide a track at the very end of the CD. Anyway in today’s world of instantly downloadable tunes and digital rights management, you can actually find yourself in the surreal position of having paid 99 cents for a downloaded track that has nothing in it. Amused by this, the folks at appleturns.com have compiled a list of the silent tracks one can download from the itunes music store. They also point out a side benefit – you can play these at maximum volume without fear of blowing your speakers or annoying your neighbors 😉

If you had asked me when I graduated from college 14 or so years ago, I definitely would not have said ‘Oh, I’ll be a Systems Analyst when I grow up. In fact, I didn’t really have a firm sense of what one was until the new CIO suggested that I become one. So. Here I am. I’ve grabbed a handy definition of what a systems analyst actually is, or at least one interpretation that seems to fit, off of monster.com:

“Defines Clients’ problems and translates then into program specifications (problem and objectives) and design solutions. These specifications and solutions are then usually passed to the Computer Programmer. Alternative titles: Business Analyst, Application Analyst, Project Leader, Project Manager, Senior Analyst and Systems Designer.”

The truth is, the shoe sort of fits, I mean, a large part of what I do is meeting with faculty and staff at Bowdoin and try to imagine how to engineer software solutions to solve their issues. Still, it all feels rather strange.

When I don’t have a strong affinity for either team in the Superbowl I tend to root for the underdog, so I’m hoping the Panthers pull off an upset. The fact that their coach is the former Giants defensive coordinator (whose departure was a big piece of the Giants decline) is also a big point in their favor. But do I think they can actually beat the patriots? Well….no. Belicheck is also a former Giants defensive coordinator (whose earlier departure was also a factor in an earlier Giants decline….) and he’s just a fantastic coach. Plus I don’t think the Panther’s strong running game will be able to overcome the stronger Pats defense, and while everyone is falling in love with the Panthers QB, if they decide to air it out a lot I think the Pats will be taking the ball away. On offense the Pats will be able to plod down field with the short passing game. It’s not going to be a high scoring affair, and I expect it to be a competitive and entertaining game, which is more than you can say for most superbowls. In the end, Pats by a touchdown.

Come back on Monday to make fun of me as you see fit, but that’s my call. I was 50% in my playoff picks which doesn’t speak well of my powers of prognostication, but I figure I picked against the Pats twice so now I’ll switch and pick them, I have to be right 😉 (I still think in a best of 5 the Titans would have won 3, but kudos to the Pats for taking that game).

Continuing with my anti-Internet Explorer tirade, today’s link is courtesy of Microsoft themselves. They’ve helpfully put up a support page with some tips on how to avoid being hijacked. My favorite? They suggest:

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

. That’s right folks, no problem. Just type that 600 character URL ebay just sent you by hand yourself, no problem! Don’t click on the URL, a fundamental function of your web browser because, well, Microsoft can’t be bothered to fix a defect in their product.

It’s so pathetically absurd. Anyone who’s just read the proceeding paragraph and is still using IE needs to have their head examined. No, wait, actually, they need to have their computer forcibly taken away from them, they’re clearly not capable of operating one in a responsible manner.

There’s an opportunity for a class action lawsuit by all the people who’ve ended up buying bogus merchandise or had their checking or paypal accounts drained or discovered a lot of Ukranian hotel rooms charged on their credit card all of the sudden. Any ambulance chasing lawyers reading this are advised to get right on it 😉

I’ve become quite the open source fan over the last several years, due mostly to apache and linux. Sometimes I have these twinges of guilt about it though. Yesterday I was offered the option to get an update to BBEditfor my mac at work and after thinking about it for a minute I declined. I just don’t need it anymore. I’ve been using BBEdit on Macs since before the internet, in the days of system 6 when it was just this great text editor, and it’s been a central part of my toolkit during my entire career. Until the last year or so that is, as jedit slowly replaced it. The main advantage jedit has over BBedit aside from being free is that it works the same on all platforms – my two linux boxes at home, the mac and pc at work, my gaming rig, my lab full of machines at work – on all of them I have the same editing environment. Jedit is also wonderfully extensible – everything from XML indenters to wiki editors are available and there’s an active development community supporting further extensions to the editor.

So what’s BareBones to do? How can they compete with free? Who is going to continue buying their text editor when they can just download Jedit and have a more extensible editor running in a matter of minutes? I guess I don’t see how BBEdit can survive in the long run with things like Jedit to compete against.

One other observation: Jedit is my favorite example of the potential of Java finally being realized. For at least 5-6 years we’ve been promised this ‘write it in Java and it will run on any platform’ future, but in almost all cases this meant buggy and slow software with crufty interfaces. Jedit breaks that mold. It’s a little memory hungry due to the Java overhead but otherwise you wouldn’t really notice it’s a Java based package.

Erm…one other observation. I guess eclipse deserves the same sort of credit, and actually its interface is even better than Jedits.

It’s friday, which means it’s time for something fun. Check out some copyright free belgian music. It’s mostly electronica in various forms (techno, trance, Drum N Bass, and so on) so if that’s not your cup of tea skip it, but if you’re looking to broaden your musical horizons give it a try. I’m partial to the trance myself.

Mind that you’ll need flash to listen – the site has a reasonably good embedded flash mp3 player.