have browser, will travel Jim Roepcke's weblog, since 1999

50 million are right, 60 million are not

CNN: House votes for do-not-call registry

Oh, really?

News.com, March 6, 2001: Napster settlement chances appear dim

It's too bad Congress could act in the interest of the consumer in one case but not the other.

Two down, three to go

Last night I finally finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I've been wanting to finish it for over a month, just haven't had time, but in the last two nights I read half of the book to finish it off. Now I need to go get book three from Shane. I'll start on that next week.

Good week, Mac dreams

Aside from being very tired and having intermittent cold/flu-like symptoms for the past week, it's been going great!

Things are going well, the market is picking up (worldwide and those which affect me directly), my Python Tutorial is nearly done (and we got an extension to finish them, thanks Alan!), and we have a very nice student from Japan staying with us this week. He's got a cool DoCoMo phone with a camera, it's pathetic to look at my crappy LG phone in comparison.

The new PowerBooks are out. They're so great, but to see them benchmarked against a dual G5... sigh, it's so hard to decided what to get (hypothetically speaking of course, I can't afford either, sadly)!

If I was getting a PowerBook I'd definitely splurge for the lunchtray 17" model. The extras are totally worth it in my book. If I was going to break the bank and get anything, it might as well be top of the line, because it's going to have to do me for 4 years.

If I was getting a G5 there's no question it would be a dual 2.0GHz model. The 1.6 is a black sheep, it'll be regarded as the "Yikes!" of the G5s (referring to the rushed, flawed first G4 PowerMacs), and the 1.8 doesn't make sense, price-wise, compared to having TWO processors for FAR less than twice the price. Oh, and two 23" Cinema displays please. I spec'd one out on the Apple store last week, it's only $8300+ USD. LOL!

HBO’s K-Street show set back by Senate

CNN: Senators nix filming for HBO's 'K Street'

Do local or cable news crews ever go into these locations to do any filming? The news media is a commercial, for-profit venture too. Perhaps these HBO crews should have gotten press clearance. Hm, since it's a "fusion of reality and fiction", I guess that wouldn't work.

I definitely agree that those buildings shouldn't be exploited though. I'm just disappointed because I think a show about K-Street would be very interesting and enlightening, especially considering how things have changed on K-Street in the last couple of years. I wish they had made it a true reality/documentary show, rather than fictional.

Plone BOF at O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference?

Tyrell (the company I work for) is planning to attend O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference next month in Santa Clara, CA. We'd like to hold a Plone BOF during the conference, but we need to judge the interest level first. If you're interested in attending a Plone BOF during this conference please email me.

Document previews in OmniGraffle icons

I was just browsing a folder of OmniGraffle Pro 3.0 documents in Column View when I noticed that the picture in the document icon for each file was different. It's actually a preview of the document itself! Awesome!

InfoWorld CTO switched to Mac OS X

InfoWorld; CTO Connection: Moving to a Mac

InfoWorld's CTO switched to using Mac OS X. When I decided to post this to my weblog, I had a flashback to Guy Kawasaki's old "EvangeList" mailing list. If he'd seen this he'd be jump all over it and send it to his thousands of EvangeListas.

Pity the fool that dared say anything negative about the Mac or Apple... by morning their mailbox would be full of 10,000 emails "correcting" them, no matter how honest the statement might have been!

I wonder, will Chad Dickerson feel the wrath of the XPerienced?

Keynote for Python Tutorial

I bought a copy of Keynote today to prepare the Python Tutorial presentation on. I can't wait to install and get started with this software.

Actually, I can't wait for the conference! It's going to be a lot of fun, I'm really looking forward to presenting the tutorial. Teaching is something I love to do.

Microsoft wants to control Asia, but Asia controls them

I'm re-posting this to a new thread, with hopefully clearer language. A few people misintrepeted my first attempt at posting this story and many incorrect assumptions resulted.

News.com: Microsoft: Asia not playing fair over OS

Microsoft complaining about fair competition?

What are governments? The people. In this case, Asian people. (Okay, not so much in China, but still) If people in those countries (the Asian consumer, the Asian market itself) elect a government that decides they would benefit from an alternative operating system that they can use to access critical government services and the Internet to communicate with the global community, where does Microsoft get off thinking that that's unfair?

Microsoft should look into the reasons WHY Asia wants to do this. If Microsoft offered them a quality product at an affordable price under reasonable conditions, I don't believe they would be considering this.

One might presume Microsoft believes it offers a quality product, affordably priced under reasonable conditions. If that is the case they have nothing to fear. The only reason they should worry is if they know their offering is not as good a value as it could be for the Asian market.

No wonder Microsoft is worried.

Microsoft wants to control us, but we control them

News.com: Microsoft: Asia not playing fair over OS

Microsoft complaining about fair competition?

What is the government? Us. The people. (Okay, not so much in China, but still) If the people (the consumer, the market itself) elect a government that decides we would benefit from an alternative operating system that we can use to access critical government services and the Internet to communicate with the global community, where does Microsoft get off thinking that that's unfair?

Microsoft should look into the reasons WHY Asia wants to do this. If Microsoft offered them quality product at an affordable price under reasonable conditions, I don't believe they would be considering this.

I presume Microsoft believes it offers a quality product, affordably priced under reasonable conditions, so they should have nothing to fear. The only reason they should worry is if they know their offering is not as good a value as it could be.

No wonder Microsoft is worried.