Mac toys, revisited

iWeb is an interesting little application and certainly tops the list when it comes to ease-of-use and reliability. In fact, those are the two reasons that make it a winner. For anyone looking to build a personal web site, the templates are decent and it’s almost impossible to do the wrong thing. It’s a double-edged [...]

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Cheerleading competition or paid advertisement?

I can’t decide. Was tonight’s State of the Union address a cheerleading competition between two rival teams or was it more a paid advertisement justifying Bush’s actions?

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Cryonauts?

You can’t take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it. — Antonia Regalado, W.S.J.
Apparentloy Mr. Pizer has more faith that his frozen, dead corpse will someday be more than meat in a cryo-locker. According to this Wall Street Journal article, he’s breaking new ground [...]

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Mission possible

Shortly after writing mission impossible, I was referred to How to Fail with the Rational Unified Process. All I can say is, I wish I’d had a reference to this document before starting that project. It’s tongue-in-cheek but makes it very readable — and I think an excellent quick read to hand many misguided, waterfall-driven [...]

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Mission impossible — the art of choosing the right project

Entrepreneurs, particularly those with a strong vested interest and long history with a product, can be terribly persuasive. Years of tuning the message and creating an infectiously exciting atmosphere makes them skilled at converting skeptics. Becoming excited about a product is wonderful, but don’t let the euphoria of the moment overshadow the concrete facts.

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Don’t call me

In less than a month our cell phone numbers will be open to telemarketer farming. I’ll bet you can’t wait — imagine, people fumbling over themselves to sell you the latest deals on magazines and insurance scampolicies. And you don’t have to do anything! Well, except pay your phone bill as these vultures start burning [...]

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Quality not quantity

In defense of the Bush administration’s illegal wire tapping policy, we have this quote from The New York Times:
I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available. — Micheal Hayden, N.S.A. Director.
Well, yes, by definition I’m sure that wire tapping would give you information that [...]

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Flip out

If you’re like me, installing Microsoft software on your Mac is, well, disenchanting. Granted I have Office/X but it’s just a fall-back position when Pages doesn’t read a horribly complicated Microsoft document correctly (I’m hoping that problem disappears with the new iWork).
But anyhow, the point — Microsoft has started giving away a free download of [...]

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Impeachment in the air

Just passing on a few tidbits showing up at www.VoteToImpeach.org regarding the quickly increasing popularity of an impeachment action against George Bush. According to the site, the majority of the country supports impeachment:
A new Zogby poll will be released tomorrow showing that by a 52% to 43% margin, Americans believe that Congress should consider impeaching [...]

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The sum total of human experience

I just had to put in a quick reference to this circa 1985 $40,000 hard drive with a whopping 40MB of capacity. But according to the simple mathematical extrapolation of growth, we’ll end up with sugar-cube sizes hard drives that can store… well, everything. Or will we? Sooner or later we’re going to run out [...]

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Two conflicting views

Looking at the Palm Treo 700W I have to think — they’ve lost it. What was Palm thinking? For years they have represented simplicity and streamlined functionality. Palm devices were lightweight, easy to use and efficient.
So how well does the 700W come up using an operating system from Microsoft? Apparently not very well, according to [...]

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Mira la vista!

It’s still coming. Sooner or later Windows users will have the option to upgrade to Vista. The question is, will it offer anything new or is it just another upgrade to the same old? Personally, I think it’s still pretty damned cluttered and ugly — but it’s an improvement over XP. As always, Microsoft is [...]

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    This is me. Martial artist, zen student, programmer, writer and author, technologist, father of two, photographer and a resident of Los Angeles (well, the outskirts of it).

    I also publish Rational Scrum and am President & CEO of Hyrax International LLC, delivering comprehensive process improvements to its clientele. Specialities include audit and assessment of program areas such as project management, quality assurance, risk management and customer satisfaction as well as delivering focused initiatives to improve customer efficiency.

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