Daniel Von Fange

Cluetrain.

The cluetrain manifesto theses is a must read. A key point is: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it." I began using Mac computers, never having watched a Mac advertisement - a person in Flordia showed me his. My decsion to have a Treo came from a personal site on the web.

The real Braino.

I just found out what "braino" really means. And all along I just thought it was a neat sounding word that played off of my nickname "Brains".

Ancient Geek Lore.

I you like computers, you've got to watch this demo of the mouse, hyper text, search engine, threaded forums, collaborative work, and video conferencing - from 1968! Even stuff we don't have now.

A Family Blog.

Our extended family will be starting a little news site, using movable type. As long a we keep on posting, this should be a great way to keep in touch. I'm excited!

Merry Christmas.

We celebrated christmas today, just because our Grandmother was here for a visit. I surprised my brothers with a domain name apiece. "IAmJohnboy.com" for John, and "TervurenDog.com" for Andrew. Elizabeth got a registered version of Coldstone, and is now happily building fairy tale worlds where everyone you meet asks you questions about the "Lord of the Rings".

Twinkies.

I printed off the faux science reports from the Twinkies Project for mom. She could not stop laughing.

Caeser.

I spent the evening reading snatchs of Caeser's The Conquest of Gaul while simulatainiously running the lighting board for Dad and crew who were aiming lights in a new church building. The book is incredable, and even more increable is the thought that I, a person living two thousand years later, should be able to listen too the thoughts and ideas of one of history's great figures.

Norwalk.

Tonight I found all about the virus my brother came down with on the cruise. It's hard to believe that we were on vaction only two weeks ago. It seems like only a pleasant , distant memory now .

No Spam 2.

I'm not the only one with no spam anymore. Stevef says

Mail's junk filter does such a good job of stopping spam, that I had kind of forgotten about it. Until it all started showing up unfiltered on my HipTop.

Easy to sell.

I've been looking through the options PayPal provides for getting people's money to you over the internet. My initial impression was that it was a costly, difficult thing to do, but boy was I wrong. I could start selling stuff through PalPal this evening with no setup fees and nothing on my website but a little PayPal button. They even provide a free shopping cart if you need it. Bigger sites with my own cart, or unlocking software downloads are also possible with very little pain through PayPal. I'd guess they will soon take the internet by storm.

A New Bot For Grobots.

I just finished off a new grobot for Grobots. It is winning with the highest scores since the release of my previous robot. It will probably take only a week for the other three programmers to make a new robot to counter it, but for now it's clearly the king!

Desktop Browser Wars.

I had a shoot off yesterday to see which browser I'm going to be using for the next few months. The three contenders were Mozilla, Phoenix, and Chimera. I did not test Opera, IE, or Netscape 7, since I had tried them before and was not happy with how they worked on OS X.

Chimera is gorgeous. Unfortunately it's missing one feature that I just can't live without - keywords for bookmarks. I have most of my bookmarks with these keywords set, and they are a part of my fingers now. I can't just give them up! :)

Phoenix is going to rule the PC world very soon. Unfortunately it's not ready to run on Mac OS X - I tried a version someone had ported to the MAC. Unfortunately the port had a few bugs and could not become my day to day browser, but even so it made me wish I could use it. It's fast, snappy, clean, and fun. Today, I had someone ask me if I had tried out Phoenix yet. The last time someone asked me something like that, it was several years ago about an almost unknown search engine called Google. Today I installed and am now using Phoenix as my standard browser on the Windows computers.

Mozilla is what I have been using for the past few months, and it looks like it gets to keep it's spot as the browser that others are measured by. Day in and day out, I use it and works. The tabs are done right, and being able to quickly jump to my sites with a quick taps on the keyboard via the keywords for bookmarks also pays off.

iPulse.

I tried out the just released iPulse tracker. It makes a cool little transparent gizzy that shows you how much processor power, RAM, hard drive, and bandwidth your computer is using. I can't wait until someone hacks this to be able to monitor a remote server over SSH. A row of these little dials on my desktop keeping me up to date on all my web servers servers would be cool.

Lighting Again.

I got to light a small Youth Concert at church this weekend. It's the first time I've been behind a lighting board for a show in almost three years. I realized two things. Number one, I still greatly enjoy lighting. Number two, I hate using an Expression 3 for controlling intelligent lights.

It was great to be back in the action again, painting the stage with color. Getting ready for the show was a little bit of a challenge since I had never seen or heard the band before, no one had a CD of their music, no one know where they were going to be on stage, every conventional light from the front was in white, and I'd never done a show with an Expression 3 before. There were just enough intelligent lights out front to wash the small stage, so it was obvious that at any given moment I had a choice between having a stage in color, or having lights moving around with a white stage. Therefore, I decided to save all the moving about with the lights for the finale, and do static color looks for the rest of the show. (I was blessed with color mixing Studio Spots and Studio Colors. Color mixing is so wonderful, and opens up so many possibilities for gentle transitions and adds quite a bit of flexibility and ease to programming the show. ) I put about ten gorgeous to extra gorgeous looks on cues, then programmed the submasters with a combination of both effect lighting and normal submaster things (like the front white conventional washes). Since I had no idea what would be coming, everything had to be ultra flexible.

The show went off well, though I mistook the second to last song for the finale. (I can't understand a word of rock music especially and when it is loud enough to make me feel like I was missing eye protection.) After cutting loose with with lights on the song finale, and doing a right good job of it, I realized about half way through the song that this was not the end! Good grief, how am I to top this?!?! After some quick thought, I was able to do even more for the real finale by bumping the color mixing submasters that I had used during programing. The crowd was wild as the entire building blacked out for a split second on the bands final bash on the guitars and drums. As they vanished and the MC appeared on stage, I was still glad I'd been able to drag up a little more for that last song. But the MC's words chilled me, "Maybe if we yell loud enough, they will come back and play one more song!" Rats! There was no way I could just do a motionless stage with the band and the audience still wild from the finale just before. So once more I had to invent some action as we went into it. I'd have been in real trouble if I had not covered the subs with useful stuff before the show. It's good to light again.

Blosxom Importer.

I decided to use Ruby to make a script for creating a import file from Blosxom to Movable Type. If anyone wants it, you can
download the script. My primary reason for using Ruby instead of PHP, is that Ruby comes installed by default on all new OS X (10.2+) installations, but very few people have a command line version of PHP on their computers as I do.

Ruby turned out to be a great choice. I'll definitly be using it as my filesystem scripting language of choice now. Take a look at the source for my simple import script - that's so clean and easy to read compared with perl or sh. And yet it is powerful.

Sync away!.

My Treo, iPod, and desktop G4 now all sync their contacts and calandar through the magic that is iSync. Now I just need to pick a good email program for the Treo, and find out how to use AIM.

From the Treo.

I'm testing out posting from my brand new Treo. Movable Type's ability to do both desktop and web based posting is one of the resons I swiched. Being able to post from anywhere I go is going to be great.

Movable Type.

I'm switching over to Movable Type for this site, since I really think having comments would be fun and exciting. I'll probably have to write a script to handle importing all of my old entries. The real decision is wether to programing my importer in PHP or Ruby .

Spam Fooled.

I just posted my email address on this site - not having it was just an oversight actualy. But you will notice that I have posted it completely in the clear, with no encryption or anything to keep it away from spambots. The reason is simple - I don't have any more problems with spam.

With about ten website with my name and email address on then plus four years of using the internet, I get a lot of spam. But I only see about two spam emails every day. My email client, Apple Mail correctly sorts the rest of it right off into the junk mail box. It's liberating not to have to worry about my email addy. Macs Rule!

Screen.

I just tried out Screen, metioned over on Freshmeat in this article. Screen is awesome at easing work on remote hosts, and will be something I use from now on. No longer do I have to have multiple SSH windows open to track error logs.

Perfect for Johnboy.

My brother needs one of the new Neuros mp players. That thing is cool!

Contribute.

A from my first looks at Macromedia's Contribute, it looks like it will be great. I have a clients who could really use this. I can't find the price on it yet though. I hope it's around $50-$100.

Wouch.

I stumbled across quite a detailed write up of the "whys" behind current education problems. Worth a read though it will take you a while as it is a book and not an just an article.

SnipSnap.

SnipSnap looks like a cool piece of blogging software.

Car Crash.

Comming home from Miami, we had to rent two vehicles, since no 15 passenger vans were available. John, Andrew, and I took took one, the rest drove the other. Morning turned into afternoon, afternoon to night as we drove the twelve hour trip home. Suddenly the interstate slowed to a crawl. John leaned out the window, and said that it look like a car wreck, but there were no emergancy vehicles there yet.

Traffic inched on past site of the wreck, and we got a view of the sceen. A car had crossed the median and head on colliaded with another going the other way. Speeds on this piece of interstate vary between 70-80mph, so a frontal smash between two cars going that speed was not pretty. One car's occupants were our and walking around in a sort of daze, while the driver and passenger of the other were still pinned inside their car.

John pulled off the road as soon as we passed the wreck, hopped out, grabbed his legendary backpack, and head over to the steaming, twisted cars. The driver had no idea what was going, from his point of view - semi-crushed inside a steel cage, he was about to die. His wife had a few broken bones, and although also stuck in the car she was much better off. John began stabilizing the driver, and after a quick check told the driver that he belived he would live. A first police car pulled up, which followed a few minutes later by an ambulance, and then a steady stream of emergency vehicles arrived.

John stayed in the thick of things, even as the rest of the emergency people arrived. As well as keeping the injured driver calm, he even got a little time using the Jaws of Life as they cut the car open. They got every one in ambulances and we drove off.

Heading Home.

The cruse is over. We had been on the ship for about twenty-four days, and had begun feeling at home. The room attendants, waiters, cruise staff, security guards, librarians, musicians, and almost everyone I came in daily contanct with had become friends and not strangers. I could not walk down the halls without meeting passengers I knew. Hopefuly we will meet again on another cruise.

If I learned one thing from the cruise about cruising, it was this: "Make friends every chance you have." I've gradualy gotten better at it. In Alaska on our first cruise I became accquineted with only two people. On the first two weeks in the mediterranean I meet about ten. At the end of our two week crossing I left with more than fifty. So many wonderful people on the ship, I wish I started making friends earlier.

The trans-Altlantic cruise appeals to hard core cruise people - I only meet one first-time-cruise person the entire trip. At beakfast this morning a couple at our table were on their ninety-fouth cruise.

Bugs.

Check out the example screenshot for Fogbugz. The dialog is too funny. :)

St. Thomas.

We just docked at Saint Thomas in the Carribean. The cruise is not over but the lovey five days at sea are. I've not even been to the outside of the ship yet - so it's time for me to get some pictures before lining up for US immigration inspections.

Life at Sea.

I'm adjusted to living on the Constallation at last. I usualy get up about two hours before the rest of the family and then over the course of breakfast make about seven more aquintances. I grab a book or occasionaly my laptop and head down to the ship's library for an hour of reading or programming Grobots. Next I move up to one of the ship's lobbys to listen to an hour of harp playing, while I read or code, then back to down to the library for more reading or coding. After lunch, I may check and reply to my emails, read the latest tech news at scripting.com. I hang out for a little bit with a older man who teaching Sextant classes to passengers in trade for free travel. After sucking up some navigational learning, it's back to reading or code, until supper with the whole family.

When the last bit of chocolate desert is polished off, it's time for about two more hours of reading or coding in the library. Often Bosco, the Indian librabian who knows no fear of stangers, will start a converstion with a passenger or two, and then we will have a sparkling little salon in the libraby for the rest of the evening. Around ten pm, it's back to the room for an email check followed by sleep. Pretty close to the perfect vacation for my tastes.

The dog ate my homework.

There is a funny discussion going on about dogs eating paper things including dollar bills, checks, and of course homework!