Author Archives: brad

Roger Ebert: I had a colonoscopy once, and and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than “The Brown Bunny.”

I’m back from the Outer Banks, but only in spirit. I’ve been “quasi-blogging” while away, writing down into BBEdit little bits I don’t want to forget. I’ll put it all together into a post some time soon. I have around 300 pictures as well, so I need to do some pruning there. I made some major progress on Frequency at the beach and even made some significant headway on H.U.B. (the Helpdesk Utility Belt).

This was a hard vacation to leave. Jen and I both remarked that this was the first vacation we’ve taken for a long time from which we just weren’t ready to leave. Corolla is such a beautiful place, we were with terrific people, and the weather cooperated pretty well.

news.com reported (yeah, I know, but I was on vacation) that Microsoft is discontinuing the standalone version of Internet Explorer. Not just spewing vapor, Brian Countryman, IE Program Manager is quoted as saying, “IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.” Ack! That’s horrible news! Another gem: “Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.” Isn’t this this company that was tried for antitrust violations, and found GUILTY? I don’t get it.

Joe Brockmeier: Teaching a specific program by explaining exactly how to do something is a losing battle anyway. Instead of training computer-literate users, you create users who are helpless when the interface of a program changes. We’ve all worked with such users before — the people who become helpless every time there’s an upgrade. People whose work habits are thrown into chaos just by upgrading from Word 97 to Word 2000 because one or two of the features they depend on have changed slightly. Amen. Hallelujah. This is the argument I’ve been making at work for years. And the response I’ve gotten? A wholesale move to Microsoft Office and all the goodness that implies. Virus software is now absolutely required on our Macs, even though we never had problems before. And what’s with the Mac versions of Office eating their own prefs files?

Mark Liyanage, and who makes great installers and instructions for OS X, stomach now has a discussion board online. Sweet! Topics include PostgreSQL, sickness PHP, and mySQL, all running on OS X. Good stuff here.

Boy, does my template need some frickin’ work. I went with one of the default templates/styles for Movable Type, and it’s nice enough to look at it, but it looks like all the other Movable Type weblogs out there. I’ll work on some graphics while I’m away.

You know what would be cool? If Mike updated his blog while I’m on vacation. That would be cool.

You know what would be even cooler? If Mike switched to Movable Type while I’m on vacation. Mammothconcepts.com has everything you need, dude. You should try it; you’ll like it.

I’m outta here, folks. See you on or around June 8.

(And yes, I’ll be working on Frequency while I’m gone, adding support for pMachine, Radio, and maybe Geeklog. Movable Type support is coming along nicely already.)

I leave for the Outer Banks on Friday. This weblog will be idle for a while. I expect lots of comments on this story when I return.

Dave is finally using Frequency as his main blogging tool. I provided him with an early beta of 1.2 that supports Movable Type.