Here’s a great article talking about the phenomenon of successful lowest cost software comparing it to the recent development of low costs wines. This is directly relevant to how I hope to be earning most of my living in the not to distant future. Just need to find the time to get some work done….

After hearing from all my Mac using friends how much iTunes rocks, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Apple recently released a version for Windows (which is unfortunately still my main work platform). There’s not a whole lot to it, but I have to say, it’s quickly become my favorite interface for listening to mp3s. Among it’s wonderful features that I love is the ability to mass edit the file info – for example, I can quickly update all the mp3 files for a single album if, for instance, some of the information was missing when it was originally ripped.

Last night I was at Little City with Nicole, when I ran into my friend John who I hadn’t seen in ages. John is a fascinating character. He teaches astronomy classes at Austin Community College and tutors in math and physics. In addition to all this, he has a deep connection with the truely spiritual aspects of the world. Our conversation last night began with a question about a book he was reading on Tibetan yogas and progressed through a relating of various experiences and thoughts on how the spiritual can creep up on even a cynical, critic like myself.

The Book of Ratings : Dangers Symbols, part 2. I can’t stop laughing. The people in the cube next to mine must think I’m on drugs.

The Daily Mis-Lead is my new favorite inbox item. It’s a daily email that provides continual updates on how Shrub is leading us furthur and furthur down the path to hell. Brilliant. Truely brilliant. Read today’s item, describing how Bush’s self-appointed inspectors are failing to find the so-called weapons of mass destruction. What’s amazing is that he hasn’t even bothered to have some planted at this point. s

I jsut wotre a new MT pgulin to ilnpeemmt Jamie Zkwiansi’s Srmbacle scpirt as a text foaittrmng ootipn. Tihs is a test to see if it works. Need to uatdpe it to inogre tags. Also, I need to pbbolray povdrie a way to iidnctae text to be ignoerd, but the piont is it was qutie simple to mkae wrok. I’ll psot the cdoe ltear.

The previous entry’s mention of needing enough variety to make a reasonable selection about which school for Nicole to attend remind me of another interesting subject which I’ve been reading about lately: Stafford Beer. Beer, who I was not familiar with until just recently, was the founder of managerial cybernetics. Before you turn your attention elsewhere, let me point out that this is not nearly as boring (in my eyes anyway) as you might think.

Well, as usual, it’s been a while. The biggest news I can come up with at the moment is that we’ve expanded the list of choices for our move next year. After some serious discussion about which schools Nicole’s applying to, we decided that we should probably look a little more abroad. Not that we have any problem with Boston, it’s just that certain decisions she had made about the schools there and the line of reasoning we had used to choose the right schools for her had eliminated all but two schools from the list: Harvard and Boston University (at least at that point).

I guess those of you who know me already suspect it’s about time for another change of plans anyway… well, it is that time of year again, isn’t it? I guess it occured to me when a co-worker of mine brought up a program he was enrolling in that would allow him to continue working towards his computer science degree in the evenings. Of course, I’ve seen plenty of programs like this, but I didn’t know there were any in Austin.