Knock

I think this is Lao & Harlan's Abyssinian Knock. The last cat picture!

TiddlyWiki

I stumbled across vroop.com while reading a little about daring fireball, which is the website for John Gruber (the creator of Markdown). Two people who care about the way software works in an intuitive, use-aesthetic sense. On Vroop I read mention of TiddlyWiki, a client-side "Personal Web Notebook" based on the whole Wiki shared document concept.

TiddlyWiki looks like it might be the non-linear thought processing application that I've been looking for. I often write stream of consciousness style, defining terms and grouping things as I go along. Usually this is a somewhat tedious task, requiring many passes to refine the core ideas. But the organic and self-organizing properties of Wiki, with the ability to automatically define entities by mashing WordsTogetherLikeThis, could provide me a way of writing and organizing on-the-fly.

Google Cheat Sheet

This is interesting... a concise cheat sheet for Google searching. I consider myself a pretty good search engine jockey, but there were several tricks that I wasn't aware of, like date (searches within X months), define (shows definitions of a word found around the web), ~ (also searches for synonyms of the word, like ~car will find automobile, etc), and so forth. Via John Dowdell.

Tommy

Here's another picture of Tommy, Mark's Russian Blue.

Sci-Fi Weekend TV

I finally got around to watching the 4 hour miniseries, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. And now, the series is officially over. It was a good run, with some of my favorite characters ever in a series. Sigh.

I'm looking forward to the new Sci-Fi channel series, Battlestar Galactica, which picks up after the excellent mini-series pilot. Sure, there's some iffy elements, such as the suddenly-human Cylons. At least they're supermodels. But the human element was surprisingly poignant...it's kind of like The West Wing meets Rat Patrol. Uh, in a good way. John Olmos (you may remember him as the brooding chief from Miami Vice) is an awesome Adama. And surprisingly, the new Apollo and Starbuck (shown right) are pretty cool.

Jenny!

Here's Jenny lurking on the couch while she was visiting.

Dot-Com Business Plan Archive

The Economy seems to be picking up here in the greater Boston area. Just about everyone I know seems to have more work than they can handle, which is great if you're a freelancer. But beware the mistakes of the past that threaten to drag us down once again! Enter the Business Plan Archive:

The Internet boom and bust of 1996 to 2002 was the most important business phenomenon of the past several decades. In the wake of this historic period, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from our past mistakes and successes.

To help us learn from history, we are creating the Business Plan Archive (BPA) to collect business plans and related documents from the dot com era. These plans – the “blueprints” that lay out the assumptions and strategies of Internet entrepreneurs – will enable entrepreneurs and researchers to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research.

Sounds pretty cool! Registration required, though. Via slashdot.

Introversion 3.14…

Online buddy Tim forwarded me this site for contemplation.

I like it! But I am soft in the head for this kind of stuff. For usability, some may find it inaccessible and daft. But that's not what it's about...

You could look at this as an expression of introversion... a very private type of interface, created to please its creator first. Each bloop and blurp is a pure expression of delight in motion. You're certainly not invited into the site like a Walmart with carpet spread wide. You have to grapple to extract any meaning. You either get it, or you don't. But if you put the effort into it...it becomes accessible bit by bit. Very lovely. The motion work is awesome too...click on everything!

Signs of Winter

Today, as I was leaving Active Edge, my car dashboard went "bing!" Looking down, I saw that the little "warning! temperature is close to freezing!" light had gone on. For me, this is the official notification that Winter is coming. Thank goodness I have heated seats.

Pure CSS Slideshow

Read on Joel on Software about this pure css slideshow called s5. It seems like it would be a good tool for one's client extranet, in sweet compliant CSS. Think of it as an engine for creating slide-style presentations on the web, just the kind of thing that might be nice for presenting a series of mockups or even online proposals. The default templates are not much to write home about, but you can of course customize them.