A shoutout to the fearless readers there in blogger-land! I don't have scads to talk about, but a melange of little items to clear off the the decks. Editors - I think TextMate is the winner. Truthfully I haven't looked at SubEthaEdit yet as suggested by Brian - but I still think it's key point is Rendezvous collaborative editing. Which is super-cool, don't get me wrong - but it's not an item I'm looking for right now. iPodder - iPodder is definitely a very cool bit of tech, but it's still an infant. It seems like if you listen to an hour of podcasts you're likely to get 30 minutes+ of discussion about how cool iPodder and podcasting are. What I need to find is some feeds that are less talky, and more background music that I can listen to while writing or coding. But I'd recommend checking it out for two reasons. First is that even though it's early there's still a lot of interesting stuff to be found - it's a problem of sorting through the stuff, not of there not being enough stuff. Second is that if you have some sort of portable audio solution (not just an iPod) then you will almost immediately see the potential of this. Radio is in trouble (that's not new), but this is moving the broadcasting model for audio to something new. If you're all interested in media and broadcasting (hi there RIAA!) this is totally worth checking out. If you do - start with The Daily Source Code. I tagged it thinking it was some coder thing, but it's not. It's kind of the central clearinghouse to hear about new feeds. Star Wars DVD's - PVP says it better than I will but these DVD's rock the house. Yes, it's the special edition, and yes Lucas is exploiting your childhood, yes, yes, yes. But if you read this blog, the odds are still good that your inner child will giggle as soon as that camera pans down and the Star Destroyer comes onscreen. They are beautiful to watch and I know Han shot first - I can let that one moment slide in favor of yummy, yummy Star Wars in digital clarity. Games - I picked up Leisure Suit Larry for PC - I was in Fry's and they had it for $20. Well . . . it's OK. There aren't any puzzles per se, I guess there is a little bit exploration to find item X before you can talk to girl Y. It has moments of brilliant comedy. (personal favorites - the Ron Jeremy "porn fairy" signing "For I am the Porn Fairy" to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I am a Pirate King" and the Grease cover bit for "Lesbian Nights".) But the mini-games definitely get repetitive and that's a bad scene when your game interferes with your story or humor. But the most damning thing in my mind is that there is a razor line between mocking what I'll call titty movies and being one. I don't think they walked it successfully - there's too much "Hey look at this hottie model we got for a loading screen". (Which is another point - the mini-games would play better on a console, but the loading screens are numerous. Stick with the PC - it will be a fast load then.) Anyway, maybe worth $20 just to see the humor parts but I certainly wouldn't pay any more. Games II - Star Wars Galaxies sucked me back in, we'll see how long that lasts. There was a confluence of factors. Certainly the DVD's got me back into fanboy mode and then I ran into the remaster of The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack on CD, and then Sony sent me the "come back" email. Now here's the real hook in my lip - the end of the month is when Jump To Lightspeed comes out. This is the first expansion and it's the one where they add spaceflight and space combat. And it's not standard MMORPG fare - it's twitch-based. So it's supposedly massively multiplayer X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter (ooooh!). So I'm revamping my tailor to get smuggler skills and be ready to jump in an X-Wing in a few weeks. :-) So there's your update. Read 'em and weep. Or at least comment.

So I've been experimenting with different Mac OS editors, trying to decide what editor was going be my companion for the upcoming novel escapade in November. I had been assuming that Bare Bones Edit was the way to go, but a few new choices have blipped my radar. At the moment I'm writing in TextMate, which was just released this week and has a lot of the Mac world all aflutter. It seems like it's aimed pretty squarely at Bare Bones as a code/markup editor and has a lot of neat HTML features. For instance, hitting option-command-period will scan back through the text and auto-close whatever the last open HTML tag is. That's pretty cool - even for a HTML level 1 scrub like your author. Anyway, we'll see how I like it. It's much less expensive than BBEdit, so if I decide it's close - it's less than one-third the price. Another one that I've been playing with CopyWrite which I saw a pointer to from the NANOWRIMO site CopyWrite is different in that it's directly aimed at authors, so it focuses on supporting separate docs for character descriptions, places descriptions, etc. It also has some sort of odd built-in version control, which is probably just in the way for me. I hear the crowd out there asking "What about a "real" word processor? Well here's the scoop. I don't currently have Microsoft Office on the Mac and I pretty much hate MS Word anyway. My original plan for a Office suite was to use Open Office. I had pretty much switched from using MS to Open Office on my Windows PCs. The thing is . . . the Mac version isn't really very good. Basically there isn't a native Aqua OS X version, it's the Linux version. So it's XWindows, which isn't intrinsically a problem per se but has some fit and finish issues. The worst offense in my mind is that the fonts are just fubared. I'm not sure what the issue there is, I haven't tried any other X app, but it's a far cry from the anti-aliased goodness the Mac normally produces. Additionally, it's all linux keymaps, which is understandable, but a cognitive dissonance - If I want to copy from a web page and paste into a OO doc I hit Command-C to copy the text, but Ctrl-V to paste it. Maybe I could remap that, but it just ends up being clunky. And you have to start the X system in order to launch the app, and close it when you're done. It just adds up to a un-Mac-like experience. Yesterday I grabbed Ipodder and have been checking that out. (Ipodder is available for Windows, BTW) Super-short form is it's RSS for audio - with a dash of BitTorrent for handling the bandwidth involved. The slick bit is you feed it regular subscription URL's but it downloads MP3's, creates an iTunes playlist and stuffs the files in that playlist. So basically you start up iPodder, let it run in the background for a bit and then plug up your iPod and you get the songs/shows/whatever autotransferred onto your iPod. At the moment I'm listening to "The Rock and Roll Geek Show" done by some guy in SF - it's basically internet radio but delivered by subscription to your portable. Of course the value of it all depends in whether they get good content and a decent aggregator, but it's certainly a neat idea. Anyway, there's the buzz. If anyone cares to know more about Mac text editors speak up, and I'll post more once I settle down on one package. And if anyone checks out Ipodder and podcasting, let me know and we can swap notes and feeds. UPDATEIn between writing this post on the train this morning and posting it I ran across this Wired News article about iPodder. (Hmm, that autoclosure button is pretty freakin' cool!)

GmailStatus - Puts a little unread messge count on your menu bar and can play a new mail sound when new messages show up. Gets rid of an entire Safari window that performed the same function for me. Sweet! SizzlingKeys - Systemwide global hotkeys for iTunes. Opt-Command-Space now pauses and unpauses iTunes regardless of what app has the focus. It also has a little floating window that displays the song title when a new song starts. For the life of me, I don't understand why iTunes does't support a global pause key right out of the box. Indispensable. WeatherDock - Fetches weather conditions from weather.com and displays it in a dock icon. You can click it to see the five day forecast. Also has the coolguy feature where you can set home/work locations. So mine shows Menlo Park from 7 to 4 Mon-Fri and San Jose the rest of the time.

So I saw many of my loyal readers last night, but for the sake of completeness I'll note that the scooter got dropped, and I think permanently. As you'll recall as of Wednesday morning I was quite enamored of the scooter. Well Wednesday evening on the way back to Caltrain I got to the point where I was a little comfortable with it, and my mind wandered from obsessively worrying about cracks in the pavement. I wouldn't describe it as pride, more complacency. But apparently complacency can goeth before a fall as well. I hit a bit of sidewalk where a tree root had forced it up, and discovered that the scooter will quite happily stop, pitch around it's front wheel and throw you into the ground. Indeed it converts all of your forward momentum into downward force. So. I wrenched my left wrist and pinky finger and skinned my knee. So Thursday I just walked the damn thing, which was quite pleasant and actually fits my schedule very nicely. That's today's plan as well and I think it will be the de facto plan. Both the scooter and the rollerblades would be faster (the scooter already WAS faster, and I'm sure the rollerblades would be if I just practiced a little), but they require attention. I'm happier with walking, which I can do on autopilot and without injury. It's a nice walk (albeit quite suburban) and the two walks every day are good exercise. On other notes . . . we're having an open house party to "officially" unveil the new digs tomorrow. I use quotes because we've already had several people over on three different occasions. If you read this blog and you're local you ought to be invited already. We're not completely unpacked, but we are unpacked in all of the common areas and our bedroom. Just the two offices and the guest room aren't completely unpacked and I hope to finish the guest room tomorrow, pre-party. I have a new album that I really like and should have mentioned much sooner. Right before the actual move I purchased Jem's Finally Woken on iTunes and listened to it fairly incessantly during the move itself. (Album website here and iTunes Store) It's a perfect blend of upbeat infectious tunes, and then when you start listening to the words you kind of go "Hey that's a little dark." It's two great tastes that always go great together. I really like her sound - she keeps a very lush track playing behind her vocals. I also picked up the new Scissor Sisters album (iTunes). I mention that mainly for the completely awesome cover of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb It's disco, and it's amazing. Check it out. The rest of the album is . . . decent. It's pleasant, nothing I don't like exactly. But it's definitely the one track that elevates up to being blog-worthy. That one track has climbed to the top of my iTunes "Top 25 Most Played". In fact . . . (wanders off to add it to the Party Shuffle for play next. Mmmmmm Beethoven right to disco Floyd covers. My random eclectic musical tastes sure love shuffling from a vast library of randomness. :-)) OH! Last little link. Today is October 1st and signups for NANOWRIMO start today. That little mouthful stands for NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, and the basic idea is that you write a 50,000 word novel (well novella maybe) during the month of November. I'm going to do it this year - I'll sign up later today. That's where a large chunk of the train time is going to go, and a big reason why I wanted a Powerbook this fall. I can work on the Mac - Windows machines are always half-broken in some stupid way and I can lose a lot of time to fiddling with them. Anyway, I think it's a pretty cool site and concept, and I think it should be a fun project. Of course check back with me in mid-November and see if I agree! :-)