Apple finally got around to releasing the new iPod update. I need to do some fiddling around to figure out just how all of this works once they come out with iCal. My music lives on one machine, but all my calendar and address book stuff lives on another. I am assuming they let one sync up like this.

I like how they are making the iPod into a kind of read-only address book. There are a lot of times when I might forget my Palm, but have my iPod. So it would be kind of handy to always have access to that. I’ll have to play a bit.

And the Friday Five:

1. Do you have a car? If so, what kind of car is it? Yup, I have a ’95 Nissan 200sx se. She’s a good car.

2. Do you drive very often? Yes. I’m addicted to my car. I love driving.

3. What’s your dream car? Oh I have lots of them. I have to pick just one? I like ones that go VROOOM (tm zannah).

4. Have you ever received a ticket? Yeah, but in the past 10 years I’ve only gotten one (if you don’t count parking tickets ^_^).

5. Have you ever been in an accident? A couple. Only one has been my fault and that one wasn’t real bad, it just backed up traffic on a major highway in Philly for hours.

I’ve been slowly working my way through more anime, some notes:

• Ground Defense Force! Mao-Chan – This show is silly. The adventures of 8 year old Mao-Chan and her friends fighting against an invasion of ‘cute aliens’. And they really are cute. The aliens almost look like they belong in Pokemon.

• Witch Hunter Robin – Episode five wasn’t a real strong episode, but was still decent. The show has a very X-Files feel in how it presents stories, which I find quite nice. The character interactions are pretty cool too (even with my view of two of the characters being forever tainted by Lyn).

• hackSIGN – I’m still working my way very slowly through this. Still not a lot is happening, though as usual we get lots of hints.

• Chobits – Is every 9th episode going to be a recap episode? Sadly enough, episode 18 was a recap episode. I think it was a little better then the last one in that it kind of helped pull lots of stuff together, but it still annoyed me. Next episode looks interesting though.

Now I’m off to watch the latest Ai Yori Aoshi.

Good news for TiVo:

TiVo boosts revenue target. The company, which makes digital video recorders, doubles its previous revenue target for its second quarter, courtesy of a recent licensing pact. [CNET News.com]

I’m pretty psyched to hear they are doing well. I really like my TiVo a lot and would be kind of lost watching TV without it. I also find that a lot more people know what it is now then when I first got it. I’m having a much easier time explaining to people why it is so cool too.

Friedrich Nietzsche. “At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.” [Quotes of the Day]

Okay. I’ll admit that I don’t like Microsoft much. They tend to annoy me a lot for some reason. This is one that affected me at work significantly before I left.

InfoWorld:  Frustrated Microsoft users explore options  [Rodent Regatta]

The new licensing terms from Microsoft are not making corporate users very happy, it seems… [jenett.radio]

We ran into this at work recently when we were looking to upgrade some of the copies of SQL Server we were running. We were told, ‘oh, no, we don’t do upgrades anymore, you have to buy all new versions.’ Well, that just wasn’t in the budget to do. Let’s not forget the snail mails we were getting for months about their new licensing models. No wonder their revenues went up last quarter, they were scaring everyone into buying the latest version of their software so that they wouldn’t get screwed later on.

I would have loved to have looked at other solutions, but people at work were quite Microsoft centric.

Steve Pilgrim:  “there seems to be an informal consensus around SpamAssassin as the right tool for frying spam…”

I’ve been having second thoughts about SpamNet this week.  It seems to be letting more messages in than it did previously.  Perhaps a database problem on their end or just due to spammers constantly creating new forged return addresses.  But, the price is right for an underemployed web designer like me and I don’t play the “wishlist” game, so I’ll stick with it a while longer and see if it improves.  All in all, it has made dealing with spam easier for me and up to a few days ago, it was catching almost every single spam message sent to me – this week, it’s catching about 2/3 of them. [jenett.radio]

Well, I’m no longer running Outlook since I’m not at that job anymore, but as far as tools for outlook go, SpamNet is pretty damn cool. I was hoping to try out SpamAssassin Pro too, which is a pay version of spamassassin that works with Outlook. I think it might actually be a tad better then spamnet because spamassassin will query Razor (which is basicly what spamnet is querying if I understand things correctly).

If you’re a mac user there’s also a solution for you coming out in the next few weeks. The new version of the Mail application that comes with OS X has a learning spam filter. As mail comes in it seems to start with some basic rules for identifying spam. But then you can go through and start tagging messages as spam (or untagging ones that aren’t spam). Once you feel it does a good job of marking spam you put it into ‘automatic’ mode and it will filter that spam into a folder. I kind of like the idea of an adaptive tool like this, since spam is always in flux. The next step is to merge something like this with Razor.

I predict you will soon win at least one of the following: a MacArthur “genius award,” a Congressional medal of honor, a blue ribbon from a local fair, a Nobel Prize, a report card with all A’s, an honorary degree from a major university, a plaque commemorating your service beyond the call of duty, or employee of the month. If for some reason my prediction doesn’t come true, you have cosmic permission to forge homemade versions of any of the above. You may also go down to the trophy store and buy yourself the biggest, shiniest trophy. Make sure you get it engraved with a title like “Supreme Champion Love God/Goddess” or “Tricky Master of Lush Wisdom” or “Deepest Feeler of the Year.”

Courtesy of http://www.freewillastrology.com/

My friend Erin is stopping by to join me for breakfast in a few and then we’re gonna hang out for a bit. So I won’t be posting much today (like I’ve been posting much anyways these last few days). Life is progressing slowly but surely. I still haven’t finished my damn resume, but I am making progress. And I’m psyched to show off the PHP stuff I’m doing tomorrow.

I just wrote the framework for a simple content management system, completely with versioning using PHP and MySQL. It’s nice to know I still can program when I’m in the mood for it.

Now I just need to work up a user management system to go with it.