Via Engadget:
Seems like an online store is suing Apple over their new OS - Tiger.

Tiger Direct has slapped a lawsuit on the computer company over the name of its new operating system, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Theyíre asking for a court injunction to halt the rollout of Appleís new OS, scheduled for tomorrow.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. I love this description they give:

But maybe they have something here, you know, because we could see how the company most often accused of developing overpriced luxury hardware could get easily confused with the company most often associated with selling dirt-cheap OEM PCs and peripherals. Plus, itís really hard to tell the difference between an operating system and an online merchant.

That’s why I’m so happy that Apple is still releasing Tiger directly to consumers. I’ll be at the U-Village store’s launch party tommorrow to grab me a look.

CURRENT STATS: 6d 7:45 smoke-free, 52 cigs not smoked, $13.65 saved, 4:20 life saved

I’m on day 5 of quit number five. I’ve had a few transgressions, but I need to realize these are normal and a part of giving up for good. I had 3 cigarettes on Sunday, but that was after no patch on Saturday OR Sunday.

My mood is fairly grumpy and quite tired. I was doing the twitch and clench last night at home. Decided not to go for a walk with Aileen and Kelsey as I had a huge urge when they left and I used to smoke when I walked to the store or bus stop alone. Just want to take a bit to break the cycle.

I’m still wearing Monday’s patch. I need to get around to changing it soon. I ahd really weird dreams last night and slept very fitfully. Getting more tired a this whole thing goes along.

This week I need to set my quit goals/rewards so I stay on track.

—

Day number 7. I’m starting to feel a lot better now. I could have sworn I had Tourette’s Tuesday night. I had major tweaks, twitches, exclamations, etc. It really rocked me hard. I’m still having trouble concentrating, but it’s getting much better. I’ve been without the patch for the past two days and have not transgressed. Although I wanted to Tuesday night- I rode a new bus (75) that it seems turns into another one (330) every five runs or so. I ended up 40 blocks away from home and decided to walk it. That was HARD. I kept craving the whole time. Last night I walked home from Northgate via Bestbuy/Quiznos instead of dropping off 2 blocks from home. Not quite as long of a walk, but still 15 minutes. Tonight I’m stopping off at U-Village for a Jamba Juice. Aileen and Kelsey will meet me at the playground. More in a couple of days…

There’s an ancient Chinese proverb:
“If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time. “

I just added a new category “up in smoke”. I’m going to track my efforts at quitting smoking there. Instead of clogging my aggregate blog with a new post every day, I’ll just continue to update one post for every quit attempt. Hopefully this will not need go beyond my current quit. These posts will be found in this new category for anyone that wants to watch along as I struggle through and track things.

Quit Number one occurred sometime while I was living in San Francisco. It had limited success.
Quit Number two occurred just before Aileen moved to Seattle, while she was driving through Mercer Island in fact. It lasted a little over a year.
Quit number three occurred while Aileen was pregnant with Kelsey. It lasted about 9 months.
Quit number four was about 4 months ago when Aileen was pregnant with K2. It lasted about a week.
Quit number five is happening right now.

Below is a spam (high priority no less!) I just got (I did remove the headers to save the poor idiot some grief.)

I almost shot juice through my nose when I got to the part I’ve hilighted in bold…

Subject: please contact me…
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”ISO-8859-1″
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 04:53:31 -0700
X-Priority: 1 (Highest)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <20050420204911.B98CF560146@link.e-rice.net>
X-E-RiceNet-MailScanner: Found to be clean

Hello There,

I come to the point of sending this letter for the reasons of introducing the business which I belong at the moment, and also, I am interested to know the business venture that you are currently working. Perhaps you were surprised on how did I obtain your email address.

Actually, I obtain this e-add once I go to see some of the web sites in the net. And it happened, that this e-mail address is enclosed on the portion of the page, which certainly triggered my intimacy to send letter of invitation.

The first thing that necessitates me before sending you this letter, is to well thought-out the consequences. I might wasting your precious time and privacy. But because of my desire to spread the word of my business, I took all the risk to pursue sending.

Maybe I violated the Spam Law because you are not requesting any information from me in regards to business. That is why I didn’t include any of them to minimize my violation.

To lessen my violation in Spam Law, I would like to ask your permission to send you the information about my business. You can reply to this letter with the subject MORE INFO and also your first name on the body of it. Because with out any of those permissions is already my violation, right?

I am gladly anticipating for your nice reply and at the same time we can exchange businesses for evaluation as soon as possible.

God Bless us all.

First, I admit I broke the law, but I don’t care.
Second, to make sure I don’t get caught I won’t tell you who I am.
Third, I won’t even tell you what the heck I’m selling…
Fourth, even if you were intriqued enough to care, you can’t find me (catch me if you can…)

And these morons think that they’ll get money from people??? The really sad part is that they’re probably right…

Via Engadget and Photoshop News

Nearly every different camera maker has its own proprietary version of the RAW format (though Adobe has been trying to get manufacturers to adopt the license and royalty-free Digital Negative, DNG, standard), so RAW converters are almost always necessary if you want to use a third-party photo editing app. Until now photographers were able to read that data using third-party RAW file converters, but by encrypting white balance metadata Nikon is essentially forcing you to either use their own Nikon Capture app rather than Photoshop (or anything else) or manually adjust the white balance (which can make it more difficult to get the results you want). Not the end of the world, but all Nikon is doing is needlessly alienating their best customers (i.e. the only people could possibly care about something like this).

I may not have a high end Digital SLR, nor do I even like Nikon cameras (at least not yet… ) But, this is a slippery slope I’d rather not have ever seen. I was incredibly excited to see Photoshop CS offer RAW file support, but given this latest news, I can’t help but wonder what will happen next. Nokiashop? Yeah, people would buy that.

Camera manufacturers take note, consumers will NOT stand for this. I understand your want for control, but this is not the right way to go about it.

No there, is no scientific generation i, I made it up after a realization tonight. The masses that are growing up now are growing up more in tune with a new corporate culture than any other generation.

The proliferation of iPods has propelled Apple back onto the map. Even if they never gain desktop or business workstation market share, they have forever changed teh way that the world listens to music.

iPods have outsold Sony’s walkman numbers by laughable amounts. iTunes is profitable. iPhoto, iChat, iThis, iThat. We’re surrounded by the new MAC culture. They are bringing the convergent home to reality. Others are helping out and doing the same, but none have been as successful or innovative about it as Apple.

How did I realize all this? When while going to free scoop day, my 2.5 year old daughter turned to me and yelped (yes yelped!) with glee, “DADDY, DADDY, LOOK!!! I WANNA GO IN THE APPLE STORE!!!” Not only did she recognize the store itself from the outside, she knew what it was, and here’s the killer - what awaited her inside. And she was so enamored by past visits that she wanted, no HAD to go back in again.

As we passed the tables of iPods, she immediatley points and says, “look mommy, like daddy’s!.” She doesnt skip a beat and heads straight for the center table in the back by the theater and sits down on the black ball in front of a slick iMac and starts drawing. After a while, we ask her to come along and she just tells us, “no, I’m working.”

Guess it’s time to get her a WACOM tablet eh??

A lot of people are talking about Lenn Pryor and his post informing everyone that he is leaving Microsoft and Channel 9 for Skype.

It’s being played out in every news venue possible (except maybe the nightly news, we’ll have to wait and see on that… ) I won’t add any more to the relational discussion except to say that I agree wholeheartedly with his decison and his stated reasons.

So, why am I posting then? Lenn and I have known each other for over 10 years now. We’ve worked together multiple times and have shared so many personal memories together that I can’t help by shed at least one tear of sadness before shedding a few tears of joy.

From the Bamboo House in NOVA to my fire esapce in SF to boating on Lake Washington in Seattle to my wedding where he took the spot as my best man. We’ve been through a lot together, and I couldn’t ask for a better friend.

So, unlike a company or community, I’m not mourning or rejoicing (depending on what side of the fence you’re on) the loss/gain of a leader. I’m both mourning AND rejoicing.

I’m mourning the loss of a great friend. Granted, we will still keep in touch; however, it will soon be remarkably hard to just catch dinner or a drink with him or go out on a play date with our kids (Until Skype has a REALLY good video phone that is… )

I’m rejoicing for him and his family more than I could ever describe. This is exactly what he needed to do, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Welcome back Lenn…

*sigh, cry* Those are our old condo keys. Yes, old, as in no longer ours.

This past Friday we closed a book in our life. The buyers of our condo took possession at 9PM. Whereas we’re glad to have sold it and be on our way to places with much more space to grow, we still close this book with a bit of sadness. We lived in this neighborhood for almost seven years. We did so much in our life while we lived in this building.

Aileen and I moved here just after getting engaged. We started our new life together here. We walked the streets, went to the parks. Hempfest, Bumbershoot, Folk Life, Vegfest, the St Patty’s Day Dash, Pagdiriwang, and more were all 5-10 minutes walk away.

I worked in the office building next door and started to realize how stressful I found driving to work. To this day I still take the bus, even though we live further away. I’ve found an inner peace that can’t be bought.

We had many superbowl parties and BBQs in both units. We made freinds, we formed bonds.

We got married and bought our first condo after our apartment building got converted to condos. This was a big step for us as we started to grow in our life together.

We had our first daughter, Kelsey. A miracle then, now, and forever.

I got laid off for the first time. I think the management was surprised at how in stride I took it. I was actually welcoming it, as I got to stay home and take care of Kelsey for two years. They were stressful, but I wouldn’t give anything at all in exchange for them. I formed a bond with her that most fathers could only dream of having with their daughters.

I started my business and worked from home out of a makeshift office we created in our bedroom with a door desk and two free-standing partitions we scored off of Craigslist. This was by far the hardest thing ever. Kelsey would refuse to go to bed until I was done working at night, and I could only get things done after Aileen got home from work to take over night shift day care duties.

We moved my mom to Seattle and out of the sheer drudgery that was Middletown, PA. I have not seen her this happy, full of life and enrgetic since I was in high school. She’s come to a palce she can call home (with or w/o us). After years of inactivity and boredom, she walks and buses all ove rthe city every day. She even walked a 5K with us on St Patricks Day.

We got pregnant again and are less than a month away from delivering K2, Kelsey’s younger sister.

In January it was with great sorrow that we decided to sell our condo FSBO. Things were going veyr well at first, but we just couldn’t get enough people in, and it proved much to stressful with everything else going on to get enough people in to see it. A month or so ago (it seems like forever right now) we hired a realtor to list it on the MLS and represent us.

Now, as of Friday we no longer own the condo, we are preparing for the end of May when Aileen is due, and are looking forward to the future which holds places that have at least 3 bedrooms. Our current lease ends in July or when the house we’re renting sells. Likely we’ll rent again for another year or two while we save for another down payment.

This will give Aileen the chance to stay home with K2 like I got to do with Kelsey. She’ll soon be starting the SAHM/start your own business cycle I did a few years ago. I know without a douby that she’ll be as successful at it as I was.

Goodbye Queen Anne…

From the Seattle Times

SAN JOSE, Calif. ó Combining two of the largest makers of software for creating and delivering digital content, Adobe Systems Inc. said today it will acquire Macromedia Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

Shares of Macromedia, known for its Dreamweaver Web-design program and Flash, which animates and adds interactivity to Web pages, rose more than 8 percent in early trading, while Adobe shares sank 11 percent.

I guess this was bound to happen soon, but it still got a “wow” from me.

Nintendo has come out with a great viral marketing campaign/contest. They’re out of them now, but before the demand hit hard, they were giving away mannequin hands. Their Touching is Good Web site touts a contest where people submit photos/movies of their mannequin hands touching whatever. Winners get prizes.

Kudos marketing team!