An impressive gallery of powerful photos taken over the last year.

Sunil has a new site that I must say is very cool. So cool in fact that I am posting it here and running it on my blog roll. Now he just needs an RSS feed.

“Even now, I look back and wonder if I was horribly taken advantage of, or whether I was in control. I can’t honestly tell.”

Ron Avitzur’s relates his story of being a contractor at Apple, having his project killed, and his unwillingness to give up. Instead he and a friend began a clandestine development project to complete their graphing calculator application. Although he had been terminated by Apple, he hired contractors using his own savings and setup secret offices in Apple’s headquarters. In the end, his application was adopted by Apple and he was paid a ‘nominal sum.’ This is an interesting story of two guy’s determination to finish what they started.

People around the Apple campus saw us all the time and assumed we belonged. Few asked who we were or what we were doing.When someone did ask me, I never lied, but relied on the power of corporate apathy. The conversations usually went like this:

Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you’re a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who’s paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!

My father-in-law gave me one of these Logitech MX 1000 Laser Cordless Mouse for Christmas. It was actually on the top of my Christmas list, but somehow my wife missed it. Luckily, my father-in-law heard me complain about my trackball dying on me an picked me up the MX 1000. I have only used it for a day so writing this now may be somewhat premature. Here is what I think so far:

• It is spectacularly precise and works exceptionally well on any surface, even reflective ones. Kudos on this front.
• The shape of the mouse is very nice, but I have big hands and I wish it were a bit bigger. However, I realize it is probably perfect for the majority of the market.
• The placement of the TEN buttons are great, except it seems to me that the forward and back buttons could be a bit more forward (this could be due to my big hands though).
• I love the TEN buttons, BUT — and this is a big but — why the hell can’t you modify the settings for the left and right scroll mouse buttons in the Setpoint control panel? You can set all the buttons, but these two? What the hell? Those are the two I immediately attempted to modify.
• For my final complaint. And this one is a doozy. I cannot get the damn back/forward buttons to work in Firefox! What a disappointment! Moreover, I sure wish someone would write a Firefox plug-in so that I could assign buttons to functions of Firefox. For example, open tab — close tab, etc.

Overall Rating: 8.5/10

I was complaining about the lack of functionality in FireFox, but I just discovered the fix in Logitech’s extensive online forums:

You have to set the mouse buttons to generic buttons in order for them to work in [some] applications.

Open the Logitech software setpoint/mouseware:
go to the mouse button assignments for the button you want;
on the select task hit other
next to to it there is a set function button
select generic button
hit apply

Now the mouse will send regular [Win] impulses.

Now that I have that issue resolved I increased the overal rating. It would have to be bluetooth and more mobile for it to get a 10/10.

I’ve migrated my personal blog back to a self-hosted installation of WordPress at Dreamhost. Previously, I wrote about my complaints with WordPress.com and I explained my desire to move to a hosted service in a another post. My complaints about WordPress.com continued to grow. In addition to the previous complaints I was surprised to learn I couldn’t embed videos except from youtube.

This is some very spectacular footage of a golden eagle flying about with a couple mini-cams mounted to it. Fantastic.

Well, looks like I have returned to blogging after a 6 month respite. I am certain I will be no where near as prolific as I once was, but this will force me to stay up on industry trends and current events. Perhaps other web denizens will be interested in what I post.

After living for years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina Tara and I return to Minnesota, which is where we met many years earlier. We moved to Maplewood, Minnesota and lived there for the next year. I began work on MindTouch seriously at this point and was working out of the basement of a little townhouse in a dodgy neighborhood. My office space had no windows. This made for interesting meetings with contractors.

Tara Candace Boone took my hand in marraige in the courtyard of Louis XVI in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

While being interviewed for a job a lovely young lady approached me, yes during the interview, and introduced herself as Tara Boone. We shook hands. She smiled coyly. A week later she saw me again and demanded we go out that night. Tara Candace Boone later became my wife.