RSSMailingList

Because I've been looking for something like this for a while and I know I'm going to want to find it later; it's RSSMailingList: a combination RSS feed generator and email mailing list manager. Free, too.

It's not too late

Unsurprisingly, Apple's early bird special for WWDC 2005 has been extended — it now ends May 6. So if you thought you'd missed it yesterday, you can still get it for another couple of weeks.

Want to save some more money while attending WWDC? The best price I've found for a hotel nearby is at The Mosser, but don't book it through them, book it through Orbitz. Yeah, $70/night is cheap, but why pay it when you can get the exact same room for $40/night? Yes, $40. I've reviewed my receipt about 50 times, because I cannot believe that I paid $256 (after taxes and fees) for five nights in SF one block away from the conference. I've paid about that much for a single night in the past at other hotels nearby. Yeah, it's a crappy room, but the location and price are right, and it's not like I'm going to spend that much time in it.

And one last WWDC comment: whose bright idea was it to book Advanced Dashboard Widgets and Safari for Web Designers at the same time? I can't believe that I'm the only person who's mainly going to attend these two sessions, and it's driving me insane that I have to pick one or the other.

Tim O'Reilly on Bookscan numbers

If you're in the business we're in, when Tim O'Reilly posts a piece called Book sales as a technical trend indicator you listen. And even if you aren't in the business, it's worth a read just for the trend analysis alone.

The short version: 2005 is looking no worse (and maybe better) than 2004, but 2004 wasn't a very good year. Sales of books should go up once the new Mac OS X Tiger books start hitting the shelves. InDesign is eating Quark's lunch, but (imo) that may just be because InDesign is newer and more people need books, not a sign of an application changeover.

The long version: study this image very very carefully (requires a Flickr account to view, but they're free).

Pizza Cutters From Hell!

This is just cool stuff: an artist, Frankie Flood, has created machined, customized pizza cutters. Check them out.

(Via Paul Music.)

The truth comes out

From a Seattle paper, Pope Benedict's books are selling fast:

Demand for books by the new pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has quickly surpassed supply, with many of his works selling out.

So, Mr. Negrino, was this your scheme all along? Running for Pope was just a reason to get people to buy your books, eh?

Is it that great to live in Manhattan?

Saw this report on a few blogs in the last day or so:

Andrea Mackris, the former associate producer for Fox News Channel who made headlines by suing talking head Bill O'Reilly for sexual harassment, recently purchased an Upper West Side condo for $809,500, according to deed-transfer records.

Now, I'm pleased that she was able to get enough money from Falafel to buy a nice place. But what got me was the home she got for that money. It's described as a 750 square-foot, one bedroom apartment. Incredibly, that's not a typo; that's what people are actually willing to pay for Manhattan real estate. That amount of money would easily purchase a 4,000 foot (or more) home in most areas of the country, but yeah, I know that it isn't on the same hallowed ground. Now, I've been to Manhattan a few times. I'm not a big fan; I could imagine living there, but I couldn't imagine why I would want to. And personally, I find the "its-the-greatest-city-on-the-planet" types annoying. They're like snooty pod people, smugly self-assured that they're the select, and the rest of us live in a benighted hellhole. So I obviously Just Don't Get It.

Friday Pope Blogging

I've been really busy for a few days, wrapping up our affairs before moving to the Vatican, so I haven't been posting. Sorry.

I figure that the cardinals have now finished up their fifth day in the conclave, and I'm surprised that I've not received the telegram, or the knock on the door, or whatever it is that they do. I never expected the papal election to take this long.

...

What?

You're kidding. They wouldn't pick him. He'd lead the Church back to the Dark Ages.

OK, OK, I'll look. Keep your pants on. What site did you say?

Aw, Rats.

Pope Benedict XVI? What kind of a name it that? Benedict is for eggs. Or liqueurs. And how is he going to avoid the natural confusion with the two Benedict XIV's? Nobody can keep that Roman numeral stuff straight. That's just sloppy and inconsiderate. Think of the children, man!

Anyway, I can only conclude that the cardinals have made a terrible mistake, putting an antipope in charge. I'll have to see what can be done about it. In the meantime, I've started a new blog, Papal Thoughts. Friday Pope Blogging will continue there.

Until you hear from me again, your prayers are appreciated in this time of trial.

Web writer get-together at the WWDC?

John Welch says:

So, if anyone who does this "Writin' on the IntarWeb thang" wants to get together, meet each other and hang out one night, drop a comment here. I'll wait a few days and see what the response is like, then find a place.

So long as it's not the same night as Buzz's dinner, I'm there. If you're interested, go sign up over at John's.

Definitive, my ass

Justin Williams has a blog post titled JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, in which he says:

I picked up a copy of David Flanagan's JavaScript The Definitive Guide a while back because I had full intentions of actually learning JavaScript in order to create a few Dashboard widgets for around work (submitting support requests, getting server status updates, etc). I never got the time to read it until this morning, and after twenty pages, there's something that bugs me about the book: it has no mention of any modern browsers.

It mentions variations of Netscape and IE, but not Safari or Firefox. Those two browsers have been so ingrained in my thinking when it comes to browsers, I was just taken aback.

To be fair, the publishing date was in 2002, but I'd like to see a 5th edition that makes mention of Safari's excellent JavaScript engine, Firefox's support for DOM, and even a chapter or two about using Ajax (Even if the author hates that name). Skimming through the book, I can understand why Apple recommended it as the guide for developing Dashboard widgets, but it seems somewhat odd to hear no mention of Firefox or Safari in a book.

Must control self… must control…

Hugo Nominees

If you're a science fiction fan and want some good reading, the Worldcon 2005 site has a list of and links to many of this year's Hugo Nominees. For the uninitiated, the Hugos are the yearly achievement awards for science fiction, voted on by other fans and presented at the Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention (this year it's in Scotland; we'll be attending the one next year in Anaheim).

Note to Bloggers Attending the WWDC Bloggers Dinner

She's married, guys. And I'm a gun owner.

WWDC roundup

It's down to the wire to sign up at early bird prices to go to WWDC 2005 (they end Friday), so here's a few thoughts about the conference:

• Damien Barrett says

  Having never attended WWDC before, I'm not sure how the sessions work--are the sessions a first-come, first-serve situation, or do we sign up beforehand for the sessions we want to attend. I can't find any information about this on Apple's WWDC site; nor was there any information in the printed literature we received from Apple after registering. So, how about it LazyWeb; does anyone know?

  I want to know this myself, as it's also my first year attending.
  
  
• Apple came out with Meet the Engineers Behind Tiger. That led to WWDC 2005 Engineer Trading Cards. Now that's led to Apple Engineer iChat icons. Rendezvous Bonjour chatting is going to be interesting during sessions, I can tell already.
  
  
• Buzz's WWDC 2005 Weblogger Dinner is scheduled for June 6. Currently, the attendees appear to be 54 men and one woman, the latter being me (obviously). So if you're there, I should be pretty darn easy to pick out.
  
  
• My current plan is to stay at The Mosser. Cheap price, great location. Unless anyone knows of a woman who's going who'd like to share a room…

Fish in a barrel

Over at Making Light, Teresa wrote a post about the new pope: Habemus papam. She's now getting drive-by sermons from Catholics who've never read anything else she's written, and who are eager to teach her (and the usual crew that posts there) about the correct teachings of the Church.

Oh my. It should be some fun.

Tiger's a'comin

Yep, Tiger's coming out soon: Apple's now accepting submissions of Automator Actions, Dashboard Widgets, and Spotlight Plugins. You'll be able to go to Apple.com, look around for coolness, and download.

I knew something like this was coming along, but my guess was that Apple was going to be supporting Widget sales. The docs make it look like that's not happening (not now, at least). Too bad — there's a lot of people out there who'd like to be able to sell their widgets, and Apple's shown that they can make good money selling other people's works for 99 cents each.

Not this, not that, not the other

This keeps coming up, over and over, and that says to me that there's a problem here, but I don't know what to do about it, or even if something should be done about it.

The issue is that this blog isn't a single thing: it's not a woman's blog, it's not a tech blog, it's not a man's blog, it's not a political blog, it's not a parenting blog, etc. And for that reason, we don't get included when people are making lists (mental/online/print) of any of the above.

The latest hoohah is taking place here and here, where it was determined that (so far as I can tell) I didn't get invited to a cool uber-geek dinner in SF because I don't write enough here about tech.

The previous instance was when I was looking into running Blogads here, and it came down to the fact that while we have the traffic to make it worthwhile, we don't have targeted traffic. I can't say that people are here to read about tech, or women's issues, or politics, or culture, or parenting, or whatever, because we cover all of that (and more). So, we ended up not being able to run Blogads, because advertisers want targeted traffic, and we don't have those type of readers.

It's also the case with the sites that collect links of a certain type; most commonly, political blogs and women's blogs. We don't count because we aren't solely one thing or the other. And in many cases, it seems that the same people who're complaining about "we need to stand up and be counted!" won't, well, stand up and count us.

This isn't a rant about why I'm not invited, or why aren't we included, or any of that… but these issues seem to come up over and over and over recently, and I figured that it was worth noting. I don't know that there is a solution, although I'm open to suggestions!

Oh, and if you want more of my tech writing, there's a bunch of it in the current Macworld…

Later note: Chuq blogged about this with his own observations, and gave me a nice compliment in there, too. Thanks!