inluminent

DVD Capture is a new Applescript Studio Application that’s been released by digitallyObsessed. [download for Mac OS X] I haven’t played with it, but like the idea of a promise of actually being able to take screen captures of DVD movies (something that Apple has made impossible with the stock DVD Player application.

Great commentary from Frank on this piece. Thanks for showing your bias Dave. Now I know how much stock to put into your writing in the future. Oh, and by looking at Dave’s corporate website, we can all tell that he’s a stellar marketer, and has the experience and knowledge behind him [...]

Adrants latest ‘made up statistics‘ list is a great pick me up after an afternoon of drudgery.

My company is currently doing a big marketing push (it’s big for us, because its our first advertising buy in 20 some years of business). I found this list of Thirteen Great Ways to Kill Your Companyís Marketing and I thought to myself how appropriate the timing was.
Here’s the list:
1. Basing decisions on personal opinion.
2. [...]

excellent explanation of how a startup can profit on their employees backs, er, um, wages. (btw, sometimes I feel like I work for one of those non-startup, non-growth companies and am always looking for my next best opportunity.)

Due to some developments by Phil, and using his template and plugin for movable type, I’ve created a comments RDF feed for inluminent/weblog.
The URL is here:
http://www.inluminent.com/weblog/comments.rdf
So, if you’re interested in syndicating my comments (not sure why this is useful yet, but I’m sure Phill will point it out eventually) then drop that URL into your [...]

Why don’t major news publications like MSNBC or rather, NewsWeek, include outbound links in their articles?
Take this one, which I just skimmed, In it you’ll find this passage:
And yet my GSM-capable phone didnít work in Asia. I was missing a removable chip called a SIM card. A little bigger than a fingernail, a [...]

Scott gives us Fuzzy Search™.
and yes, I do highly recommend mnoGoSearch, but am waiting on Movable Type 2.5 which has search built in to it to add searching to this site (just want to be an end user).

Travel is the largest e-commerce category on the net, and yet it’s still the toughest nut to crack, and at the same time, the one with the most potential, in my opinion.
Reading about Nate’s most recent experience, I’m reminded of how hard it is to do something that’s traditionally been a completely hands-on experience in [...]

Do whatever is neccessary to make it look like it was no effort at all.
This is the story that I learned from reading Todd’s latest post on his weblog.
FrontPage Sucks™. Any developer knows that. Even windows based web designers know that FrontPage sucks. Todd’s story really isn’t about Frontpage though. It’s [...]

I normally read technology related weblogs these days, so when I find a weblog with coding tips and great writing, I’m inclined to thank the writer somehow. I’d like to point you all to Scott Andrew’s weblog and this post about yellow jackets. It’s a refreshing read.
“I squashed it with a newspaper before [...]

Where the hell have I been for the past couple of weeks?
Since Vanguard declared bankruptcy and closed its doors, Hooters has formed Hooters Air LLC and is seriously considering launching an airline in Vanguard’s place.
Wow!
Now this would be a great marketing gig, though, I have a feeling that it’ll only work for two markets. [...]

I’ve been using SpamCop as a non-paying member for about a year now. In that time, I think I’ve probably reported about 1,000 spammers, but you know what I’ve noticed? It hasn’t really helped me. I still get spam. Sure, I could sign up for the paid version, but that’s a [...]

I can’t steal the punchline to this one from Kasia, so go read the joke and the punchline at her site. Classic.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a post on Joel’s weblog from January about Knowledge Management and a software product called Six Degrees, that was coming out from Creo (made up of the guys that were the real brains behind Quark back in the day).
I was intrigued. Here promised to be a product [...]

inventory.overture.com - very useful tool for learning what to buy on overture. [via executivesummary]

So, today, I got a call from a client asking me to sell them all of my inventory for a particular target.
Woopee! Jump for Joy! right?
Not neccessarily.
As an ad sales person in today’s world, I know better. You see, today’s internet advertising rates are always negotiable, and when I say that I [...]

Keith Devens shows us his mod_rewrite rule for getting rid of extensions. Totally cool, though I don’t know much about mod_rewrite (yet)

Been working on our server for my new company a lot lately, and that’s taking a lot of time. As I work on it with our new sysadmin (who comes highly recommended by Scott Johnson) I’m starting to realize how little I really know about server administration, and for that matter network architecture. [...]

Amazon is Big Brother, posted over on the Amazon Weblog shows us all one more reason to not use Windows. The fact that they’re installing Alexa things by default (which was under serious attack by privacy organizations since they launched) without telling anyone anything is typical of the Windows mentality. Netscape 4.x embedded [...]

I’ve had an Earthlink account since I bought my iMac in August 1998. I signed up for that account for two reasons: 1) I was new to the dialup internet (having been a college student for the majority of the time before that, I didn’t need a dialup account) and 2) It was so [...]

This is too fun, especially considering my weekend trip to the indy race.

During my college years, I was introduced to DoubleDave’s Pizzaworks, a great little local chain that started in College Station, TX (yes, I’m an Aggie) in 1984. DoubleDave’s seemed to be a staple part of the diet when we were in college. We’d eat there after football games, during study sessions, before Bonfire, [...]

Nicholas Riley does a great job of summarizing the new Terminal application in Jaguar. He also told me how to find the MacMinute RSS feed (until Stan freaks out and changes it) and MacUpdate’s RSS feed.
diveintomark, among others, points out that Mac OS X 10.2.1 is coming out soon, we’re all sure.
MacOSXHints tells how to [...]

Monday was a good day for incoming referrers.
It seems that Tony Pierce finally stumbled onto this little weblog, and thinks that I’m doing it better than him… Thanks Tony. That is terribly high praise, in my opinion. Most of you don’t know this, but Tony’s weblog was the key inspiration for [...]

Just ordered a 512MB Compact Flash card from Amazon for $149 after mail-in rebates. Great deal, considering a year ago I bought a 64MB card for about $150. [via gizmodo]

I read this story today, about Virgin Atlantic Airways having to replace all of their mother and baby room table because passengers are using them to join the elusive ‘mile high club’ and thought to myself “is that good or bad PR?”
I mean look at it this way:

Virgin gets in the public eye for something [...]

I read all of MarketingSherpa’s email newsletters religiously. Over the past month or two, they’ve proven to be just about the absolute best resource for new ideas that I have been able to find (and because they’re newsletters, I don’t have to continually search them out).
In the recent past, I’ve learned about ways that [...]

It’s nice to see that Phil Windley (CIO of the state of Utah) likes his iBook and Mac OS X.
“Its beautiful and very well executed. Everything about it, hardware and software, makes you want to play with it. Some of its “gee whiz” but other stuff is useful and neat.”

Unsanity makes just about the coolest software for Mac OS X. They call their software ‘haxies‘ as the large majority of their applications are really just hacks for Mac OS X, but they also are much more than just hacks for the users that install them… they’re usually akin to total user experience upgrades.
Take [...]

Sunday night, I went to the IRL’s Chevy 500 at Texas Motor Speedway north of Fort Worth, TX. I’d received 15 free tickets to the event, and thus invited a bunch of friends to go wtih us. We had a blast.
This was my first race involving automobiles ever, and thus, I [...]

i’m having issues with MT rebuilding the index files this morning… please bear with me while I try to figure it out… thanks.

Q: When should a salesperson just ’shut up’ and tell the customer what he wants to hear?
A: Never, and always.
You see, a customer might ask you question A, but in reality, they’re asking this question to answer quesion B (which they probably haven’t thought of yet). It’s your job as a salesperson to answer [...]

On Monday night, Jeremy Zawodny, an employee at Yahoo, announced the launch of remember.yahoo.com on his blog. On Tuesday, he posted a quick ‘i’m freaking swamped’ post.
Today, he came up for some air, it seems. He learned a while bunch about MySQL (and other things I’m sure) and he’s decided to share some [...]

Anne Holland shows us how to pick that day to end a special offer on… Anne rocks.

Tonight, I read this quick post over at the ContentBiz blog, and that prompted me to think about how we deliver our tutorials in-house, and how we might do then better in the future.
Writing a tutorial or ‘how-to’ manual has got to be just about the hardest damned thing in the world to [...]

This looks cool: GPGMail for Jaguar. [via Pat Berry]
The only reason I’m not really all that interested in downloading an installing it right now, is that it’s a hack, and there is a commercial piece of software on the horizon that’ll do the same thing (which means it’ll come with support) … then again … [...]

I meant to blog this earlier in the day, as it’s a great example of why I love Kuro5hin.org.
The other side of greener grass
I don’t know about other countries, but many US homeowners are really obsessed with their lawns. I guess growing grass around your house is better than pouring concrete. Of course, [...]

Wow! Rick Bruner just pointed out an article on ClickZ, by Kevin Lee, about Google and Overture’s CPC advertising programs.
Damn. I really wish I’d have read that article prior to a meeting I had with my boss earlier in the week. I was trying to explain how the adwords rankings [...]

It had to happen: the iCal Weblog. [via Adam Curry]
iCal2blog can be used to publish your iCal events to a blog.
[Later] A webdav+iCal tutorial.

Today, Ranchero released a new beta of TigerLauch, which is a little menubar application that’s open-sourced, and free. The idea behind TigerLaunch is that it runs in your menu bar, and provides quick access to all of your applications (fully configureable). It rocks. [screenshot]
I’ve been able to get my dock back down to [...]

I’ve been reading a lot of complaints about iCal recently, but I’d like to point out that I think that most of them are people that are comparing iCal to other calendar keeping software that they’re 1) used to and 2) that they paid for. iCal is free. It’s a huge value add [...]

Today, Steven Frank at Panic pointed me to Shoutcast DNAS as a solution to my MP3 serving woes…
I’ve played with it a little, and have some configuration issues to work out, as well as permission issues on the files (I’m an idiot sometimes… I unpacked the tar file in /usr/local/ but probably should have done [...]

So, at work this morning, I got a call from some guy at RealKeywords (they’re trying to do what RealNames was doing before Microsoft fucked them over). I let him take 5 or 10 minutes (of my not really listening) to give me his schpiel and then he stopped (to breathe I guess) and [...]

Back on September 4th, I wrote about adding ‘live referrer tracking’ to this website using a bit of Perl and PHP. I pointed at a few sources, but didn’t provide any real details on how to do it, so I’m going to try and explain what I did, and how to do it yourself [...]

I’m looking for a way to stream my own MP3s from iTunes on my home computer, so that I can just type in a URL into iTunes at my office (or anywhere) to listen to them.
Macintosh Digital Hub:iTunes looks like a good starting point, but no quick apparent solutions.
Audion 3 supports Broadcasting, but requires a [...]

This is probably the best commentary I’ve seen on iCal and why it’s important yet.

I know that my buddy’s had it bad, but this too funny not to laugh at. You have to understand that he works a a very large company, and this company probably has just as many problems as the rest, when it comes to beuracracy, but my buddy just left a small start-up environment [...]

AdAge published the results to a survey that they gave to advertising professionals recently, that deals with the ad world’s tech desires and needs and more.
It looks like the PowerMac G4 is still the favorite among creatives out there, which is probably the only reason that rich media companies are developing for the Macintosh. [...]

These books are on my ‘to buy and read’ list:
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Small Time Operator, 25th Ed