Long weekend! Jodi's parents are here, mine were here three weeks ago, and Jim was here last weekend. Still have pics of that to put up.

Jodi's parents and I went to South Mountain last night, to see the sunset and the city lights. I've mentioned it before - the sunsets out here are a thing to behold.

For the last few months, Macrobyte has been working on readying Conversant, their internet groupware application, for release as a 'shrinkwrapped' product. Today marks the first release of Conversant 1.0b1 to Frontier and Radio Userland developers.

Announcing Conversant 1.0b1.

Our favorite platform vendor has managed to completely ignore the release of an incredibly powerful server product for their platform, one which will drive sales of their platform, and will go far to show the power and flexibility of the platform.

Awesome! The recent episode ("Cross Jurisdictions") of CBS' hit show CSI which included the Las Vegas CSI team heading to Miami, was actually the warmup to a CSI spinoff called CSI:Miami. Jodi and I are certifed CSI junkies, and this episode was a definite highlight in the series so far.

Jim was here for the weekend, and we had a blast!!! Some highlights:

Looking for a way to heap adulation and loot upon your friendly neighborhood redmonk? Look no further than my recently un-earthed Amazon.com wishlist.

ignore please

Jim arrived, and is already hooked up on our airport network, and showing us pics of his kids. Fun!

I'm sitting here, wondering what the heck I'm doing at work this early after very little sleep last night, reading some of the blogs in my "those who don't ping weblogs.com" bookmarks list. Of interest:

The Apple Store has gone away temporarily, as expected, so as to bring us pure Xserve purchasing goodness.

To appear here, or here.

Apple's new server is called Xserve; MacCentral is updating live...

Sid2 is now properly sorting and reverse sorting the history when you click the column headers, either by Title or Date/Time.

Doc Searls is blogging the 'Stevent' live.

The box has a dual G4s, fast L2&3 cache, an ASIC Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire sys controller, Big 266 MHz DDR SdRAM Dual Gigabit ports, quad ATA drives, on a 533MB/s bus, buncha other stuff I can't keep up with. "Fastest architecture we've ever built." (He's been describing the maximum configuration.)

See it here.

Apple is scheduled to announce new rackmount servers today. I've been around the Mac world long enough to be pretty cynical about this, but here's what I'd like to see:

I've got Sid2 working now to the point of duplicating the functionality of the Java version (i.e. Sid 1) - plus a few extras. I think I'll release a beta pretty soon.

Bill Bumgarner has a weblog, and from time to time he posts insteresting bits that are useful to Cocoa developers.