I went to the public library to day and came back with an armload of books. The Phoenix Library system rocks. My titles:

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (for fun)
• Server-based Java Programming (to get a better understanding of how Java handles networking etc)
• Enterprise JavaBeans (expanding my horizons some)
• The Humane Interface (HCI design, by Jeff Raskin, Mac interface designer)
• Mapping Web Sites (information architecture brushup)

The "Rodeo" and "Chedeski" fires in north eastern Arizona have now eaten through 300,000 acres of high country forest.

The fire has burned about 300,000 acres - about 479 square miles - since Tuesday. As many as 25,000 people have fled homes from more than half a dozen towns.

Seth and other Macrobyters (that doesn't sound right...). Attached are three versions of the FriendlyTemplate, and two photo templates. Please respond via email, as I don't have a private space to do this in. I'll put up more shortly.

For the four of you out there reading my blog, I'm not dead yet. Things in my life have gotten way the heck crazy lately, so I've not been concetrating on redmonk.net. But fear not, I'll be back to posting random bits very soon now...

Here's wishing the best to Dave, who is in the hospital, and will remain there through this week.

I'm on the tail end of a 30-hour stretch at work. We had a major, multi-application deployment last night, with everyone from the network administrators to the programmers to the message board admin involved. It was a big deal, and of course my app decided to throw a tantrum precisely 2 minutes before we flip the switch.

Jodi posted a pic she took of me in the new specs over on her site. She seems to think they make me look smarter. Is that good?

Oh wow. Jim had himself a creative outburst with my recent be-spectacled pic.

John Robb thinks that k-logs (fancy word for weblogs) in the corporate environment are a good thing becuase they are archived for posterity.

Seth Dillingham released a cool Conversant macro today, an implementation of the unix strftime function that is used with formatting dates. It works with several data/time related message macros, and date custom fields.

...to divintomark: tomorrow it will all be different.

I was pointed to the Armed Liberal by Glenn at InstaPundit. Good site, I've added it to my blogroll.

Well, I've been getting headaches at work lately, and when I go to the movies. After Spider-Man and Star Wars I got serious, nausea-inducing, eyes-watering, jackhammer headaches.

I need to find a library for creating charts (report style) in Java. Ideally it should be:

Mena of The Morning News ponders The Pixies' Doolittle, a very great, very odd, very Black Francis bit of tunage.

Bravo! The Electronic Frontier Foundation is helping a group of ReplayTV users to sue the entertainment industry (meaning the MPAA) in order to keep the rights that current copyright law and legal precedent give them - the rights to record broadcast tv shows, to skip commercials, etc. -- the stuff you can do with every VCR in existence now. When will the industry learn? Ugh.

Unsanity has released Silk, a preference pane for Mac OS X that enabled Quartz text rendering in Carbon applications. Requires Mac OS X 10.1.5, available on Apple's site or in SoftwareUpdate.

Ok, I know we're going a tad overboard here, but I'm having fun, too. Witness:

Mark Pilgrim is happily hacking away on interesting uses for the HTML <link> tags a lot of bloggers have been putting up lately.