Once upon a time I was a really good rock climber. My friends and I would be at the rock gym twice a week, and be up in the Appalachians climbing on weekends when the weather allowed.

The "column-view" in Mac OS X, affectionately known to Cocoa geeks as an NSBrowser, is a really really awesome and efficient way of browsing hierarchies. I'm working on an app (on and off) that needs an NSBrowser, so I'm posting this link to the Using Browsers topic of the Cocoa Programming Topics documentation.

Well, one of my best friends Nate just got laid off from the company we both used to work for. No two weeks notice, just "pack up and leave". They've never been great about dealing with their employees, but this is just rotten. Two weeks before Christmas.

Looks like some people are still trying to build a better browser. "With OmniWeb 4.1 you should see some major improvements in compatibility and speed. Our goal is that OmniWeb can be your Mac OS X browser of choice for 100 percent of the web sites you visit." Good on'ya, Omni.

(re: the desk picure) Nate asks: "...umm, where's the LEGO U-Haul logo..."

Camera fun - my desk at the U-Haul Webhouse, showing my iMac server, Ti Fighter, second monitor for the TiBook, and the Lego Mac Plus:

Those of you out there that usually chat with me on AIM: we're making a lot of network changes today - I may or may not be able to get them to open up the AIM port today (soon though). If it's important email me.

Jim just released an outline-based IM suite for Userland's outliner. Jim developed this back in January 2000... I think I had a chance to play with it - if the memory I'm dredging up is accurate, it was pretty cool. ;-)

• SlashDot

Now that we have ubiquitous networking at home, and broadband access to the'net, I'm going to get an IMAP server set up on my home G3, so we don't have to POP our mail from multiple machines.

"Dear Steve Ivy,

We regret to inform you that on Thursday, December 6th 2001, Kudosnet Technologies Inc. will be ceasing operations."

OK, so this rocks as much as I thought it would. I finally got my Linksys 4-port-10/100-switch-broadband-router-wireless-access-point working this morning, and am blogging from my couch. I may have to put on a movie just to complete the experience.

Brad Cox (inventor of Objective-C, the main language OS X applications are written in) is building Java Web Applications now. In this article he is complaining about the way most web application servers still treat pages as files. (see JSP)

I've started reading Andrew Sullivan's website pretty much daily. He's a fairly prolific blogger, now we just need to get him to make his posts linkable. Doc agrees.

Jim pointed me to the Jikes Bytecode Toolkit a bit ago... I agree with him that some awesome dev tools and documentation could be developed with this. Gonna have to check it out.

Nick Denton links to a Spanish new site with some awesome information graphics on the goings-on in Afghanistan. Flash. Excellent information design.

Kevin Werbach has written a great article about the rules governing licensing of the radio spectrum, wireless ethernet (WiFi - 802.11b), spread-spectrum technologies, and other things.

Jodi and I have tickets to tonight's taping of "Wait, Wait, Don't tell me!" in Tempe, AZ, our new home town.

Ok, so, like everyone else I hated Wes Crusher on ST:TNG (those who care will know what that means). But I must say that Wil Wheaton, Wes Crusher look-alike and all-around geeky dude, is a riot. And he has his own oft-updated blog and discussion group. Wil's been on my "Reads" list for months now - check him out.