t’s late after a long day, and – of course – I’m still coding.

Night is a good time to reflect, especially as you are watching the tail -f on a script you just fired off for the billionth time.

Quick notes – Tech memes without legs, so I can be on the record as incredibly incorrect:

• Twitter — I just don’t get it. Geek love; I understand. But no legs. Even the younger geeks I talk to dismiss it.
• GreaseMonkey — Love the concept, but buying into the MS ActiveX camp: Must have X browser with Y extension installed. Nope….
• OMPL — Dave Winer – whom I respect – is behind this all, but – as with Twitter – no one I know (geeks) get/grok/care about it
• Ruby — Nice language, the Rails framework is nice. But…why? Slow, based on Python (which is wicked fast) and competes, basically, with PHP (FOSS and fast) and JSP (sorta OSS; compiled fast but a clunky language).

Am I totally wrong?

Of course!

Just jotting down some notes about how I feel right now.

History will judge…

Well, today is the official end of my vacation for this year – it’s Sunday, and we just got back from about four days in Montana on Friday.

I’m furiously trying to get the pics together in my gallery, but it’s going to take awhile.

In the meantime, a teaser of what’s to come is posted here.

That’s Lake Saint Mary in Glacier National Park – part of a breathtaking drive over the continental divide called the Going Into the Sun Drive. Pretty amazing.

I’ll explain later, but I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotations – the last graphs of Norman MacLean’s brilliant novella, A River Runs Through It.

It’s worth reading if only so you can truly appreciate these last graphs, and be able to go back to them from time to time. That’s great writing.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Artic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Yes, it is iDay – the day of the iPhone launch.

Do I want one? Yep. (Why wouldn’t any even slightly geeky individual not want one?)

Do I need one? Nope.

Will I get one? Nope (at least not now).

Do I think this changes everything about cellphones, as has been the general buzz?

Yep.

The one striking thing I note when I read reviews about this product is that the reviews are not about a cellphone, the reviews are about a mobile device that does A, B & C – oh, and you can use it as a phone, as well.

I do think this is a watershed moment in cell phones and all mobile devices; I’ll be interested to see what Apple does next (3G, for example) with this device.

And that’s the key – it’s not a cellphone.

It’s a device. A handheld computer.

Steve Jobs appears to be an overbearing, Type-A asshole controlling freak of a boss, but he seems to have a handle on not only what people want, but – more importantly for sales – on what they should want.

And the innovation – based on existing tech, agreed, but put together in a friendly form – is astounding.

And thanks to the reality-distortion field, Job’s attention to detail, some amazing UI and tech engineers, here is a device everyone wants.

Let’s see how reality plays out now that XX users have the iPhone and begin banging away on it…

I’ve flipped the switch to display my summer theme (CSS) as it’s now summer.

Whoo-hoo!

Can it get more exciting??? I think not…..

Yep, it’s 10pm here.

I have a couple (minimum) of hours of work before hitting the sack.

REMEMBER: If you sleep, the terrorists have won…

YES I’m being facetious…

When I awoke today
Suddenly nothing happened

— Colin Hay, Waiting for my Real Life to Begin

I sought out this song after hearing it on an episode of Scrubs (excellent use of music on this show).

In the show, it was sung by a woman, and I still want a cover of this song by a woman: It just worked better for me than Hay’s (a guy’s) version.

But an excellent song, outstanding Scrubs episode and some poignant lyrics.

Junk e-mail continued to land in mailboxes around the world Thursday, despite the arrest a day earlier of a man described as one of the world’s most prolific spammers.

– Spam flows despite high-profile arrest, MSNBC

I a shocked, shocked to discover that there [are more than more than one spammer] going on [in these tubes].

Like slapping a mosquito. Duh.

OK – it’s a good thing and sends a message, but it will not affect spam in the least bit. Sorry. That’s the reality.

Oh, so very tired.

I have stuff I have in my head that I want to put here, but I’m tired.

Get it?

Hey, three-day weekend (Memorial Day) coming. Some sleep-in time, ja?

Sixth anniversary of this blog.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

And an excellent learning experience in so many ways.

And I’ve begun to write again…as I had hoped.

Let’s see what the new (blog) year holds…