So I got Omnisky set up and actually posted a test message to the site from my palmpilot. (I deleted it because ti basically said, "this is a test message. cool.")

This message is not from the wireless, because I (yet again) accidentaly clicked the 'metacookie update' button and needed to post something.

I'm going to see Moulin Rouge tonight with friends, so I'll post some fashion of review tonight or tomorrow. I managed to sleep in until 1pm today, all that sleepdep caughtup with me, and hopefully I'm mostly over it now. Got to get to sleep before 11 tonight though...

That's all for now. More to come soon (as always!)

Out There: One man's search to find the funniest person on the Internet, a new book by Henry Alford, is set for release on June 12th. I got a review copy in the mail this week, and found that AOLiza has been deemed the second-funniest person on the Internet (at least that's the opinion of Mr. Alford and his panel of experts family members.

It's a great book and everyone should get it, if for no other reason than that it talks about sites that are funnier than AOLiza and it has a cool bright green cover.

Speaking of AOLiza, well... I have some new convos, and they'l be here very soon. If you go over there, you can add your email address to the list, so I can let you know when new content is up.

The other big news (well, big is such a subjective term (but then, so is news)) is that I'll be making AvantGo gateways, and possibly WAP and/or Tellme gateways, for both AOLiza and Fury.com, so you can catch up on the latest as you commute to or from work.

I re-activated my Omnisky account for my Palm V CDPD modem, so I'll even be able to post while commuting to or from work. Win-win!

Today's Kisa's second birthday, as you may have noticed (or even anticipated?) by looking at the "Look Ahead" widgit to the left.

Kisa is still the best kitten in the world (though I suppose less of a kitten now) and is adorable beyond compare. She's taught me and Emily a new game, involving getting wrapped up in chanille and tussled. It starts her purring like nothing else I've seen.

Anyhow, it's the end of a great week. I hope everyone else has a great weekend!!

I'm so tired, and more than that, so tired of Netscape on my linux box choking in fear over simple well-formed HTML pages. It just crashed mid-post, so I'm reshaping my thoughts from the powerbook.

I'm now between my third and fourth days at Yahoo!. (note: The '!' is an integral part of Yahoo!'s brand identity, and should always be included as such. Thus, when someone inquires at your inclination to "Yahoo!?" it should be interpreted as a regular question, and not an interrobang (note to the note: an interrobang is actually "?!." (note to the note to the note: The period "." in the preceeding (preceeding) quote was grammatically correct, even there there is no period in an interrobang (n^4: except for the two periods within the ? and "!." (n^5: Argh. Forget it.)).) and so a "!?" would more accurately be termed a "bangogator.").) Did I mention I'm tired?

So, back on track: I only got about 3 hours of sleep Monday night, fretting about the new job starting on Tuesday. Tuesday night I played games at Ammy & Rick's, and didn't get home until around 10:30, got to sleep at midnight, got up at 5:30 (half hour before the alarm, but I was up, so it was no use). Last night I got 7 hours of sleep, but it was really hot and I had bad allergies so I tossed and snuffed all night. This morning it all caught up with me and I could barely stay awake most of the day. At least the meeting I most needed to be awake for was postponed.

Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep. Tonight I will sleep.

Work is great. These people really do know their stuff, and I think I'll fit right in. The best part is I haven't figured out yet whether they know just how rare they are. They probably do. Anyhow, it's just like summer camp where everyone's cool and they inspire each other to do great things.

Okay, now about blogging. I'm torn between getting a Blackberry and writing an email-blogging gateway, reactivating service on my Omnisky modem, or holding out for a ricochet modem for my laptop. The idea is that now that most of my non-work computer time will be in-transit (on the days I take Amtrak, anyhow) that I'd like to be able to blog from the train. Even more importantly, I'd love to be able to write a blog post whereever I am, whenever I have the thought. I leave myself voicemail messages on things to blog about when I'm driving in my car. I believe I have yet to actually blog one of them, and after about 6 weeks the saved message mysteriously disappears from my voicemail box.

So I've got that to figure out. I'm leaning towards the blackberry, which also has the cool bonus of being able to interact with Yahoo Instant Messager or (and possibly and) AIM (I may have to choose one or the other when I buy the service, in which case a server-based AIM<->YIM bridge may be another project to work on.). As for now, I barely had the initiative to sit down in front of the computer tonight to blog this. I'll write tomorrow morning about a cool sighting on the AOLiza front, but for now, I've got some catching up to do...

Quote of the day:

"'i-before-e' rules are weird and unscientific."
- Blue Oregon

Sleepy. I just got home about a half-hour ago (though that's more the result of having dinner and playing Cranium at Ammy's before driving back up to Berkeley.

Note to self: Driving 75 minutes to work going on 3 hours sleep for your first day orientation isn't the best way to start things off. On the upside, I got there 40 minutes early, so leaving home at 6:30am was probably a good move.

Tomorrow I'm taking Amtrak to work to see how that goes, now that it's not critical that I get there by 8:30 for Orientation.

Every Yahoo employee has a company and benefits orientation on the first Monday of their employ (or Tuesday if Tuesday is the first day of the work week). This week there were two new Yahoo! employees, me and Jee Park. Jee and I basically were hired for the same job, and she actually got in touch with me back in March when we were both interviewing, as her friend read about my interview on the blog, and told her. It was just a funny coincidence that we both had orientation on the same day, as she doesn't start for a few more weeks, (Stanford and its quarter system donchaknow).

I felt a little bad when they asked us to put our names in the hat and they raffled off a Yahoo!opoly board game. Names in hat: Two. Winner: Kevin.

The campus is great. Benefits are great, and the stock even took a graceful 10% dip today, just in time for my options strike price. Now it just needs to start climbing again. I just know it will.

Anyhow, I'll have more to write soon, specifically when I don't need to get to sleep and try to hold my own in the battle against Morpheus with a scant 6-hour tithe to appease it until I sleep once more.

In other news, the iPad story was mentioned on Macintouch today. It got about 1600 visitors to the site, several of whom stuck around to see what else was here. Fun stuff!

Oh, and I've already got a few blog entries planned for tomorrow. If I get started early enough I may be able to write one or both before I leave for the train tomorrow.

If I stay a really cool weblogger for long enough, will I be able to get a house like this?

Laundry, catching up on movies, cleaning, getting to sleep early.

Tomorrow I start at Yahoo! and, as I predicted, I don't know where the week has gone. So much to do, so little time (for resisting the urge to quote Willy Wonka, I will now quote the Rabbit) I'm late, I'm late!

Lots of interesting topics to talk about. One great thing about this job (and proof that I'm an optimist) is that I'll have an hour on the train each way each day to write up all the things I want to blog about, and work on projects. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but I do some of my best thinking on trains. As for why, well, I'll save that for my first in-transit blog entry.

As for today, I'm off to see Shrek again, this time with Karen, as she was sick when we all went to see it.

Sleep has been my enemy this weekend. I don't know why, but yesterday I slept in until 10, then read for an hour and fell asleep for another four hours. (Okay, maybe it was because I stayed up until 2am, or because I had a cat curled up at my feet, but sleeping until 3??

Anyhow, I'm working to overcome it. After all, in a couple days I'll be a worker again and will have to get up around 6, so I'd better get used to going to sleep well before the witching hour.

Anyhow, I'm rapidly trying to do everything that I won't have time to once I start at Yahoo. Most important is cleaning my office, then going through the remaining half of my old posts (November-April) and categorize them by topic, then the AOLiza refresh, then MetaCookie or photo galleries, then Randompixel, then, who am I kidding? Well, we'll see how much gets done. If I do anything visible to you, the web visitor, then I've cleaned my office, and that's a very good thing.

There has been a lot of speculation going around sparked by a comment made by a representative at Alpha Top, Apple's Taiwanese iBook fabrication contractor. According to the comment, Apple plans on releasing a 'larger-screened iBook' and will offer iBooks in different colors in July.

After a carefully worded denial by Apple (in itself a rarity), some Mac rumor sites have spun the comments and the wording of Apple's denial into the possibility of a third powerbook, priced around $2000, falling between the iBook and the G4 Powerbook.

This idea is highly suspect.

First, the speculation comes only hours after the Alpha Top and Apple comments, and seems to based on nothing more than spinning them into a reasonable rationalization. Second, and more importantly, such a product just doesn't fit from a marketing perspective. There is a vanishingly small number of people who would buy such a machine that wouldn't otherwise buy an iBook or TiPB.

Adding a product to the line costs a great deal of money, and in the 'new Apple' this is only undertaken when it will improve sales, not merely redirect them. This was the lesson learned by the Cube: People want expandability/functionality or they want value. A product wedged between the two didn't sell because people either weren't willing to sacrifice the expantability or higher clock speeds of the G4 PowerMac, or they weren't willing to pay so much more than an iMac, for a little more speed. The Cube is Apple's biggest failure in the past two years, and Apple isn't about to make the same mistake in the portable arena.

So why did Alpha Top say anything? One possibility is that, like any manufacturing contractor that OEMs to other companies, it uses PR not to build anticipation for new hardware, but to prove to the investment community that the company is prospering, and is worthy of its stock valuation. If Alpha Top is ramping up production for Apple, they need to be able to tell the world about it, so the world knows how well Alpha Top is doing as a company. It may have been misguided to elaborate on exactly what they're building, and knowing Apple's wrath if they were to reveal an upcoming product, they may have blurred the actual product to protect themselves, while still releasing the fact that they're doing more work for Apple on a new product.

There's little doubt that someone at Alpha Top messed up somewhere, but we'll just have to wait and see exactly how.