ivory-tower dot org

Free parking: a coworker's on vacation and offered me the use of his parking space in the garage at work last week. Sure was nice to avoid shelling out the $14 it usually costs to park a couple of blocks from work. (Note: I work in the Streeterville area of Chicago, just east of Michigan Avenue, where parking is expensive, all of the buildings are really tall, and traffic's a mess.) I'm not quite sure why some firm would build a 28-story office building and give it only 50 or so spots in a one-level underground garage.

Here's a picture taken on the way to work one morning.

I've been keeping the digital camera in my briefcase in order to take some random pictures for the site.

And here's one of the downtown skyline from the living room. Might use this as a banner someday, which would explain the size. I really need to try to take this same shot at night to get all the lights.

Posted by jim at 1:35 PM | Permalink

Seems that Apple's Cube team has been dissolved, from what I've seen on MacNN.

I'm really not surprised, nor are many others I suppose. It was a neat idea, sort of a half iMac/half G4 tower crammed in a cube. The price was too high, which resulted in low sales. A neat idea, but asked to shoulder too much of the sales burden. The people who wanted more than an iMac remained happy with their G3 and G4 towers and didn't want to spend more and get less (expandability, mostly). I can't imagine what other features would have shown up in future version of the Cube that would distinguish it from other machines in their product line.

The Cube sure looks neat in person, especially when hooked up to the 15" LCD, and it was that striking appearance that made people like it and want it, or dismiss it a an overpriced paperweight. I think there are still many users out their who want their boxes remain plain and businesslike, assuming businesslike = serious and not looking like a computer you have at work = silly toy.

The Cube reminds me of the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, which was essentially a PowerBook locked in a open position with some Bose speakers that they sold for USD $10,000. Perhaps they should have kept the Cube secret for a little longer and released it as the 25th Anniversary Macintosh.

At least Apple realized they missed the boat on CD-RW. I'd be interested to know how they pulled off the crowd for the new iTunes commercial they've been running. Now if they only would have stuck around in the handheld market and somehow crossbred the Newton 2100 and the Palm Vx and VII.

Lots of useful and fun stuff at the 404 Research Lab site. Having a useful 404 error page is an essential part of any site. The site itself is fun but also educational. There are general instructions on how to set up a 404 page on your own site and also a directory of 404 pages of note out there. I'm really surprised at home many site, both personal and professional, don't have a 404 page.

Posted by jim at 1:33 PM | Permalink

Adam's got a blog going for his trip to Vegas (wonder if he'll lose any space dollars). I thought about keeping a running commentary on my trip to San Antonio, but never got around to it. Plus, I only took a couple of pictures with the digital camera, and they're not particularly interesting from a travelog stand point, so nothing came of that. Maybe on our road trip to Boston I'll put something together. I haven't traveled for business since San Francisco in 1999 (pre-digital camera) and never got around to documenting any trips out to Iowa either.

Weather's lousy (40 and rainy) here, almost like an early November day than a March one. Bleh.

Posted by jim at 1:29 PM | Permalink

Cue Lyle Lovett's "That's Right (You're not from Texas)"

Spent a couple days in San Antonio with friends last weekend.

Things bought:

• Brisket at Rudy's


• Large molcajete


• Cast-iron tortilla press


• Terra cotta Virgen de Guadalupe plaque


• Two small magnetic Virgen de Guadalupe figures


• Little Mexican girl doll (I suppose there's a name for them. I saw them at the airport and at various stores around town.)

• Hat


• Boots


• Guayabera shirt

I think air travel has made people pretty blase about going places. It still is a bit odd to sit in an aluminum tube for a couple of hours at 30,000 feet at hundreds of miles an hour and not quite realize you're somewhere different until you exit the aircraft. Once in the jetway, the primitive kicks in and you notice that everything smells different and the sun's at a whole different angle in the sky.

After traveling with my trusty PowerBook 540c, I miss the modern features of my iMac at home (my main machine). Sure, a new PowerBook G4 would be nice, but even an old iBook would be better that my current iMac. I'd really be interested if the form factor for the iBook were smaller. I'm thinking of a cross-breed machine of he Titanium G4 sleekness and the iBook's 12.1" screen (an updated PowerBook 2400c, if you will).

Cydonia, the new Orb cd is out. The released version isn't as good as it could be/should be. Several tunes were replaced by newer ones, most of them throwaways. I'll have to rely on my CD-R of a previous unreleased version for Yungle and Freely Wheely, among other replaced songs. Hope they'll come out at a later date in some format (perhaps a new version of Orbscure trax?) along with Mickey Mars from U.F. Off.

Been fiddling around with HTML here to have the site validate as HTML4.01. Most of it does, except the counter on the main page fails (which I can understand. Been reading a bit on XML (for Dummies) and XHTML and will go the XHTML way at some point.

Came back to news that one of the first sites I remember, the Trojan Room Coffee Machine is going offline soon. Sigh. Next thing you know, my favorite webcam/art thing the Light on the Net will go away. I remember being somewhat amazed when I realized that clicking on the image was turning on and off lights somewhere in Japan, and that anybody could do it.

Posted by jim at 1:26 PM | Permalink