Several months back, I allowed myself to get sucked into a little Apple-Dell spat -- err....discussion where an acquaintance of mine, Faruk Ateş, "debunked" the "myth" that Apple charges more for the same hardware.

Of course, the systems had differences so the debate raged on, but honestly, I was amazed that Dell's prices were, well...so close to Apple's. Perhaps Apple truly was intent on competing with the PC makers. Fast forward ten months to yesterday when I made a comment about not being Anti-Apple.

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Robert was kind enough to tag me for a meme -- along with a few others who don't normally get them. This one asks "Where were you one, five, and ten years ago?"

One Year Ago

Austin, Texas. Not much different than today, a Software Developer at Austin Info Systems, now known as Overwatch working on various products dealing with intelligence gathering and visualization. I had just launched iamacamera.org managed by blosxom.

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South by Southwest Interactive 2006 was a blast -- as many folks are mentioning in their blogs. I learned a lot. Here are a couple things I want to do differently next year.

1. Get invited to a meal with more folks

Meals are where the real interaction takes place -- folks discuss their current projects and lessons learned. Opinions over panel discussions and where things are going and the inside scoop on what's going to happen soon.

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Would you trust these people?

IE7's new phishing filter wasn't quite sure initially if these shady characters were on the up-and-up.

I was mildly amused and mildly annoyed seeing the IE7 phishing filter dialog appear when I viewed my website a couple days ago.

I'm not sure what would cause it to mark it as suspicious. The only reason I can think of is that perhaps I added a Technorati javascript file that references a site outside my domain.

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Visiting Robert's Talk is always an experience. While I'm more than likely going to find discussion on internet technologies, I never know what might pop out of the keyboard of Robert Nyman. He's talented. He's thoughtful. He's friendly. He's Swedish. What's not to like?

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Here's a big reason why I have been unable to attend to Vine Type. I just returned from a ten-day mission trip to Guatemala.

These are some kids from Iglesia Presbiteriana Emanuel in Quetzaltenango where my group helped with construction of new classrooms. The country is trying to recover from a thirty-six-year [1960-1996] civil war and is dealing with the pressures of global economies and internal discrimination.

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Milan's website desires to "promote both ASP.NET and web standards." That's just about sums up my core interests as well. I came across this site less than a week ago, but I can tell that this is one worth watching.

I enjoy this site because Milan's mix of design and development are right in alignment with my own. I enjoy his articles and the tools he shares. The writing style is informative and substantive.

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Welcome to the re-launch of my blog now under the power of Vine Type.

I'm interested in seeing if there's any interest in Yet Another Blog Engine, but with it generating XHTML-valid code on a .NET platform, folks might be willing to give it a try. Especially since it's so easy to test out.

I've tried to pack in the most important blog features, but the primary goal during development has always been standard content management functionality. I like the simplicity of the blog paradigm and I think it can be applied to small-to-medium websites.

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Rather than just list people on my blog watch without explanation, I thought I should perhaps "introduce" them or at least explain why my blog watch contains the links that it does. So my lead-off batter for blog watch has to go to Eric Meyer, someone whom I've never met but seems so very familiar...

He grew up near Cleveland in the 60s and 70s; I grew up near Cleveland in the 60s and 70s. He's a web designer and developer; I'm a web designer and developer. He and his wife are teaching their child sign language; my wife and I taught our children sign language. He attends SXSW in Austin, Texas; I live in Austin, Texas. He's an internationally renknowned author and speaker and all-around friendly guy whose writings are followed daily by thousands around the globe; I ...uhmm... okay there are some differences. I don't shovel snow off my driveway being another.

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Ed Hassinger pointed me to two new Google features that I think are worthy of specific mention.

The first is Google Suggest that provides character-by-character feedback as you type in your search terms. It even includes hit counts in the dropdown list.

The second is Google Maps that has all the normal features of map plotting that we're used to but then provides drag-around capability. Meaning, once your map displays, click (and hold the mouse button down) then drag left or right to reveal more of the map. No need to constantly recenter the map before zooming. But if you do want to recenter the map, simply double-click on a spot and it will recenter to that spot.

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