Well, in light of my chatty nature lately, I thought I would share my thoughts on Apple’s announcement, or lack thereof, today. If you haven’t heard the coverage, you an certainly tune in to Engadget to find out more.

I’ll summarize it here though:

• Mac Mini with Intel Chips
• Leather Case for iPod
• iPod Hi-Fi

I’m not casting any judgments on the quality of any of these things, however, considering that they spent so much time preparing people for this and letting buzz fester for quite some more time, this is definitely not the way to play this out. Check the comments above, you need to get to page 6 or 7 to pass all the people commenting in anticipating - yup 250 comments before it started. Then you’ll see the definitive drop in the tone as, well, pretty much everyone begins throwing tomatoes.

I think there’s two anecdotes here. First, PR is a wonderful and destructive thing - something to be handled with care. Second, when you make an announcement, make sure it means something to the audience you’re reaching, not just you - make it count. We’ve got so many little startups whipping out these days, everyone is announcing something - but there isn’t a similar level of execution. Keep them level.

Well, iSoldIt is taking their sweet time getting these things onto the board, but at least they are all up. Here’s the full inventory of things - please buy them :)

• CATALYST 2900 XL NETWORK SWITCH RACK MOUNT (3 days left)
• 8 PORT BELKIN KVM SWITCH WITH (4) 6FT CABLES RACK MOUNT (3 days left)
• 3COM SUPER STACK II SWITCH 3300 XM 24 PORT 3C16985 (3 days left)
• BELKIN 16 PORT KVM SWITCH WITH (7) 10 FT CABLES RACK (7 days left)
• HP XML SERVER ACCELERATOR SA7150 RACK MOUNT (7 days left)
• HP LOAD BALANCER SSL TRAFFIC DIRECTOR SA8220 (7 days left)

Too bad I don’t want to deal with pricing, negotiating, and shipping product otherwise I might have given Edgeio a try ;)

I almost never do this, but I can’t resist. I came across this link on Seth’s blog and checked it out - I’m not an avid YouTuber (or whatever you call yourself if you are into Tubing).

It’s a great little video on how to, uhm, do packaging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAGr3mVVUwE

Well, I spent the better part (ok all) of the weekend figuring out how to fit all my stuff into an apartment 1/8th the size. A challenge, yup, but that’s how we like ‘em.

We’re almost all the way out now, we have today and tomorrow to fully vacate. If I just didn’t have so much bloody work to do, this would be “simple”.

Saturday turned out to be great weather. We didn’t move on Saturday. Sunday was hovering in the teens with some icy, blistering cold wind to spice up things. Things aren’t much warmer today.

Oh well.

Just a quick shout out to my main man, Jimmie. Today a recent interview was posted on the New Media Collective where he talks about his photography and Cornershots.com.

Here’s a quick grab from the interview:

Why photoblogging? What made you choose this medium to display your work?

It sorta grew as a natural extension of my hobby and profession. Combining photography and technology—it was the perfect synergy for my life. I stumbled upon a few NYC-based photoblogs in the fall of ‘94 and till that point, I hadn’t touched digital photography at all, but I was amazed by the stuff people were doing. Photoblogging has given me the opportunity to share my work with people around the globe. It’s totally different than say, shooting a roll of film and just saving the contact sheet in a shoebox like in the old days. It’s a complete experience.

If you haven’t seen his photos yet, why not?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how the chat room works on this site. I definitely think it’s the way to go but I am missing something from the mix. As the owner of the site, I really want notification when I get a new chatter, much like I get an e-mail when a new comment is posted.

While there are a number of other solutions to this problem, and the 3Bubbles team is on the job, I wanted a quick fix now. So I whipped up this script.

Essentially, it checks when you land on a page to see if there are any of the 3Bubbles iframes in use. If it finds them, it pops up a window for that site that lets you see the full list of chats that are present. It updates in real-time since the iframes are copied to that page.

I’ll be improving it when I get time and there’s more things for me to play with, but it does the job for now.

Dowload it here.

If you have Greasemonkey installed, you can right-click on the link and choose “Install User Script”.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, I am in the process of evicting myself from my apartment in Newark. As a part of that process, I am also trying to rid myself of most world possessions - so I can get a whole slew of new worldly possessions.

In a part life, startup, we had accumulated tons of hardware in preparation for a launch that fizzled out. So for years, the equipment has been sitting there, doing no one any good. As I didn’t want to take it, I decided to sell it - on Ebay no less.

Now, I don’t have time to mess with all that work, so I did what any reasonably busy entrepreneur would do - I got someone else to do it. I’m using this service called iSoldIt. It’s one of those franchise drop spots where you give them your stuff, they photo it, describe it, list it, and hopefully ship it.

If you’re looking for KVMs or Switches, check out these links:

• CATALYST 2900 XL NETWORK SWITCH RACK MOUNT
• 8 PORT BELKIN KVM SWITCH WITH (4) 6FT CABLES RACK MOUNT
• 3COM SUPER STACK II SWITCH 3300 XM 24 PORT 3C16985

I figure that a least you know read the owner and you can get them for a steal.

Here’s a quick report on Day 1 with comments disabled - it works like a charm if I do say so myself. There’s two observations worth making.

First, the spammers are not having nearly as much impact on our server resources. Consider these numbers:

Now that’s a real savings if I ever saw one. Just think about how much crap I am not helping to share with the world.. ahh, refreshing.

The second observation is that quite a few people have gone into the chat room. I don’t know who most of them are, which is interesting. It’s the first time I am talking to people that are reading the site - aside from the hallways at blogging conferences. And the number of people is really interesting. It’s far more than would normally comment on a post.

Interersting indeed.

Today is a momentous day in the history of SocialTwister. The $pammers have finally won and I will no longer have comments on this site. I’m not sure how others deal with this problem, but I’ve reckoned with it for some time now and, well, quite frankly, I’m damn mad about it.

Two nights ago, Jimmie scripted through and turned off comments on all of the old posts. That should at least cut their interest in hoarding this site with their offers - I’m a poker player and I still don’t like the ads! I can’t recommend more than anything that you NOT use MT 2.x anymore and that you go with the DB version for no other reason than your ability to mass obliterate shiite.

However, all is not lost. An angel came to me with something much better. You’ll notice that now there is a Live Chat option available on all of my posts. This is brought to you compliments of my friends at 3Bubbles. In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been a close advisor to the company and have worked on a number of usability and interface issues (and NO, I had nothing to do with the inital design - sorry Drew).

So why chat? Simple, it’s not hacked to all death now. It’s simple to use. It’s easy to understand. It provides the same level of conversation - JUST WAY BETTER. If the open chat model starts to be a problem, I’ll turn it into a registered model. If the registered model fails, well, let’s not go there.

Indeed. I believe that the inline chat model is a killer and I am happy to push it into this use case kicking and screaming. If you miss comments, well, you shouldn’t - people hardly commented here anyway ;)

What’s that expression? You don’t miss something until it’s gone. Tough.

P.S. Trackbacks.. watch out, you’re next!

Since I have been back from my travels to the West Coast, I’ve been quite busy working on client work, preparing documentation, and, most horribly, packing up to finally move out of Newark. The move is bittersweet, but I guess all periods of your life eventually come to life.

I have a huge apartment.. something on the order of 2,000 square feet. I’ve been working/living here for about 4 years now and I’ve accumulated lots of things - though not more than the usual. If I have too much of anything, it’s bloody computer parts.

Yesterday, Pappoe came buy to take 2 raids, a 4-port KVM, and a box of network cables off my hands. He also did me an immense favor and offered to hold my collection of books (from the technical to the business to the philosophical). As we packed up the car, there were only 2 books that I held on to for myself:

• The Art of the Start - I don’t know which copy this is actually. I’ve given the book away 3 times already. I think, but I am not sure, that this might be the autographed one I got from Guy at the conference - but I might have given that to my partner.
• Blink - This was the pre-print copy of the book that I received for review purposes. See, blogging does have its benefits.

Yesterday, or so, there was a dust storm over a post that Guy wrote, “How to Suck Up To Bloggers”. Stowe seemed quite perturbed, as did a number of other folks that he’s linked off to. Despite the uproar, I’m not bothered much at all by what Guy has said.

I don’t know Guy Kawasaki personally, I’ve just met him a couple of times. He doesn’t call me up to play hockey or to see how things are going. However, I’ve read his work for years on end, and more recently, his blog. Going on that, and I will have to call any blogger out that doesn’t feel that they come to know someone from reading their writing, that I can relate to what he’s saying.

To close out the day, though, I’ll share a personal story. As we were loading the car yesterday with books, a street vendor (you know, one of those guys with a hot dog cart) rolls up and wonders if we’re having a book sale. We joked that we could make him a deal if there was something he wanted. The top of the pile had mostly tech books, but I pulled out my copy of “The Concise History of Buddhism”. I handed it over to the guy and he flipped through it, said “Wow. How much you want for this?”

I responded, “Take it. It’s yours. I can’t charge for Buddhism.”