Dave Mancuso dot Com

Remember when I talked about the Hershey Trust trying to sell (for all practical purposes) ownership of Hershey Foods? Well, they backed out after the HUGE public outcry. But that wasn’t the end. The trust Board is in discussions over the “changing of the guard,” so to speak. The Board may be downsized from 17 members to 13, with 10 members leaving and not all of them being replaced. The Board will have representation from the Hershey School’s alumni organization and other balanced representation.

Score one for ideals over dollars. I’m still stunned at how badly the Board misjudged the impact of its actions. I guess they understand now.

Yep, that’s me all right. Look what they say about me:

“David Mancuso is the true pioneer of the modern clubbing”

Pretty cool. Go to Google.com and put Dave Mancuso in–I’m the second top hit (and third, etc.)

Chimera hit .6 today! And my PowerBook (which melted down today, and which I’ve just recovered from) welcomes it with open arms.

I actually thought that Chimera killed my PowerBook in conjunction with Radio Userland (the app that powers this site), but it now seems more likely that it was a freak accident involving QuickMail.

Hoser app.

(Time to resurface from the ether):
Vivato is introducing a wireless product that allows you to handle hundreds of users at incredible ranges (Wired has a good story). The key? The specially designed antenna:

” To demonstrate how this works, one Vivato engineer launched a live audio stream from the Net on a laptop, then cavalierly carried it out of the meeting room, into the elevator, down to the first floor, across the building’s lobby, out into the street, and three doors down to the nearby McDonald’s — without the live MP3 stream pausing to rebuffer during several minutes of constant motion.

Belanger joked, “Just wait. That sucks compared to the product.” “

Heck, I just want to hang out on the back porch in the summers and surf like I do indoors.

Maybe you missed the Microsoft PR story about a user who switched from Mac to Windows. It was apparently a rebuttal to the popular Apple Switch Ads.

Until people found out it was falsified.

A great expose of the “switcher story” can be found here.

I like my Windows XP machines as much as anyone–I manage several hundred Wintel boxes at work. But why do you have to lie about a product to “prove” its worth? This is almost as bad as when Microsoft created fake political action committees to help sway views on the federal Justice Department vs. Microsoft. case.

The latest nightly build of Mozilla (the new Netscape web browser) fixes the scroll arrow problem I’ve been having in Mac OS X–you could click on the scroll bar arrow and it highlighted, but no scrolling would occur. Now it works. Checking Bugzilla shows that the bug was resolved on Friday (the patched was commented “Shot in the dark, but seems to make sense 🙂 ” ).
Also, in the preferences, you can set Mozilla to always open the Download Manager when downloading files. I’m not sure when that became available.
Looks like Mozilla 1.2 on Mac OS X is ready for beta status. My Windows XP build seems pretty stable too.

It was great to visit Kevin on Saturday and Sunday morning. We did some computer stuff, talked about a lot of things, and went to a party on Saturday evening at John Dorcester’s house. Susie and I made my Sweet Italian Jambalaya, and it was much in demand (until it was nearly gone, in fact). Kevin’s friends are really, really nice people. Cool, too. In my favorite discussion I learned a lot about Philly’s history and architecture.

The visit was too short, actually–we could have used another day. But I couldn’t really complain, since I was already missing Denise, Alyssa, and Drew. It was nice to get back home to them. I got home to find Denise on the back porch and the kids cavorting around in the back yard (Parent’s note: you know your kids are growing up when you can actually read a newspaper for more than 3 minutes while they play on their own).

I downloaded the latest nightly build of Chimera, the new Mac OS X web browser written in Cocoa from the Netscape/Mozilla source code. It’s really nice and really fast now. Downloads are much improved, too. I altered Chimera’s window buttons a bit with an app called Chimericon and now it looks even better.

Robert Heinlein once wrote a great piece call “This I Believe.”

I wrote some words I strongly believe in a reply to an interview the other day, and I thought they should be posted here. Essentially, this is my advice for other technology directors in my line of work.

” Advice for Technology Leaders

f) Finally, involve yourself and your staff with the district and involve the district with your staff. Technology is not an island unto itself, but I see many teams using their offices as bunkers and heading out only to do tech requests. Eat lunch with the staff, attend after school functions if possible. Get to know your users better and let them get to know you and your staff.”