Dave Mancuso dot Com

From SlashDot:
State Coalition Approves Internet Sales Tax Plan [Slashdot]

Great. Well, we knew it was only a matter of time. The honeymoon’s over, folks.

(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.

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.

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.

Well, it looks like the pressure caused the Hershey Trust to back off the intended sale of Hershey Foods (technically, they wanted to unload their stock, but in all practicality it was a sale of the company). A lot of people around here breathed a sigh of relief.

A number of them, however, aren’t stopping there. They are collecting ten thousand signatures to force the Board members to resign in favor of new elections. I think I agree with them. These Board members definitely are not in line with the wishes of the Hershey legacy and the people of Hershey.

I’m surprised how much I’m looking forward to this. Kevin is my oldest friend (friends for 26 years and still going) and I haven’t seen him for awhile. Work has been so busy that I didn’t even realize how much I was excited about the visit. Relax and enjoy, that’s my motto tomorrow.

I mentioned my tilt table test a while ago, but they recently did a treadmill stress test as a final check on my heart. It turned out pretty well–I have no blockages or abnormalities that they could see, and they said I have less than a five percent chance of a heart attack in the next 3-5 years. As I head to the 40 year old mark next year, this is great news for me.