A year or two ago, in response to one of my mother-in-law's Windows questions, I gave her an iBook. Since then, I've been training my wife to know everything there is to know about consumer usage of a Mac. Now my father-in-law has retired, and I steered him towards a MacBook Pro.

My evil plan came together tonight as I sat idly on the couch flipping through an eWeek, while my wife gave tech-support to her father. I love it when a plan comes together.

(The photo on the right is George Peppard, who played Hannibal Smith on the A-Team)

Today, being a lazy Sunday, I surfed over to 37Signals and picked up a copy of Getting Real. I know I'm a few weeks late on this meme, but I truly enjoyed the book.

On the surface, after reading 177 pages, you could easily think that there was nothing concretely useful in the book. You could, but that'd be silly. The whole book enforces a different attitude. It's about agility, not only in development or management, but in the vision of the product you're producing. The best quote, I think is

Stick to what’s truly essential. Good ideas can be tabled. Take whatever you think your product should be and cut it in half. Pare features down until you’re left with only the most essential ones. Then do it again.

Ultimately, stop thinking about producing, and simply go produce. As my dad says, "the enemy of 'good' is 'better.'" The essence of your product is probably good (or you can hope). Alas, the desire to make it better can work against you, creating feature overload, delayed schedules, and a lack of focus in the vision. Get on with it already.

Last night I managed to pick up Best Reason to Buy the Sun by the Benevento/Russo Duo. Purely instrumental, they are an odd cross of Medeski, Martin Wood, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Bad Plus. For me, at least, it's one of the best CDs to sling code or manipulate a spreadsheet to. I'm amazed at what two guys can do. There's the guy on the drums, and the guy on the keys. And it's a wall of intricate sound much of the time.

While my DSL does not have the most amazing uptime statistics, it certainly is doing okay today in the speed department. And I'm even using it to download legal stuff, like kernel source trees. When it works, I have to say that the Bellsouth DSL Extreme is quite handy.

I really need server-side spam nuking... 3 days offline, 1414 new messages, 98% of which are spam.

This weekend, I purchased a wacky cool MacBook Pro for my wife. The included PhotoBooth tool seems pretty useless, if not entertaining. For example, even I can have a strong chin and wonderful hair. Of course, it sucks that my non-geek wife now has a better machine than I do.

We had the ups and downs about the Oracle acquisition rumor for JBoss. Then that died.

This morning, I just happened to wander by the RedHat site, and what do you know, but they are buying JBoss. Overall, RedHat will probably be a better opensource citizen in caretaking the JBoss property, compared to Oracle.

The new meme is tag everything of course. For some reason, everyone's definition of 'everything' does not seem to include tags themselves. We can already tag blog posts, pictures, podcasts and bookmarks. Soon, you will be able to tag the tags you tag things with. Imagine the power of the web once you can apply a tag to another tag. Limited beta will start soon, invitations to A-list taggers are being prepared.

I've been working within the dark recesses of rackmount hardware lately. The bunker doesn't have the best lighting, and I figured I wasn't doing anything else with my forehead, so it'd be a perfect place to strap on a light. Of course, not a week after I make my investment in head-mounted lighting, I stumble across the I-Sight.

It seems to always be the case that right after you make a purchase, something better comes along. Yay capitalism, I guess. Now, if only someone would merge the I-Sight with a Jabra, and perhaps mix in some wireless audio from my iPod, I'd be set.

Joy joy. North Carolina's lottery starts today. I fled Georgia, with its lottery and really enjoyed living in a lotteryless state. It was so much easier to buy some gasoline and a PayDay bar and get on with your day, before the lottery. Now, the lines will form, particularly when the stakes are high. Dozens of folks (who probably should be saving that dollar instead of giving it to the government) now will be milling around the register, trying to figure out which scratch'n'sniff lottery tickets they want with the $11 they just won from their last scratch'n'sniff ticket.

Uh, yeah, gimme 3 of the Lucky Sevens, um, 4 of the Golddigger's Delights, and 4 of the Mucho Moneys

Of course, then they stand there, trying to reserve their place in line, in case one of those 11 tickets is a winner.

The state estimates it will take in $400 million in sales during the remaining 9 months of this year. I love how they call it an "Education Lottery". Hopefully the money will be used to improve statistics classes in our local school system.