I've been thoroughly intrigued and entertained by the young cat that lives in my house. She constantly wants to know how the computer monitor works because items there are impossible to touch, aren't 3d and have no smell or texture. However they are visually stimulating and she clearly knows that they are very interesting to me and are requiring lots of my attention.

The other thing that I find funny about this is that my MacBook Pro is extremely hot which makes for a great belly warmer until I need to type and she think that its perfectly okay to streatch her self right across the keyboard. But from a perspective of someone who has never seen an image drawn by pixels it must be amazing. She constantly tries to touch an icon, or the mouse cursor and when I move to the edge of the screen she sits and ponders how it doesn't simply fall of the edge... (the way explorers thought about the world.. before we knew better) and how when she pushes on something it doesn't pop out the back.. so she puts one hand on the screen and another on the back side and again sits and ponders. It's a very simple concept.. but think about it?

Class is in session!







Pretty cute huh! Animals are great.

Finally, Cosmo 0.6.0 is out the door for anyone to use who is interested. A lot of work went into this release and some really neat new features are there including read/write web ui calendaring, time-zones, recurrence massive amounts of bug fixes and cosmetic changes. I really recommend everyone go check it out because it is free and available to the world at osaf.us.

You will notice that newly in my links section is 'My Calendar' and 'Collaborative Calendar'. 'My Calendar' is the calendar I actually use on a day to day basis, it is 'read only' unless I have specifically given you access.. it's very accurate as to where I am and what im doing... I'm not particularly sure why anyone really needs that out in the world wide web.. but there it is. On the other hand -- the 'Collaborative Calendar' is 'read/write' so anyone who wants to add to it can and should. I'd prefer it if people didn't make a mess of it and put actual things going on up there. The work flow is actually pretty cool as well. I am using the trunk build of Chandler the desktop PIM application that can be found at the Cosmo site, using the Cosmo Sharing Service built in I can subscribe to osaf.us and my account there to download my calendars, which become collections in Chandler. I can then download both my real calendar and the collaborative calendar and move events to my real calendar that I think should be kept around, then I can sync my real calendar back up and stay up to date.

I actually didn't know this worked, but to get my real calendar in Cosmo to be an exact copy for the shared calendar I just downloaded my real calendar to chandler, unsubscribed, re-named it and shared it back to myself and there it is. Cool huh?

There are some sharing issues with the Chandler trunk, which will be the main purpose to the 0.6.1 release which is expected to fix all of those issues. That leaves 'Preview' or 0.7.0 left to build, and it has a huge feature set which will just blow everyone away with it's coolness.. but unless you want to go read the specs you will have to wait till mid-late April.

My cousin Jillian also has caught a bit of the Blogging bug, and since a few people read mine I think its an easy way to connect everyone else who is interested with hers! I was supposed to do this a few months ago.. but I forgot, so now she might have a little more motivation to start updating it. You can check it out at Jillian's BLOG.

Another BLOG of interest for those techies out there is that of Mr Mikeal Rogers who writes very specifically about emerging technologies and specifics on specifications and protocols, that can be read at Semantic Mikeal, The mumblings of Mikeal Rogers.

Flickr is now working again and I will be adding my flickr albums to the links bar on the side, but to get directly to the California Coast album you can visit California Coastal Pictures!

So apparently they have qualified CVS as an official optometry term meaning "Computer Guy Vision Syndrome". Since those of us in the industry spend all day staring into a computer screen it is easy to develop vision problems. This is one of the draw backs of the business. However when I wen't in last week for a checkup he tested my eyes which initially were aweful but as we chatted more during the session I told him that my eyes get better after a few days away from the screen so he put muscle relaxing drops in my eyes. As I sat there I watched every letter on the board become clear with no glasses. I explained this to him and he told me this was extremely strange because as the eye relaxes things should become blurry and hard to see. We finally figured out that instead of my eyes getting worse, my eye muscles are getting worse at relaxing and if I start focing them to work a little more often I can get a lot of that vision back without even wearing glasses. Anywhoo, I just arrived home from a great trip to Irish Beach on the California Highway 1 and I would recommend that everyone spend at least a weekend up there chilling out. I feel extremely revitalized and ready to take on a week of getting out our release of Cosmo 0.6.0.

Below are some pictures from the weekend, I uploaded the whole batch to my flickr account, but its currently being broken so I will update and add that link at a later date.



First of all, I love beers so we had to roll by and grab a pint at Anderson Valley.


Then we were forced to relax in the hot tub and drink delicious beverages.



We spent some time enjoying the big blue ocean view.


But we also got a chance to hang out inside and relax. But unfortunately there was no internet access.. so I will probably have to spend the rest of the night reading digg, slashdot and 100's of blog entries to catch back up.



Cheers!

Things have been crazy since my 23'rd birthday 13 days ago. We are trying to get a release out the door at OSAF of Cosmo 0.6.0 but unfortunately we have been so concentrated on making it near perfect that we are on the fifth RC build. But I think people will find it that much better when its finally shipped.

This weekend I will be taking a trip to a beach house in Mendocino for the three days to relax and allow my eyes to come back to reality. Valentines day was a blast, Megan and I went to a place in Chico called Johnny's and had a wonderful dinner. As usual there are lots of sticks in the fire and in the next few weeks there will be all kinds of new and interesting stuff for me to write about. In my dream last night I somehow wound up in jail for playing my guitar in public, and it wasn't a very great experience. I would recommend all of you to steer clear when you start to dream about jail its really not fun, especially when its ran by farm animals.

Beach house!