I haven’t had nearly enough wacky programming ideas recently. Here’s one:

1. Apple is rolling out iCal, a free calendar application, for Mac OS X 10.2 (aka Jaguar)
2. All weblogs have calendars
3. What if iCal could be an interface to a weblog?

I don’t have Jaguar yet, but it might be interesting to play with this. Maybe an RSS aggregator that converts individual blog postings to vCal; maybe just a batch downloader that you run every couple of weeks that uses the Manila APIs. We’ll see where things go.

From my old stomping grounds: Marsalis Music opens its doors. What’s interesting is that Branford explicitly bitchslaps the record labels in the press release:

"The consolidation of the record industry into major conglomerates has turned the business into a mega-hit pop music machine with a very short term focus. Artists who want to be musicians, not marketing creations, have very few places to record anymore," Branford notes. "We formed Marsalis music to provide a real alternative. This is a very exciting time and I am thrilled to be doing this."

This probably explains why “Footsteps of Our Fathers” was in pre-release so long…

Looks like I’ll be heading back to Sloan in early October for company recruiting. I wondered when I accepted HR’s request to help out how it would feel to go back to my school so soon. Now I think I know: familiar and strange. I still have a ton of friends in the greater Boston area and it will be good to hang out with them—but my home and my job are out here now.

Also, Sloan was the center of my emotional and intellectual energy for two years, and now that center is moving. I’ve postponed thinking about the effects of that, but you can’t avoid the emotional ramifications of a major life change forever.

NYT: Bush, Citing Fires, Will Seek to Ease Laws on Logging. Um, excuse me? How did this get pitched—no, how did anyone say this with a straight face? “OK, we appear to have a fire fighting problem. Might as well cut all the trees down.”

Just watched the X-Men 2 trailer. I think it looks already like the sequel will do a much better job of capturing the gripping paranoia that underlaid so much of the brilliant storytelling in the best days of the comic (“Days of Future Past,” for instance).

Now, the question is: Will the creators cop out and not make the connection between raiding Xavier’s School for a mutant round-up and the holding of Arab Americans without charges under the Patriot Act?

Couldn’t sleep last night for a lot of reasons. Part is the ongoing transition from school and short semester horizons to work and the long series of relational interactions. (Can’t say more, really, right now.) Part was an ill-conceived decision to go to a happy hour with some fellow returning interns—not that that was so wrong, but it resulted in my eating a dinner consisting of fried calimari and one oyster Rockefeller, washed down with a couple beers. Not the best thing to try to go to sleep after.

So I’m trying to regain some perspective this morning, and found this line from Huey in today’s Boondocks helpful: “Relaxing thoughts? … Can I think about Al Gore and Joe Lieberman beating each other silly in a pay-per-view steel cage death match to determine who’s the biggest loser of all time?” Not that far away from what I was trying to think about to relax me.