This is a great article by Daniel Jalkut on someone who realized his dream by changing professions.. worth the read.

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

My every other friday post at the Extensis blog is about risk. Let me know what you think.

(Via Manage This.)

It's at Extensis (url to map, we're on the 5th floor).

Food will be provided, and please arrive before 6pm because the doors are locked.

We'll start off with some food and chit chat, and give a chance for folks to ask any questions. Bring them all, easy and hard, we'll see if we can get them answered. If you have something you want to show, feel free to bring that as well.

The main attraction this month is a presentation by myself and my wife Jennifer Crumrine who attended the C4[1] independent developer conference in Chicago last month. We meet a lot of pretty cool people, and heard some great presentations on Mac development.

PS: I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

I don't get NBC.

They were providing their video content in the iTunes music store, in an easy to use, well designed program that at least 100 million people have access to.

Instead they move to Amazon. Granted, Amazon probably has more users than iTunes... granted Amazon bent over and complied with NBC's requests.

I'm sure there's some sort of feeling at NBC of being screwed by Apple - there are a lot of secret, hidden deals between Apple and other companies that no one knows about..

It just doesn't make business sense... or there's something the public doesn't know about.

Mike Lee wrote a long and well written blog post talking about the economy, and at the end of it he hits a key point:

That, my friends, is what should be scaring NBC shitless, not my three iPods, my Apple TV, or the existence of BitTorrent. You know what’s worse than being pirated? Being forgotten.

Eclipse 2, originally uploaded by Lucien W. Dupont.

I set the alarm last night, and Jennifer and I got up to look at the eclipse.. despite me wearing my glasses, I managed to get some good pictures from the 25 or so I took. Enjoy, let me know what you think.

(Via Glorified Typist.)

Rich Siegel, whom Jennifer and I talked with on multiple occasions at C4[1], writes a great article on the C4[1] Saturday night panel talk, and his take on a particular question. It's worth the read if you are interested in Macintosh development.

Kevin Hewitt started a weblog, and his first post is the Python examples he showed us at this months meeting.

Thanks to the folks that attended. Future plans - November is talk about and show Leopard - bring your cool Leopord example apps. I am thinking about doing a presentation for September on my learnings at C4[1] this past weekend.

And if anyone knows more Macintosh developers in Portland, please let me know. I need to promote this more!!

It's at Extensis (url to map, we're on the 5th floor).

Food will be provided, and please arrive before 6pm because the doors are locked.

We'll start off with some food and chit chat, and perhaps ask any development questions of folks. Bring them all, easy and hard, we'll see if we can get them answered.

The main attraction this month is Python - Kevin Hewitt is going to give us an introduction to Python on OS X. This should be pretty interesting, given development articles like this about developers who know Python really well writing what looks like a great Macintosh app.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow night!

PS: I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

I'm happy they are going to do something tomorrow. For the past month or so when I've been setting up Leopard installs, my .Mac system preferences has been telling me I have 2 months left of my subscription. Unfortunately about the only thing left that I do with .Mac is email.. I've moved photos to Flickr using FlickrExport, and blogging to my own web site. I'm also using Facebook a ton and Twitter every now and again.

I've stopped using .Mac sync between computers, because I kept losing Address Book groups, and I couldn't track down why that kept happening.

So.. I hope something dramatic happens tomorrow.. even with the discounts you can get on .Mac, I'm unsure of re-subscribing again this year. Knock on wood.

Pizza again will be provided. Arrive before 6 so that the doors downstairs are still open. If you get here after 6pm, call or text me on my cell phone.

Unfortunately the guest I was hoping to have didn't materialize, so we're going to talk about the WWDC keynote and the iPhone. If you want to demo an application, bring it along! If you have cocoa questions, bring them along. We'll have a door prize drawing, the one we forgot to do last time!

Also, before we break for the night, I'd like to set a standard date for the meetings so that folks can plan in the future (like the 2nd Thursday or Tuesday of every month).

Update: We had a pretty good meeting, with a few more than last time. We had a great chat about Leopard and WWDC, and then talked about the iPhone (3 of us had stood in line to get one).

Our meeting time is now the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so the next CocoaHeads Portland meeting is August 8th at 6pm in downtown Portland. I had a few people volunteer to potentially do small presentations, which is an awesome thing - community building at its best when members want to teach and show other members. :-) It makes me very happy.

I also encourage you to join our Google Group to keep up to date with meeting announcements: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-cocoaheads

I am helping out back stage, and went to the dress rehersal last night - it's pretty darn good! They have a few numbers that are quite innovative, and Jennifer has a small solo in one of them that, IMHO, she kicked some butt on.

Linda Sohl-Ellison and Monti Ellison are their guest performers tonight, and I hear they are quite good.

If you are thinking about attending, feel free to sign up for upcoming.org, and add yourself to the list. Tickets are $25, which seems expensive to me, but I think it's going to be a pretty good show, with the guest performers I expect it will totally be worth the money.

More about my NYC trip sometime soon. I am still debating about getting an iPhone tomorrow. Or trying to get an iPhone.

The interesting part in my eye is that it's written in Python and calling Cocoa. I've never used Python, but I hear there is a lot more built in support for this in Leopard.

Having worked on Quicken for 3 years and QuickBooks for 3 years, I'm always interested in new entries into this market. In my opinion Intuit never fully supported their Macintosh products, and any new entries like this help Apple and help the Macintosh ecosystem.

I'm still looking at the new entrants into the personal finance market, to replace Quicken.. I'm frustrated with continually giving my money to Intuit without getting something new and exciting in return.