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Jodi’s parents and I went to South Mountain last night, to see the sunset and the city lights. I’ve mentioned it before - the sunsets out here are a thing to behold.

Unfortunately we got a late start, so the sun had just set when we got there. Nevertheless, the view of the city lights was, as always, spectacular. And we did actually get to see a great moon-rise; the contrast between the huge, bright moon on one side, the brilliant lights of the cit on the other, and the darkness of the unlit park mountain park in between was amazing.

Long weekend! Jodi’s parents are here, mine were here three weeks ago, and Jim was here last weekend. Still have pics of that to put up.

My head is not really in blogging now, but I want to work on something programmish, so I’m blogging in order to get my head back into the machine. I spend weeks with my head in the machine… over a long weekend I tend to finally surface.

This is usually a good thing, but right now I have some time to work, and I need to be back inside. Time to plug back in.

Our favorite platform vendor has managed to completely ignore the release of an incredibly powerful server product for their platform, one which will drive sales of their platform, and will go far to show the power and flexibility of the platform.

Ironically, in the vendor’s own words: “small commercial developers exist. This has been a big outage for quite a few years.”

More irony: “Sometimes small developers break through where the platform vendor is clueless. I’ve seen it happen.”

Announcing Conversant 1.0b1.

See also these comments:

For the last few months, Macrobyte has been working on readying Conversant, their internet groupware application, for release as a ’shrinkwrapped’ product. Today marks the first release of Conversant 1.0b1 to Frontier and Radio Userland developers.

If you run a Frontier hosting service, run - do not walk - to this site and read it. Conversant is the most powerful groupware/cms I have worked with. It runs both sites I manage, and working with Seth and crew is a pleasure. You will be astounded at the services you can easily offer your customers. it even supports SSL for those security-minded clients.

If you are a developer looking for an internal platform for your company’s intranet/extranet needs, Conversant is for you. Conversant includes web-based discussion, calendaring, mailing-list integration, a built-in NNTP server, and more. A super-flexible templating system means you can make your content available to users in any number of XML-based formats, plain text, DHTML, or whatever else you can imagine.

If you currently have a site hosted at one of the Frontier-based ISPs, ask your admin to look into Conversant. Check out http://www.free-conversant.com for a taste of what’s available to you on this platform. You won’t be disappointed.

Believe it or not, I don’t work for Macrobyte. -). But I’ve been using Conversant now for over a year, and have been amazed at what I can do with it. Now go on - get outta here - check it out!

Awesome! The recent episode (”Cross Jurisdictions”) of CBS’ hit show CSI which included the Las Vegas CSI team heading to Miami, was actually the warmup to a CSI spinoff called CSI:Miami. Jodi and I are certifed CSI junkies, and this episode was a definite highlight in the series so far.

David Caruso was excellent, and the interplay between the Miami CSIs and the Las Vegas CSIs was clever and well written. I can’t wait - 2 episodes of CSI each week!

Looking for a way to heap adulation and loot upon your friendly neighborhood redmonk? Look no further than my recently un-earthed Amazon.com wishlist.