For the first time in the history of the bird feeder contest, someone other then the elustrious John Ira Tureman took home the top prize!

With my modern architeture inspired bird feeder, I beat out the very capable opponents featured below:

My wife just tried out the new Microsoft Live Calendar (their attempt to catch up to Google Calendar), and it is a case in point why Microsoft is a bad software company.

When you go to "upgrade" to their new calendar it makes you choose between keeping your events or trying out new features. Are you kidding me?!?!?!?

I have developed many, many pieces of software over my career, and this choice should have been PRIORITY #1 when they laid out their goals for this website. Give me one example when I wouldn't want to carry over my events with me? My wife said "It is Beta" to me to try to calm me down, and I said, "this is amateur hour and it should be pre Alpha". This is a sad, sad excuse for a software offering.

Here is a video for the behind scenes at the DNC. It is a nice change from the negativity and it shows some candid moments of the Obama family.

One of client's at Hashrocket, Spot Us, has posted a video on his blog that he recorded this morning during our demo, showcasing the work that was completed in 3 days of development!

Don't get me wrong, the great work by the designers was key to getting this done, and there is a week of face to face time where the client (in this case David Cohn) and the lead developer(s) lock themselves in a room for 5 days, and make the tough decisions of what can really be done in 3 days. Please take the time to watch this 15+ minute video if you want an inside view of some of the work that I am a part of.

Great work Lark, Desi, Carm, Tammer, and Joe!

Got my first "compliment" from co-worker today....

"Have you lost weight?"

"Yeah, been doing Atkins"

"I thought so, your double chin is a little less obvious"

Wow, just goes to show that you should live your life now, while you can. So sad to think that he has all this money now, and he will never get to enjoy it.

Comedian and Chicago native Bernie Mac died early Saturday morning from complications due to pneumonia, his publicist confirmed.

Mac, 50, had been hospitalized for about a week at Northwestern Hospital, according to his spokeswoman. A few years ago, Mac disclosed that he suffered from sarcoidosis, a rare autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in tissue, most often in the lungs.

After reading about it on the Apple Blog I thought I would share it here too.

To create a ringtone from any song in your iTunes library, do the following:

1. Right click on the song you are going to make into a ringer and select “Get Info.”
2. Go to the options tab and go down to the “Start Time” and “Stop Time” check boxes. Check both boxes and input the time you want your ringer to start/stop. The ringer has to be 30 seconds or less. Click OK when you’re done.
3. Right click on your newly “clipped” song and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” The song will be re-encoded using the start and stop times determined (If your menu item does not read “Convert Selection to AAC” and reads “Convert Slection to MP3″ (or some other format) please go to iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing and change the “Import Using” drop down menu to “AAC Encoder”).
4. After the song is done encoding navigate to your iTunes Music folder, locate your song, and drag it to your desktop (You can just right click and say "Show in Finder" if you are using a Mac). After the song is on your desktop go back to iTunes and delete the clipped version from you iTunes library (It won’t delete it from your desktop, it will only remove it from iTunes).
5. Go back the song on your desktop and right click on your song and chose “Get info.” Go to the name and extension section and change the extension from .m4a to .m4r (or you can just change the extension right from your desktop)
6. After the extension is changed simply double click on the file to add it to your iTunes library under the ringtones section. Sync your phone with iTunes and you’re done!
7. Remember to go back into iTunes and uncheck your custom start and stop times for the original version of your song.
   

So Google announced support for CalDAV last month. I tried it out on my MacBook Pro, hoping that it would allow me to have a free way to sync my Google Calendar to iCal and to my iPhone (using Mobile Me).

I am sad to say, that if you have more then 3 calendars (i.e. shared calendars for work), that Spanning Sync is still the way to go.

The main reasons are:

• Each calendar is a new Account in iCal
  
• The Spanning Sync Pref Pane is so much simpler then having to go find some cryptic group email address and replacing the Google Calendar URL
• Spanning Sync "just works" and is worth the $20 ($5 discount for using the code MM397X)

So after 12 hours in the waiting room, a magical moment happened...

Barbara danced: