For some reason, my family started talking about eyelash bugs and whether they exist. Although the scientific aspects of microscopic critters living and breeding on human eyelashes is interesting, we found a site full of cute critters as part of our social sharing of my laptop. We found Holly Hostess on http://www.parasitepals.com. We all want Blinky Eyelash Mite.

I'm going and am really excited for this event -- I've played around with the betas of all of each of the Expression products. They're not too bad.  I'm need to start toying around with the tools a bit more.  I wonder how much of a dent these tools will have to existing packages like DreamWeaver, Flash and the like. They might be a good alternative to the higher priced tools for small businesses/SOHO market, or even to small web design businesses. They appear to be well priced and appear well positioned. Adoption and application stability will be interesting.

I also thought it was interesting that iView was rebranded as Expression Media -- as user of iView in the MacOS 9 days, it's a terrific media browser. On the iView-Multimedia site, it appears as if Expression Media will be released in a Mac Universal Binary! Yay!

Tried to install Joomla the other night from my MacBook Pro -- Cyberduck (FTP client) doesn't seem to like my hosting service (Windows server) as I'm getting dropped all the time. It's a fairly large upload at over 11MB. Right now, it's the heavyweight when compared to Drupal (2.1 MB) and Umbraco CMS (7.6 MB). I'll try again later in the week from my Windows notebook.


In other news -- Steve J's iPhone announcement -- Wow! (both in looks and mystery pricing) Now that the cat's out of the bag, I wonder about design changes for a phone integrated into the Zune -- it's already got the widescreen and the media player (yeah, I know Windows Mobile cell phones already have Window Media Player). I also wonder what this means for a new generation of streamlined UI's Windows Mobile devices.

What I found really interesting is that the iPhone's OS is MacOS X -- does this mean a pending re-design of iPods using widescreen displays and a real MacOS X operating system?

I'm toying around with open source content management systems for a couple of personal projects I'm working on. I'm going to start playing around with drupal (PHP) and umbraco cms (.Net). I'm in the process of installing them into a sandbox area to do more experimenting.

I started thinking more about this stuff after I attended developer training for Percussion Rhythmyx. Being involved in the world of UED and having been a developer for equally as long, I was a bit alarmed by the publishing interfaces presented to users, not to mention a handful of architectural decisions that didn't make sense to me. Rhythmyx looks to be a powerful CMS tool, but the UI design looked too much like programmers deciding how things should look based on the architecture of their application. The question in my mind is whether the target users (all non-programmers) will get it, particularly at the complexity at which it is being implemented. Things start to get non-intuitive with complexity :(

I had a strange thought -- I wonder how many Apple Macintosh users are using MS Live Spaces? I'm a Mac users, and a PC user as well, and I like both equally. Personally, I thinke Microsoft did an awesome job with Windows Live, not to mention Spaces. I used to subscribe to .Mac and found it way too limiting. It had an interesting concept of "in place editing". It worked... some of the time. Creating a website hierarchy using their webware was like pulling teeth with a rusted pair of pliars. Apple's solution was iWeb, unfortunately, Apple made it way too difficult to use iWeb on services other than .Mac, which I thought was highly unfortunate.