Congrats to Russ on his new job.  Tough decisions indeed.

The realtime notes from the XML conference in Philly are excellent.

WRAL:

RALEIGH, N.C. — A small earthquake that started in Virginia was felt by several counties in the WRAL viewing area.

Officials say at 3:59 p.m. Tuesday, an earthquake measuring 4.5 magnitude was reported.

Its epicenter was 30 miles west of Richmond. There is no word on the length of the tremors.

Myself and some coworkers felt it here in the DC area.  Aparently it’s big news on the AM news/traffic/talk stations, but no big deal on The Richter Scale.

The BBC reports that the Dow Jones Index is over 10,000 for the first time in 18 months.

Update: what goes up must come down.

Keith points to a MSNBC quiz about your Digital IQ.  I’ll only admit to scoring over 200.

• David Thomson points out XPlanner, which looks like a great web-based XP project tracking tool.
• Christoph Cemper points to two excellent subversion tutorials.
• My-Symbian has spooted an excellent mobile game deal: 5 MGS games for $30.
• Doc brings up a nasty bug in Ximian Evolution that slams some RSS feeds every 5 minutes.
• Gizmodo brings news of a Wi-Fi Blackberry, an Asus phone that looks strangely like a Px00 among other mobile gear.
• Ask Bjorn Hansen considers GPRS useless.  SSH routinely times out on me (if it allows me to connect at all), the speeds are slow, the latency high.  But gosh darn it, it’s a connection!
• Newsforge: Ensim to support Fedora.  I hope that Plesk will follow suit, though ideally (if money were no option) you would run these atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• 71.48 mile Wi-Fi link using two DSS dishes across The Great Salt Lake.
• Newsforge: XFS merged in to 2.4 kernel.
• Blogshares is coming back?
• Is the Wi-Fi cantenna bubble next?
• Mark Derricutt and others note a new major release of IntelliJ IDEA EAP.

I saw The Last Samurai tonight.  I would give it a solid 4.5 Thauvin-stars.  It is easily one of the best movies that I have seen in quite some time.  This is one to see in the theatres and own on DVD when it comes out.

On a related note, I hope you’re feeling better, Erik.

InfoSync is excited.  The Siemens SX-1 is reportedly ready for a Christmas delivery.  Of course, that might mean December 24, or Siemens could back up the release date again.

I would consider this post by Ewan a Good Sign that they are on their way soon.

MobileTracker:

Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post reviewed the Motorola MPx200 and was quite impressed. Slated to be published tomorrow, the review praises the low cost of the smartphone and its ability to do a lot, but not too much. It knocked the device for being a little rought around the edges.

The review should be showing up in dead tree version at the front door in a few hours.  I’ll check it out.

Thunderbird 0.4 is out.

This Slashdot story that points to an article at HotHardware declares that DVD burners have hit the important $100 barrier.  The reviewed model is a DVD+R/DVD+RW AOpen.  You still have to spend more (at least $150 after rebates) for something that is DVD+/-everything.

The $100 barrier is an important one.  I bought my first CD burner shortly after they hit $100.  It was an off brand 2x burner.  Yeah, the specs are pathetic a few years later, but at the time it was a big thing for me to be able to back up my data to CDs.  My first CD burner still sits in one of my servers, and I use it every few weeks to run backups.

I’ve been telling myself that I would start looking at DVD burners as soon as they reached that $100 mark.  Well there they are, though I will probably wait until I can pick up a DVD+/-everything for around $100.  I’ve heard that LiteOn and other OEM-style burners can be an excellent deal.  It sure beats fronting $250 for a burner that will cost $150 “after rebtates”

I ordered pizza for lunch today over the internet.

That sounds like such a dot-com era thing, but it’s not.  It actually got here quicker than if I had phoned it in, and I did not have to deal with the standard “Thank you for calling Papa Johns, please hold” greeting.

Yum.

Ask Bjorn Hansen writes up his experiences with T-Mobile GPRS and OSX.  T-Mobile’s naming scheme seems a bit weird.  They tend to apply “T-Zones” to many different things in many different contexts.  In my part of the US, they don’t even offer any non-T-Zones plans.  I pay $10 a month for unlimited T-Zones which includes all of the GPRS that I can use, a couple hundred extra SMS messages, and access to the T-Zones portal.

I wish that T-Mobile would get off their butts and remove the references to Voicestream that I keep running in to.  My t-zones homepage was set to wap.myvoicestream.com when I signed up with T-Mobile, though honestly I’m more likely to start out at the t-mobile.co.uk wap page.  It has cute little icons whereas the US wap site is just an ugly list of stuff.  Of course what T-Mobile really needs to do is start migrating to an XHTML-MP site as the number of devices that are XHTML-MP-aware are rising quickly.