I needed a version of Lightbox that handled real web page urls instead of just images, so I hacked it myself. I looked into using Lightbox Gone Wild, but it seemed a misnomer; it’s more like a stripped down version of Lightbox. I like the effects and transitions of Lightbox, so I figured why not start there?I’d love to show you an example, but I don’t have a host for it right now. Just imagine Lightbox that’s capable of showing any URL you throw at it. Download the original. Replace lightbox.js with my version here.

Here's a phenomenon that really peeves me. On my way home every weekday, I pass South through these two intersections. During rush-hour, traffic can get quite backed up here, so the wait can easily be ten or fifteen minutes at this one point in my drive home. What’s worse is that people cheat. As the second map below shows, people take a side road over to Peoria, turn South, then line up at the same intersection, but in a much shorter line. When their light turns green, they cut in front of all the people waiting patiently. Argg!The green dots represent nice people, waiting in line as they should. The red dots repesent people who believe they’re better than everyone else and cut in line.

Update: The community has stepped up to take over development of ZiddlyWiki. So, it appears ZW will live on! Update 11/7/2007: Ziddlywiki.com has been dead for a long time now. I really like TiddlyWiki and think there should be a solid server implementation like ZW was; make your plea in a comment on this post if you'd like to discuss a ZW comeback. ZiddlyWiki was a product I built and maintained for awhile. Now, I've decided to give it up. I don't have the mental bandwidth to keep it up, and I've neglected its users for quite awhile. I will be letting the domain names expire shortly, and the latest version will be made available here for anyone wanting to take the product as their own and keep it up-to-date.

I haven’t actually done anything with the new Mac, but I’ve sure had fun doing it! I’ve been a bit swamped with work lately, so my bandwidth for additional projects is near zero. I’ve managed to install all the geeky Mac tools and surf the web a lot. Oh, and I worked last night to get all my photos (over 30GB worth!) in one place (on the Mac) so I can start sorting and archiving and such. I’d like to find some good DVDs and burn copies of all my photos and stick them somwhere safe (preferably different places). But with the recent hubbub about average lifespan of CD/DVD media, I’m a bit nervous. Need to do some research. I’ll probably end up writing some DVDs and saving to an external HD, too, just for peace-of-mind.

I’m writing this post from my brand spanking new MacBook Pro. Man O Man is this thing a piece of work. It’s simply beautiful. It feels solid, yet lightweight. It’s screen is absolutely flawless and can be seen surprizingly well from all angles. The keyboard illumination feature is kick-butt. Typing at night will never be the same (yes I know how to type, but doing programming requires a lot of arrow keys and symbols, and I can’t always find those in the dark).

Seems everybody who’s anybody these days is “switching” from one platform to another. Mark Pilgrim switched from Mac to Linux. Jamie Zawinski switched from Linux to Mac. Josh Marshall switched from Windows to Mac. And, well, I can’t think of anyone prominent who switched to Windows, but I’m sure everybody’s drooling over Vista. My point is, over the last two years, I’ve felt less and less like a “switcher” and more like a tool collector. I think of people like my dad… people who never throw anything away and collect every obscure tool they can get their hands on. My dad had a tool for everything. And he would always know which tool would do the job best in any given situation. I’d like to think I’m similar in a more geeky sense.

Today was officially proclaimed "Stephen and Tim day" because of all our work lately on integrating our systems with the state of Oklahoma.

My coworker Joseph put this together. I think it's awesome. See more here.

It’s official: I’m a sucker. I got an iPod for my birthday two months ago. And I love(d) it. I’ve become addicted to a handful of podcasts over the past few months and my collection of music has been slowly growing. My car radio has largely forgotten the sound of traditional broadcast radio.Yesterday, my iPod booted up with this icon. I took it back to Best Buy to get it exchanged, only to find out the extra fifty bucks spent on “extended service” or whatever they called it means they ship the iPod back to Apple for repair instead of making me do it. Whoopti-freaking-do. No exchange, no loaner. Three weeks without my beloved MP3 player.

We just started using an email filtering service at Cedar Ridge. So far, I’m very pleased with it. In the two days it’s been in place, only a handful of spam messages have passed through to our server, and every one of those were filtered by our existing DNS blacklist filtering. The filter works by proxy, meaning all mail destined for our domain is first delivered to junkemailfilter.com. Their server filters out the spam using some fancy voodoo and delivers the good stuff to our server. Very simple, and no configuration needed or software to be installed on our end.