Well, I have been lacking in the area of posting mostly because of school. I have been swamped with work and now I am starting my second round of interviews. I fly out tomorrow for Dallas and will be gone until midday Saturday, back just in time for the A&M game.

I will be having interviews every weekend until the 18th of this month and more next month. I am ready for a break from Lubbock and these will be the perfect opportunity.

MySQL 5.0 has reached version 5.0.15 and is considered ready for mass consumption. The MySQL team officially released it yesterday and the downloading has begun.

There is already a whole lot of reading for me to do but it will have to wait till next week since I am busy with school mumbo-jumbo. I am guessing there will be some subtle bugs in the new release but hopefully everything will be fairly smooth. This release comes as I was just getting ready to switch to PostrgreSQL. I will wait to see what the final verdict is and if the performance is still the same after the feature additions or if we have a dud on our hands.

Doing research on how to proceed with the restructuring of this site and what would be most useful in searching for archives I have found that tags and categories are the two most popular methods. Categories of course have been the most used way to group information together with things like “Technology” and “Computers” used to group everything about the internet or iPods together. Is this proper? Does it make the information easier to find? No. You end up with a fairly convoluted archive tree structure.

The answer to this problem seems to be a tag type system like those used on flickr and Technorati. Michael Heilemann has an interesting tag cloud at the bottom of his archives page. I am thinking about using something similar to keep my archives by keywords instead of categories. The whole category system just seems too concrete without a whole lot of room for expansion or change. We’ll see how it goes.

System of a Down has released their new single titled “Hypnotize”, also the name of their upcoming album.

The song has a completely different feel than other System of a Down music in that it is softer and almost “poppish”. Of course they mix it up with verses having different beats or guitar riffs but the sound is deliberate and a welcome change.

The lyrics of course are political and counter-culture. The song attacks the media and the entire fashion industry saying “Why don’t you ask the kids at Tiananmen square?

Was fashion the reason why they were there?”. The lead singer remarked that it isn’t right that a child molester goes to prison but as a nation we have no problem with Calvin Klein hiring a 13 yr. old girl and having her pose half exposed to sell some jeans.

I can see the point and agree with it partly. Yet, I think that child molesters are some of the sickest people on the face of the Earth and have no right to be out on the streets. I really enjoy the new song and hopefully the album will be more of the same.

The Astros have finally won their first pennant after a season that started off 15-31. The game last night was, for the most part, flawless on the part of the Astros. The call at second base with the tag out may not have been the best call but there’s not a whole lot that can be done now.

It has been my cheesy childhood dream to see the White Sox play the Astros in the World Series but who would have known it would actually happen. Why was I White Sox fan you ask? Frank Thomas, enough said.

Saturday is going to be an exciting day for everyone in Houston and probably the state of Texas.

As predicted, Apple has released new PowerMacs and PowerBooks. The resolution on the 15″ model has been upped to 1440×960 and the standard processor speed is now 1.67Ghz.

This will be the last update to the PowerBooks before the switch to Intel based hardware.

I have never used WordPress for my personal publishing needs but when Jay offered me an invite to WordPress.com, I had to check it out.

It is a Blogger type hosted blogging solution. The interface is the standard WordPress administrator dashboard but I don’t have to worry about databases or anything in the background. I am going to try and get something up at my WordPress.com site here soon.

Thanks again to Jay for setting me up with an invite!

A new iMac has been announced today with a new processor and more features.

The new features include:

• A remote for music, videos, and photos allowing you to step back from your computer and enjoy from anywhere in the room.
• Built-in iSight. This is a very cool feature since you no longer have to buy it separately.
• G5 Processor. That’s about all I can say… Superior performance.
• Mighty Mouse. Yep, it’s included with the computer.

I have already started planning my move to an all Mac household, hopefully purchasing one of these in the near future.

In my Operations and Productions Management class we had a group project that involved developing a product from scratch and seeing it through with all of the necessary research, financial studies, forecasting, and marketing. My group decided on an MP3 player as our product and today we presented it to the class (no we did not physically design an MP3 player).

The first thing that really stood out when doing this project was the growth that the portable music industry has seen over the past four years. When the players first started hitting the market it seemed as though they were truly niche items with very little opportunity for growth. During the past two years they have seen tremendous growth with Apple controlling a majority of the market (87.3%). There really is not a competitor to the iPod and maybe it’s time for one. Just from the numbers that we gathered from our research points to MP3 player sales growing by 219% over the next three years.

The real hang up for people trying to get into the market is the sheer cost of entry. It is very expensive to create an entire product like an MP3 player with the software to go with it and market it correctly. However, the break-even analysis we conducted pointed to only a few hundred thousand players needing to be sold for a company to see green. Of course this assumes marketing is able to get the product out there and in competition with the iPod. Currently Apple is producing in the area of 5 million iPods a quarter, making a few hundred thousand look like pocket change.

The moral of the story? If you have a design for a better MP3 player your odds of making it in the current and future market are high, though not guaranteed.

On Friday afternoon I received a phone call from a number that I had never seen before. I answer and the lady on the other end says “Hi, this is xxx at Yahoo! and I was wondering if you had a minute”. Of course I responded with a “yes” and she went on to ask me what I thought of the Yahoo! Publisher network and things that I thought needed improvement.

The first thing I brought up was the relevance of the ads and how I was not getting anything even close to my site’s content. She listened and said that they were going to continue to improve the crawling of site’s and the relevancy of the ads. She also told me to play with the “Ad Targeting” section of the control panel and see if I could get some better results with it.

The conversation went well and I learned a lot about the program and the simple fact that they took the time to call me is the reason I have switched back (possibly permanently) to Yahoo! advertisements. Google has not taken any time to call me to see what I think of their program and it’s probably because I am a very small fish in the sea but Yahoo! didn’t seem to care.

That phone call is a demonstration of successful business practices and it wins more people than a feature-rich application with no personal touch. I appreciate it Yahoo! Keep it up.