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.

I have changed the advertisements back to AdSense for pretty much the same reasons that Andrew did.

The ads with Yahoo! were just not targeted enough and I did not seem to be getting crawled by any kind of targeting spider. Google on the other hand has been consistent in crawling my site and providing relevant text ads.

I may switch back to Yahoo! in a few months to see if they have provided better ad support.

I want this game. I have not seen a decent looking WWII aviation game since IL 2 Sturmovik and even then I felt the game was lacking.

I’ve always been a fan of aviation games, especially WWII-era ones. That was the real time of the ace and the beginning of the end of a certain breed of pilot. Advances in radar and missile technology were made soon after and dogfighting soon became a point-and-shoot arcade type game. Don’t get me wrong, I think that fighter pilots still have a very tough job it’s just that something has changed and it’s not the same as seeing a P-51 pilot step out of his plane with his brown flight jacket and aviator sunglasses.

Back to the game… I really hope it runs on my machine but I doubt it will. It really is time for an upgrade.

I have been getting the idea that almost all of my development time should be devoted to planning and charting the project, not coding or developing the system.

I can agree that planning is a huge part of a project but I really feel that doing a full system analysis and design for something small or even mid-sized is a little overboard. Creating feasibility studies and business analyses is just taking the project through some extra steps that are truly unneeded. Meet with the client and go through the necessary requirements and discuss the design with them, they’ll learn something as will you. However, here at Tech believe that customers really aren’t interested in the software that will be supporting them. I have to disagree with that. If they are not interested then it simply isn’t worth your time or effort to design the system for them in the first place. A client will make the time to have their system designed correctly and suited to their needs. True, they may not know exactly what they want, but they know what they don’t want.

It’s all in the balance and I don’t feel that the teachers here are getting that point across and I don’t know if it’s because they don’t believe that or if they just do not realize what they are saying. Hopefully things will improve throughout the semester.

Good news, my dad, brother and house weathered the storm. We have not heard much out of them since last night because they lost power around 9:30pm. We spoke this morning and they just passed along the news that the house was ok but that’s about it. I think they are just tired from staying up most of the night with no air-conditioning and a hurricane blowing around them.

I’ll have more pictures as soon as power is restored and my dad is able to get them sent to me.