The Amiga computer was a dream given form: an inexpensive, fast, flexible multimedia computer that could do virtually anything.

Ars posted the first part of a history of the Amiga. The Amiga 1000 changed my life. I got it as a birthday present, a few months after my father died.

Since then I've learned that it is rare for something of excellence to persevere for very long. Evolution rewards the mediocre. The more average you are the more likely you are to breed.

democamp Dallas is this Thursday (2/15/07) from 6:30-8pm at Sabre Labs in Southlake. All of the *camp events that I've been to have been a lot of fun, and frankly gotten me excited about tech again. If you can make it please sign up on the wiki.

The iPhone looks great but why is Apple poisoning their brand by an association with Cingular? The Cingular CEO read his Cingular/AT&T ad from notecards during the keynote and was not enthused about being there and didn't appear to "get it." There is one more big innovation Apple could push with the iPhone.

Get the message out that American consumers don't have to buy phones from the major carriers. I recently bought an unlocked phone. While finding and buying the phone was a pain in the butt, moving my SIM card was easy. I would love to see Apple open up distribution channels for cell phones in America.

At the very least I hope they offer an unlocked version.

Thanks to a link on Jim Gilliam's blog I read a Psychology Today article about Post Traumatic Growth. I'd never heard of this term before. I checked with my sister and apparently some folks in the APA started pushing for "positive psychology" in the 1990s. They want psychology to also study the growth from trauma instead of just the problems. I think the hope might be that you end up with a science where you have something to work towards, instead of just trying to get away from problems.

Isn't positive psychology just a more palatable way to describe transpersonal psychology? Consider this definition of spiritual emergence and tell me how this is different from Post Traumatic Growth:

This has also been called transpersonal crisis, acute psychosis with a positive outcome, positive disintegration and an extreme state.

It would be an impressive feat to see the APA make transpersonal psychology mainstream by calling it positive psychology.

It looks like Dallas has a good technical bookstore now, and has had for the last 10 months. Nerdbooks made the move from Sacramento, California to Richardson, Texas and brought 20,000 technical books with them. When I asked about the Pragmatic Programmer books they knew right where they were. They even had the more academic books like say Donald Knuth's Art of Programming series.

What particularly stood out, aside from selection, is that you pay the online store price, without the shipping. Previously I'd been hanging out in the poorly organized, but decent selection at the Micro Center. Nerdbooks is much more competitive on price compared to the other brick and mortar places.

Apparently unload events have a hard time firing in Safari unless you use the one method that none of the other browser's fully support, addEventListener(). I wrote a blog entry about how to get Safari, Mozilla/Firefox and Internet Explorer to work with unload events in our work blog.

My PowerBook woes have been diagnosed by the mighty Tiger. I formatted the hard drive and dropped Tiger on my PowerBook. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear but a red disk and S.M.A.R.T. Status: failing when I fired up Disk Utility.

Apple's been a bit behind the curve on adding IDE S.M.A.R.T. status information where the user can see it.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

The Amiga is still fighting the good fight with the release of Amiga OS4.0.

February 17th, 1986 changed the course of my life. I received an Amiga 1000 for my birthday. From early December to my birthday in February my father died, my mother remarried and I began living in my step-father's house. I was lost and had no idea what was happening around me. I had never heard of the Amiga before and didn't really know what to do with it, but it promised so much.

The Amiga had funny names for the chips inside: Agnus, Denise, and Paula. It had signatures from the engineers etched inside the case. GUI functionality was captured in Gadgets. Screens where handled by the Intuition library. It had color, preemptive multitasking, good sound, and most importantly an invitation to tinker with it. Not many chip designers achieve the celebrity that the "Father of the Amiga", Jay Miner, attained.

The Amiga gave me an anchor when I was adrift. I threw so much time into that machine. I learned csh on it. I messed around with animation in Disney Animation Studio and Deluxe Paint. I played many, many, excellent games. I first began downloading music back then, MOD files, and taking control of what went in my ears rather than just passively listening to the radio. I forged the friendships over the modem that I never found in real life until the 12th grade. I edited videos for school with that Amiga. I learned the basics of programming on it. I had a very dog-eared copy of the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference manual and the Abacus books 68000 Assembly Language book.

The Amiga saved a life that felt lost. Now coming back to it again as I read that review about OS4.0 I see that first time with new eyes.

Okay, all my non-Mac owning friends you have no excuses. The new Mac Mini starts at $499 and you can use your old Windows monitor, keyboard and mouse on them. Oh and quit yer bitchin' 'bout how much Word sucks and start using Pages. Apple's forward thinking is a stark contrast to the siege mentality at Microsoft that Bill Gates alluded to by declaring Internet users are communists.

And the mightyness of Rush carries on, this time in the web medium. Congrats to rush.com for winning a 2003 SXSW Web Award for best Musical Artist/Band site.

Oh and I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that fellow DFWer Griff trounced the competition in the "Weblog" category with his site ultramicroscopic. DFW reprezent!