Barry Schwartz explains at the TED conference the secret to happiness: Low expectations.

While some industry watchers are calling moves by NBC and others “a mistake,” NBC Universal spokesman Cory Shields is quoted in the piece by the Post as saying that his company’s programs are one of the primary factors that help drive sales of Apple hardware.

“The iPod is only as good as the content on it,” he said.

What Mr Shields fails to mention is that his “content” is really a commodity compared to the iPod. What music that iPod users can’t download from ITunes can be obtained from other sources: both legal and illegal. The user experience of the iPod and iTunes is for the most part unique. If users wish to download their music (and movies) from other source, it will not affect iPod sales nearly as the lost revenue Universal will experience by exiting from iTunes.

The people at Panic Software who already make the best graphical ftp client (Transmit) on any platform, just released a surprise application which is wonderful collection of web-developer apps tightly rolled into one. While not trying to be everything to everyone, Coda offers an integrated solution for those of us who don’t utilize WYSIWYG web development tools. Historically, webdevelopers and designers who manually coded their efforts relied on separate applications for coding html, editing css, ftp, and other utilities. Panic has integrated a text editor, web browser, css editor, terminal (via SSH), ftp client and sites manger. It also features the SubEdthaEdit engine to enable collaborative work, and three online HTML, CSS & PHP reference books. While I am still working with a eval version, I expect that I will be upgrading from Transmit ($10 credit) to Coda shortly.

I survived a 7 day backpaking trip into the backcounty of Baxter State Park last week with Linda and a friend Meredith. All told we hiked about 25 miles, paddled a couple of miles, and viewed much flora and fauna (7 moose, 2 deer, and a couple of leeches!) As most Maine residents know, Baxter State Park is comprised of mostly wilderness with few roads and a few primative campgrounds. The park includes Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachin Trail. Katahdin includes several peaks and trails: Baxter peak, knife-edge tail, Hamlin peak and trail, and the notorious saddle trail.

Our trip began at Roaring Brook campground where Linda and I left our car, and met up with Meredith. Within the first hour at Roaring, we took a brief hike to Sandy Stream Pond where we were treated to a view of 4 moose (3 cows and a calf). A subsequent visit several hours later in the day showed that 3 of the moose were still present at the pond. We witnessed some bizarre behaviour from one of the adult moose which ran back and forth several times along the shore of the pond splashing water about madly. The other adult moose stood staring at the deranged moose and seemed as facinated by this behavior as we were. After several minutes the calmer moose started walking towards us, and when it got within 40 feet, we decided to give it a wide berth and return to camp. The following morning, we set out on a 5.5 mile hike to Wassataquoik stream and it’s leanto. The hike was failry un-eventful with the exception of catching a glimpse of another moose in a small pond. The hiking was not too strenous yet, the temperatures were around 80 deg during the day and 50 degrees at night with low humidity. Stream crossings were always a popular break from the monotony of the trail, and a chance to practice our balancing skills. The final mile of the hike had us “drafting” behind another couple of hikers in an attempt to pass them and optain the primo leanto for the evening. Our efforts paid off, and we were treated to a fantastic view of the stream from our shelter. We setup camp and after a pumping water, I had the pleasure of trying to remove a leach from my right foot. I felt like Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen”, and freaked out. After several attemts I was unable to pull the little bugger from my skin. I stopped pulling and it simply let go and it slipped back into the stream on its own accord.  We returned to camp , took a bath in the stream, washed some of our clothes, and started dinner. We were carrying between 45-50 lbs of pack each, and we were eager to eat our way to a lower pack weight. But of course we also had to ration food for the later, strenous portion of the trip.
After a good meal and a restful night, set off for about 4 mile hike past Russell Pond, to arrive at the shelter on the island in Wassataquoik Lake. The state supplied canoes got us to/from the island, and gave us an opportunity to paddle the length of the Lake searching for the “Beach” for a little bathing and skinny-dipping.The next day had us retracing our steps a little to Russell Pond campground. Our leanto was on the far side of the lake, about 1/4 mile from the other other shelters.
A visit from the ranger resulted in some reminising by Linda and Meredith when they were stuck at Russell pond for several days due to heavy rains and high streams. The Ranger advised us of another couple of moose currently feeding in the pond on the other side of the pond. So we hot footed it over there for a gander before it got dark.The following morning we started out on the hike up the backside of Katahdin to Davis Pond. It was a long and strenous day of hiking ending in a walk through a high mountain blueberry patch, rain and plunging temperatures. I was feling a little hypothermic, so I immediatley climbed into my sleeping bag while Linda and Meredith went down to the pond for a chilly bath. That evening we were treated 40 degree temperature as we slept. The next morning we forced ourselves out of the sack, dried out as much as possible and continued our journey up the mountain to Davis peak and the alpine “tablelands”. We were very fortuante that day as we were spared from all rain storms around us, and after pumping water we started down saddle trail (which I absolutley detest due to the steep pitch and loose rock) to Chinney Pond. We spent another cold and rainy night at Chimney and the following day decided to exit the park a day early after getting soaked in a rain/sleet mixture visiting Pamola caves. All in all it was great trip! Looking forward to next year’s trip.

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to show off an embassingly studpid manuveur upon exiting a ski boat. The resulting crash of my unbraced body against the edge of the dock left me writhing in agony. The upshot… a fractured rib.

After visiting the ER with subsequent x-rays and a cat scan (to check for spleen damage), they confirmed that I fractured my 9th rib. Needless to say, Percoset is now my best new friend! There is no wrapping or taping of my torso, so even the slightest movement can at times unleash a series of growns and salty speech.

It is uncertain to me just how long I will be feeling this injury, but I suspect that it will take several months of gradually deminishing pain. The big question is whether I will be up for the 7 day backpack trip in Baxter 6 weeks from now??

As a developer, I have always wanted to do some development work on my laptop even when it isn’t connected to the internet. And while Expression Engine which runs in a php, mysql ennvironment could be installed on MacOSX apache as local development sandbox, I have always been hesitant to start mucking around in the cellar of my primary workstation for fear of screwing something up.

So, I was very pleased when recently I became aware of MAMP, an Apache, php, mysql, and phpmyadmin installer which creates what I will call a virtual server on my Mac. After a simple installation, I simply run MAMP, which fires up the server resources without compromising the existing Apache installation that is built into OSX. When I am done with it, I can simply drag the MAMP folder to trash and everything returns to normal on my machine.

And best of all it free! Of course Apache, php, mysql are all open source programs, but the MAMP installer and environment was created by Webeditions a software developer that makes a competing CMS product like Expression Engine. While I will likely continue to use Expression Engine, I do want to thank Webeditions for making MAMP available.

I am really starting to use Sphere.com quite a bit. As a blog search engine it is quite adequate. But the beauty of Sphere is when I added the “Sphereit!” bookmarklet to my Safari Browser (Firefox is also supported). Whenever I wish to know what is being said about any particular website I am visiting, I simply click on the “Sphere It!” button , and I receive a list of blog postings on the web which may be related to the subject matter of the site I was visiting.

Too cool.

I am kicking off a new website dedicated to Katahdin Web Design today. While it is still a work in progress, I have the basic framework in place, and I decided to submit the site to the search engines today. While I have been doing some web development and graphic design on a contract basis here in Maine for the past few years, it has been more of a sideline. Recently, I decided to pursue business opportunities in a full-time manner.

This section of the site is dedicated as my personal soapbox, and may contain my observations on such topics as:

• Marketing ideas
• Web Development and Graphic Design
• Anything relating to Macs (I am partial to the platform, but not a in-your-face zealot)
• Maine, and life here
• Any other random thoughts