Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.

This was strange news since I’m currently reading Revolution in the Valley, so I had just learned more details on Jef and the rest of the Mac crew. The book is great, by the way - it’s a collection of stories from the Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories blog created by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the Mac creators.

Insanely Great, which I read years ago, is also a good book on the Mac story.

I’m also becoming insanely jealous of Jen’s Mac mini! After shopping for some accessories for the mini Mac, I’ve grown more aware of the elegance and style of the Mac. I played around with OS X a while ago and it’s only gotten better - although Jen still has only let me touch the thing like twice!

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Sometimes things way outside your direct contact can affect you - or maybe effect, I could never get those straight. A recent boing boing post announced Pam Bricker’s death. I had never heard of her, but I saw that she sang for Thievery Corporation, who I really dig. So it just is one of those things that brings you down - even though I didn’t even know this person, I was touched somehow by her voice. It’s sad and amazing at the same time. I hope I can have that same effect on someone, somehow, someday.

She sang the great “Lebanese Blonde” from The Mirror Conspiracy and “All That We Perceive” from The Richest Man in Babylon. It’s really great stuff. I didn’t know any of her more jazzy stuff, but will check it out.

I highly recommend the Thievery Corporation stuff. Probably my favorite “downtempo” artists - jazzy, worldly, loungey… check it out.

Also, turns out I went to CCM with David Pescovitz, a writer for boing boing. We were both in the Electronic Media program at the same time. Small world, eh? I never finished, but he did.

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If you’ve tried to post a comment recently you probably got a 404 message. Due to the amount of comment spam, I just got fed up with it and renamed the file. Now I’ve finally had time to rebuild my MT install to use the renamed script.

To help prevent future comment spam, I’ve closed comments on posts older than 30 days. This sucks, but I had no choice, especially since it was killing the server! Thanks to David Raynes simple script, I was able to close all the comments in a snap. Then I found Alan Carroll’s MTCloseComments plugin so that every time I post an entry or rebuild my main page, posts older than 45 days have their comments closed. Thanks guys for some great plugins! I’ll be adding the “nofollow” plugin soon as well.

Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist has been great, I just can’t keep it updated enough to block the spam and new ones pop up so much, it’s insane!

It’s unfortunate that so many bloggers have to resort to this since it sort of puts a time limit on interaction. I still get comments and emails about older posts that spark new ideas.

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