Microsoft is going to attempt to trump E3, but my hope is that will somehow only negatively affect Sony, but not Nintendo. Previously there were rumors that Nintendo wouldn't mention anything about their upcoming platform for fear of the competition "stealing" their great ideas, but apparently that rumor isn't true:

Our coverage begins on Tuesday, May 17, when we'll break early news about Nintendo's key products right after the press event concludes. Check back here for the latest announcements on the Legend of Zelda for Nintendo GameCube; news about Nintendo handhelds -- Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance -- and the first word about Nintendo's upcoming home console: Nintendo Revolution.

[ Nintendo : News ]

As always I'm looking forward to great announcements all around. For all of my favorite platforms of today, and my possible favorite platforms of tomorrow.

Want to keep it legit too? The open-source community has developed an IDE that seems to have large support for all sorts of things:

Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular. Find out what eclipse is all about - check out the Eclipse Roadmap, white paper, read some technical articles, visit the newsgroups, take a look at the projects, and pick up the latest downloads.

[ eclipse.org ]

For my purposes I downloaded the "platform" version (since I won't be extending Eclipse, just using it), installed the CF plug-in and the VSS plug-in and then got a bit frustrated before finding out the VSS plug-in required the Java Development Tools  to be installed to function correctly.

Once all of that was in place, it appears I have a program that is vastly superior to ColdFusion Studio 5, and vastly cheaper than DreamWeaver MX 2004. It still isn't CF editing in my beloved VisualStudio, but it will do.

My favorite pizza in the city delivers to my office:

[ Famous Luigi's Menu (202)331-7574 ]

Though everyone thinks it is. Instead:

Cinco de Mayo ("Fifth of May" in Spanish) is a national holiday in Mexico which commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

[ Cinco de Mayo: Definition and Much More From Answers.com ]

Why not Mexican Independence day?

The rise in Cinco de Mayo's popularity in the United States can be attributed to the Chicano student movement of the late 1960's. Inspired by student-activists nationwide, members of the MEChA organization in California sought to find a day of celebration that highlighted their largely Mexican ancestry. “El Dieciséis de septiembre” (September 16) seemed like an obvious choice, however this day proved too early in the school-year for college students to effectively organize rallies and celebrations. Thus Cinco de Mayo became the de facto alternative for these student assemblies.

[ Cinco de Mayo: Definition and Much More From Answers.com ]

Of course Corona's promotion of the holiday has certainly helped all Americans embrace it. This year, however, is a especial Cinco de Mayo since it's Cinco de Mayo de Cinco or 05/05/05.

Am I such a sucker that I'd feel the need to buy another GameCube just because it looked like the concept piece that someone mocked up on Engadget?

...supposed portable GameCube are more likely a concept design than anything based in physical reality...

[ Portable Nintendo GameCube? - Gaming - gaming.engadget.com / ]

Unfortunatly yes I think so...

I can never remember how to grab the screen as an image on a Mac, so I googled it. I like the fact that there are a bunch of options on how to do this on a mac, though I ended up using the first one listed and creating a PDF of all things. But then we get to what to do with an image on the clipboard:

Use SimpleText to copy the image or part of the image you wish to paste into your documentation

[ Screen Capture Tips ]

SimpleText can do images? That's just confusing...

Seattle, right?

Our coffee quotient was designed to serve both camps. It's a measure of the number of Starbucks stores per 10,000 population in cities across the U.S., as of March 2005.

[ Cities with high coffee quotients - ePodunk ]

Falls Church, Virginia? Come on, this has to be a statistical anomaly.

Perhaps one just opened in Falls Church to replace one that was about to close? Maybe Falls Church has weird borders and makes it seem like a lot less people live there than really do. Perhaps the folks at ePodunk don't realize that what the Post Office considers "Falls Church" and what the population data people consider "Falls Church" are very likely 2 different things. The odd thing is that I can only think of one Starbucks in Falls Church, I wonder where the other 6.7 are...

Note: Eyeballing it, I think about 2 maybe 3 Starbucks are actually in Falls Church and not just pretending to be in Falls Church.

Great article on 1UP.com about the upcoming Zelda title:

This is Nintendo. Little pikachus all around, some pikmin in the back, and a friendly guard who will take us on a whirlwind, song-filled tour of this wonderland of imagination!

[ Zelda Exposed from 1UP.COM ]

Koji Kondo is mentioned, and I'm sure you've heard his music. The entire interview isn't here, they saved the best parts for EGM. Zelda will be huge this year, and could drive a ton of last minute sales for the GameCube and possibly even assist with Revolution as it is said to sport backward compatibility.

Any-which-way, you know you want Zelda, and if you don't you're only kidding yourself...

I hate taxes. They are needlessly complicated, and cause me much anguish each year. They are difficult to plan for, always more confusing, and seem to favor the super rich who can afford big time accountants and lawyers to do their taxes for them. Enter a crazy plan:

His bill would abolish the Internal Revenue Service and the many billions of tax forms it sends out and receives. He would erase the federal income tax system -- personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax, and the earned-income tax credit -- and replace all that with a 23 percent national sales tax on personal consumption.

[ The Tax Plan To Kill K Street ]

I have no idea if this plan could ever work, or if it is good, or bad, or crazy, or impossible. But the dream of not filling out any personal income tax is just too great to not ignore this. To the best of my knowledge no other country forces this degree of law, accounting, math, and grief on it's population, so why should we?

David Kearns III thinks so:

It appears that what Apple has done is to take meaningful, desirable third-party services and applications and "roll their own" inside the operating system, thus presenting users with a fuller package of features. Of course, the third parties that had been providing these services as add-ons now are left out in the cold.

When Microsoft does this, it's denounced as a predator and a monopolist. When Apple does it, it's praised as an innovator. Still, if Microsoft didn't have Apple to point to as "competition," there might be more calls for government regulation of monopoly operating systems. We certainly don't want government bureaucrats designing our server and desktop environments.

[ Apple: Predator or protagonist? ]

And I have to agree. Of course I have little choice being focused on Microsoft development tools. Even if someone gave me a Mac to replace every PC in my network, I couldn't use them to deliver Microsoft solutions, and I have to relearn my staff in the ways of PHP and Java (instead of the ColdFusion and .NET that we use now). Still resulting in a loss.

That may be true, but apparently so are coffee devices. After a bowl of the yummiest mac & cheese around from Wolfgang Puck Express, we headed over to the Sur La Table to check out some kitcheney stuff. Nestlé has just come out with a new entry to their pod-based espresso machine line, the Nespresso D90:

Nespresso has created a hermetically sealed capsule which contains the precise amount of freshly roasted and ground coffee. All of the coffee aromas are preserved perfectly until the espresso is ready for drinking. Nespresso offers a range of 9 premium coffee blends

[ Nespresso D90 Essenza Metallic Gray Manual Espresso Machine D 90 S ]

As I was hovering around the coffee section, a nice british woman (who just happend to work there) asked if there was anything she could help with. I had to ask if they did taste testing of the Nespresso system. She replied it would be no problem, just let her fetch some pods from the back. Oooo goody, I do love coffee.

Suffice to say the Nespresso system delivers the best coffee I have ever had from any automated coffee system. Their newest machine is only $179 retail, and the pods run about 48 cents a shot. This could truly break me of the Starbucks grip forever. Philips Senseo has dropped me from a 2 Starbucks a day habit to just one, this could drop me to zero.

Metro-city populations are such a fascinating topic. However at the rate the mid-atlatic and northeast US are growing, I think there will soon be a #1 city of Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia-Delaware-Patterson-Newark-New York-Boston area with a population of 41,100,000. And of course it will be known as The Sprawl (eventually extending southward to Atlanta, but I think that will take a while longer...).

This page lists the 101 largest metropolitan areas of the world by population. This is a controversial issue rather difficult to quantify. These figures include suburban areas immediately surrounding a major city and sometimes multiple major cities which may be close enough together to function essentially as one area (e.g. Washington-Baltimore).

[ List of metropolitan areas by population: Information From Answers.com ]

And for me personally the largest metro area in the world that I had never heard of before reading this is Kolkata-Howrah in the Indian state of West Bengal. Apparently the 3 most populous countries that I know very little about are China, India, and Brazil. All of the areas that I'd never heard of reside in these countries. Which also explains how Bengali and Portuguese get so high on the list of spoken languages of the world.

Update: Once I said Kolkata out loud, I realized it is Calcutta. So Tianjin in China is largest city I've never heard of.

Or even better, pay me? Clearly some people have figured out how to do this:

Consumers will be able to purchase the software in the United States for 129 dollars and in Europe for 129 euros.

Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox said Tiger puts Apple ahead of Microsoft in technology for PC operating systems.

[ Apple's "Tiger" aims to take a bite out of Microsoft, "Longhorn" - Yahoo! News ]

Exactly how am I going to run Tiger on my Wintel boxes? Or does Joe think I am ready to sell or dump all of my Windows based infrastructure and buy all apples for everything. This may make Apples increase in sales due to it being a more attractive purchase than previously, but their market share is so tiny that Microsoft won't be worried about Tiger at all.

Linux advocates, however, should be worried...

Certainly I doubt they'll get much retaliation for this:

Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin'
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and The Crips and the KKK

[ Black Eyed Peas Lyrics - Where Is The Love? ]

But you have to wonder if picking a fight with the CIA, Bloods, Crips, and the KKK is the smartest thing to do in an internationally released single.

The strange conversations that Iman and I have in the elevator must amuse our neighbors. Today we've learned the plural of chrysalis:

chrysalis: [ krĭs´ə-lĭs ] n. pl. chrysalises or chrysalides [ krĭ-sǎl´ĭ-dēz' ]

1. A pupa, especially of a moth or butterfly, enclosed in a firm case or cocoon.
2. A protected stage of development.

[Latin chrysallis, from Greek khrusallis, khrusallid-, gold-colored pupa of a butterfly, from khrusos, gold ; see chryso-.]

[ chrysalis - yourDictionary.com - American Heritage Dictionary ]

And reinforced the fact that a chrysalis isn't a cocoon but the stage of development of the critter inside the cocoon.

Before I even read the email telling me to upgrade my Rhapsody, G$ was all over the place telling everyone to upgrade:

Listen to the music you love on-demand, with the #1 rated digital music service, Rhapsody Unlimited. Rhapsody's ever-growing catalog of over 1 million songs comprises one of the largest collections of music anywhere. Play today’s hottest hits, find yesterday’s classics, and discover the new artists you'll love tomorrow. Just find the songs you want and hit 'Play', it's that easy

[ Rhapsody.com - Music Services ]

Why? 'cause it's hot!

That's hot.

[ Paris Hilton ]

And I agree. Better player, better quality sound, larger library, new free subscription, new to go subscription, now allows your local library and the Rhapsody library to combine, new personalized offering, and just plain cooler. Though I do keep blocking out the fact that they're owned by the evil empire.