Thanks to everyone who's sent in thoughts about the cutting edge of blogging. The stuff I've gotten is really great. I think I'll post some of it to the site because a lot of it won't fit into my presentation but it's good stuff worth sharing. I thought "I want to be your naked personal assistant" from Candi had a lot of potential, but when I opened it, it turned out to address a different subject matter. Naked assistants and blogging, what more natural fit could there be?

I'm into the final push for my presentation, From the Margins of the Writable Web, for the Emerging Technology conference next week. I've been working on this for weeks now, but now I need you — the general public — to make sure I haven't missed any bleeding edge weblogging stuff (i.e. not warblogs or anything you'd read about in the paper). What's happening on the far-frontiers that I might have missed? If you've any ideas, please let me know via email. You'll get credit in my presentation if I use your example, of course. And I'll be posting the presentation afterwards to this site. Thanks for your help and participation, I appreciate it.

Apparently there are further updates to Office X for Mac than I was aware of when I posted about it the other day: 10.1.2 and 10.1.3. [thanks Gabe!]

Dr. Anita Borg, a computer science visionary and champion of women in technology died yesterday in CA. I was first introduced to Dr. Borg through the Systers mailing list, and her accomplishments have inspired me ever since. Founder of the Institute for Women in Technology, she worked towards so many things I believe in. From the philosophy statement of the IWT:

[T]he relationship between women and technology must be transformed. The number of girls pursuing math and science education must increase to parity with boys. Women must be encouraged to choose technical studies and careers. Women who make that choice must be supported as far as their skills and interests allow. The environment must assure that women of all backgrounds and races can bring the full richness of their experience to their own work.

With many challenges still before us, her leadership and vision will be missed. But her inspiration remains to encourage generations of women, including me. Thank you, Dr. Borg.

Liz over at mamamusings has been thinking about women and social software and related issues: lack of women speakers, minority of women in technology, etc. I dug through my archives for some related posts from August 2001 and I know this is a still an issue. Though I've been speaking at lots of conferences, there aren't many other women up there on the podiums with me. I know that conference organizers would like to have more women speakers, so we need more women to submit proposals. You have until May 15, 2003 to submit a proposal for O'Reilly's Mac OSX Conference 2003. And they're still looking for proposals for lightning talks at the 2003 O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Geek girls, get in gear! And if you know of other conferences looking for speakers, let me know and I'll post them here.

DEF CON ELEVEN Call for Papers until June 15, 2003. DEF CON is, "the largest underground 'hacking' convention on the planet." [via boogah]

There's an update to Microsoft Office for OS X that many don't seem to know about. Be aware that if you've got a copy of Office of dubious legality, after running the update, you might be prompted for the CD key. Also note that after I ran the update, I noticed a kind of super-anti-aliasing on my apps, text seems even fuzzier than before.

Reading BBC correspondent Jim Muir's account of the death of BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan and injury of producer Stuart Hughes this morning, I learned of Mr. Hughes blog, which he had been updating until his injuries on April 2. His Northern Iraq Weblog is packed with stories and photos, and seeing it was a Blog*Spot site filled me with a strange, powerful feeling.

Over the past four years, I've had such a range of emotions about Blogger and Pyra, many of which revolved around bitterness, anger, and disappointment. Time has done a good job of mellowing those feelings, and what time hasn't healed, (oddly enough) this war has. All those fights at the office, the worries about finances, the anger over indecision, all of it fades away into inconsequentiality when I see Salam Pax, Kevin Sites, and Stuart Hughes using Blogger to share their experiences with the world. I realize now, more than ever, it was all worth it.

One of the really cool things about Eclipse is that it has lots of plugins. I've installed two so far: SolarEclipse for color-coding of XML/HTML/JSP, etc. and Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher, which lets you run Tomcat from within the Eclipse environment. Two more I'd like that I haven't found are a text wrap plugin and one that color-codes JavaScript. Please send me an email if you know of any. And soon, very soon, I will try and get comments going here so you can comment directly. There's just so much to do! And so little time!

I am about the happiest geek in town since yesterday, when I was introduced to Eclipse. Holy moly! Now I'm hoping I can find some nice plugins for HTML, CSS, and JSP and I'll be flying. Take that, sucky BBEdit! Ok, I shouldn't be too harsh on the ol' BB, and I shouldn't be too excited yet about Eclipse. But I am. It just already feels so much more usable to me, and I can feel the speed returning to all my programming endeavors. My apologies for the cheesy title, I couldn't resist.

Lots of articles are coming about touting business uses for weblogs: Blogs likely to gain place in business world, Blogs Begin Getting Down to Business, so it seems like a good time to remind folks about
We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs' Chapter 8, Using Blogs in Business. Lots of stuff in here about how and why to use blogs in a business setting. And it's all yours for free! You don't even have to buy the book to get it.