New Taproot is finally here. The CD will be out August 16, but you can preorder it at BandMerch for $20 with a free shirt.

shallowbay.com is back.

Looks like I broke comments when I upgraded to WordPress 1.5. They should be working again now.

Blockbuster is getting rid of late fees.

Under the “no late fees” program, Blockbuster still has due dates — one week for games and two days or one week for movies. However, if customers need to keep the product an extra day or two, they can, stress-free. Blockbuster now gives customers a one-week grace period at no additional charge. At that point, if customers want to keep the movie or game longer, they can. Blockbuster will automatically sell them the product, less the rental fee. If customers decide they don’t want to own the movie or game, they simply return the product within 30 days for a full credit to their account, less a minimal restocking fee.

This should be a real PR boost for them. I know we try to avoid them because of their late fee policy. Previously you had to pay any late fees before you could rent anything. They will lose $250-300 million in income from the late fees, we’ll see if they can offset this lose.

Congratulations to the Mozilla team on 10 million downloads of Firefox.

Currently I am upgrading gallery to the latest version, so if anything is broke just give me some time to clear it up. I will post when I am done.

Update: Upgrade is complete.