Tempo wireless trash can – this seems like the most awesomest way to steal files from your co-worker on the other side of the cubicle wall – just install the software on their machine and keep the receptacle on your side of the wall. Just a concept at this point.

Protector Boats – not in the market but man these look awesome.

Weekend hike was Mt Catherine, just past Snoqualmie Pass. Cold and rainy, must have been 45 degrees at the base early Sunday morning. This guy had a much better weather day than me – Mt. Catherine, WA – pretty much all I saw was cloud.

Environmental Home Center, Seattle, green building materials. – “We are your most complete source for green building materials—simply the highest-quality choices with the added benefit of being healthy and resource-efficient”

Nice place. Smallish but a lot of interesting supplies. One wonders if there is not space in the home improvement market for a national Whole-Foods-like play.

* “The Night Gardener”:amazon by George Pelecanos. Lots of fancy blurbs, but a weak first half. The characters grew on me, but the setting never came to life. The ending was satisfyingly ambiguous. So an OK read but not my favorite. * “Silence”:amazon by Thomas Perry. Good pacing and situations, well written, but I didn’t like the characters. * “A Great Deliverance”:amazon by Elizabeth George. Great atmosphere, a twisted tale of family and love and hate and sin, detectives who are struggling with their own deep issues – an awesome tale. Very good, I am late to the party on this author. * “The world Without Us”:amazon by Alan Weisman. My one dip into nonfiction. Interesting descriptive essay of our various impacts on the planet and how they will dissipate over time. Not very prescriptive. My own take away is that plastics are the worst thing we are doing to the globe – they are pervasive, long-lived, and there is no good way to scrub them out of the environment.

I’m not really a car guy, but need new tires and wanted good ones. J turned me onto Tire Rack – they do an awesome job of summarizing all the choices for your car model, including review and real usage data for the tires. Painless ordering.

* Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has shipped ? Bogle’s Blog – Phil likes it. Me, I just can’t wrap my mind around installing a blog editor on the 3 PCs and 1 Mac at home that I use regularly, and the 2 at work, not to mention all the public terminals I use. I want all the features but I want them in a roaming web UI * Tip for installing itunes on Vista 64-bit – I wonder if this same approach is generalizable to other pieces of software I try to install. * 3 monitor setup – some good tips here on setup and utilities * Builtwith. Lets you examine the software installed on a site. Kind of fun * MT4 final release. Need to bite the bullet. * Duels.com. Buggy as hell but kind of fun. * Footnote.com. Original historical documents. * TinyXP. Minimal configs of XP. * Google Mashup Editor

Five Plants That Repel Mosquitoes – not a big deal here in Seattle but good to know.

Diary of a Crossword Fiend: How Constructors Try to Trick You – don’t even try to do the NYT crosswords later in the week unless you have embraced all these. I hate the “Phonetics and building blocks” class of clue, they seem cheap to me.

Almost here. Some stuff to get your blood boiling:

* EDSBS ? Archive ? PAC-10 FAN WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW HE GETS VERY EXCITED, TOO. – an awesome putdown of the Pac-10 and its tepid fan base. * MGoBlog rips ND Nation a new one

Oh and a composite XL spreadsheet of the season

* NITON XRF Analyzers for Toys & Consumer Goods – I saw this on a news program, testing toys for lead. totally cool. $1000 to rent for a week so probably ridiculously expensive. * iStraw – well we just had a case of giardia in the extended family so this looks pretty good * Urwerk Watch – another stupidly priced watch but awesome * Electric bike. Absolutely no need for this. * Two dimensional kid popup. This is a little disturbing for some reason. * Pie slice ejector. I only need this about once a year, but when you need it, you need it. * Hand made knives and tools. I’m not sure how functional, but they are cool * Puke inducing flashlight. A thousand and one uses. * Your Personal Moon.

Dark Roasted Blend: Tesla Power in Your Backyard – some awesome Tesla coil displays

Multimeter Tutorial - Measuring Resistance and How to speak Resistor

Installed this – An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista – as I was suffering from several of the named problems:

• The computer stops responding, and you receive a “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer’s power button. • The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations. • There are stability issues with some graphics processing units (GPUs). These issues could cause GPUs to stop responding (hang). • Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.

My machine didn’t croak on install. So far, so good