I’m in like 10 different pools, my view on various pool managers:

* PicksPal Bracket 2007 - NCAA Tournament - March Madness – easy to enter, a lot of ad content but not annoyingly so. Entire bracket on one page which is nice. * Sportsline. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the fact that they show you consensus pick info dynamically as you pick teams – this is freaking awesome. OK the math is sometimes bizarrely wrong but still. My favorite. * Yahoo. A fine choice. Not fancy but works well. * ESPN. The worst. Abusive ad content – in tooltips popups, in between regions as you fill in your bracket. I won’t bother to fill in anymore at this site and i would certainly never host one here.

From Dave, Wide Open Baja – 4-7 day tours of Baja in off road cars.

* File Sharing from Windows Vista to OS X ~ Chris Pirillo * Powershell scripts in a hidden window * PUSHD with UNC paths automagically maps network drives

Dead on – this would make my vista experience about 1000x better – Windows Vista Help ~ Chris Pirillo “VMWare is an amazingly robust virtualization tool - and it’s the only one that supports USB 2.0 device passthroughs. Virtual USB device support *ALONE* is makes it possible to run your XP-happy hardware on Windows Vista.”

Just when I thought I had the ultimate water-cooled machine, now we have water cooled ram – OCZ Releases Water-Cooled RAM – and I am behind once again.

* A portable photo background in a briefcase * 60 second beercan chiller * Tripper for photo storage * Scrolling LED license plate frame. This seems like a good way to get shot. * Able planet noise cancelling headphones * Best Indie games. These are quite fun * Phone/remote combo.

Lieber Research Group – excellent source of info on semiconductor nanowires. A great archive of technical papers.

I really like this observation – Brand Autopsy: A Vital Jack Welch Quote

“Too often we measure everything and understand nothing. The three most important things you need to measure in a business are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and cash flow. If you’re growing customer satisfaction, your global market share is sure to grow, too. Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity. And cash flow is the pulse—the key vital sign of a company.”

* Andy’s working on losing weight. Good luck man! He’s also invested in Shelfari – i am a sucker for book sites * Mpire launches shopping visualizer * Phil plays around with google co-op. Oh and he has renamed beyond411 to avoid lawyers – still the blackberry app you must download * Rich updates me on the upcoming subnotebook mac portable – as soon as this is out, I am replacing my notebook.

MAKE: Blog: Octopart - search engine for electronic parts… – also has links to various other electronics search engines.

From Makezine, these incredible wood creations – Tahoe Turner – Adrian you should love these.

On the materials science front:

* “Solid State Physics”:amazon by Ashcroft/Mermin. One of the standard texts. OK. * “Introduction to Solid State Physics”:amazon by Kittel. Another standard text. I liked it a little better. * “Physics of Semiconductor Devices”:amazon by Sze/Ng. I liked a lot better, this one is more application oriented. * “Group III Nitride Semiconductor Compounds”:amazon, editted by Gil. Really just a collection of papers. Only for Group III Nitride aficionados.

And then, throwaway reads just to purge my brain:

* “Seeker”:amazon by McDevitt. Your standard deep space science fiction tail. Won’t harm you brain, diverting. * “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This”:amazon by Bob Newhart. Love Newhart. No kiss and tell secrets in here, but harmless and diverting.

MAKE pointed me towards Toolmonger. Found a nice cable tie gun, I’ve needed one.

Report: Windows Live exec plans to leave Microsoft

* I wonder how the LPs feel (via Mattishness) at Starting Up by Rahul Pathak * Bob on tripods. Bob knows photography * Andy reminds me to disconnect every once in a while. * The jobster team keeps pouring out features. * Our friends at IR were acquired! Congrats!