It’s not enough to have the #1 college football team in the nation, he also decides to take on science instruction

* Woodland Park Zoo Pumpkin Prowl – might be fun to stop at * Seattle Times’ list of events – the bastyr event sounds good * The PI’s list and more PI

* Melodeo launches with cingular – congrats! * Rich on the Sony HD videocam – the perfect xmas present! * Also rich points me towards an IR-compatible camera – I’ve been using a Sony DSC-F828 for a couple years and been happy, but would be great to have some lens options. Get your mind out of the gutter, this is for Halloween pix. * Phil found deskfinder -- remote search of your desktop from your blackberry. pretty awesome. * As Brad notes, JudysBook has done a major facelift. Looks good… * Network Magic pricing has changed, and Jeff has gotten a lot of great feedback and support. Great to see the direct engagement with the customers.

2nd surround system up and running. My first system is basically for thunder and lightning and is fully operational. This second system is for the primary graveyard locale and will have a lot of graveyardish sounds panning across the space. I’m driving from a PC using the Creative Audigy2zs, hooked up to a Pioneer Electronics - VSX-516-K/S - 7.1 A/V receiver with Sound Retriever (picked up as an open box unit at best buy) driving 5.1 speakers. A little mysterious how to get surround working, not as nice a config utility as the turtle beach card. And then the receiver was just plain mysterious. I had to do a “reset” to finally get it to emit 5.1 sounds – hold down the tone button, the power button for 3 seconds, then enter and then setup. i can imagine why this unit got returned to best buy, it tries to be so smart about deciding what source and output mode to use, but i think it gets wedged into misconfigs. Reset is your friend.

Q-Manager Audio Playback and Show Control Software – meant to try this out this year but never got around to it. Perhaps next…

I raised a dispute with American Express concerning my problems with Alienware and I have to thank them, it is making things happen. I finally got a personal contact from alienware today:

_Dear Mr. Ludwig,

I tried to call you earlier today and left you a voicemail on the following regard. As I stated in the message, your system is ready to be shipped out, however earlier today Alienware received a chargeback dispute from your credit card company in the amount of $XXXX.XX. Unfortunately, we cannot ship the system out until this dispute is lifted. If you can please contact your credit card company and lift this dispute, it will be most helpful in expediting your order. Please feel free to contact me at anytime should you have any questions regarding this matter.

Thank you,

XXXXXXXXXX XXXXX Critical Issues Agent Alienware Corporation

Phone: 305.XXX.XXXX Fax: 786.XXX.XXXX www.alienware.com_

Needless to say I will not be lifting the dispute. It is apparently the only lever I have – the system is just coincidentally ready to ship out the moment they receive the dispute notice. They can ship me the system and if it is perfect I will pay. I’d rather the money back.

Google docs and spreadsheets – nice to see these combined. thankfully they picked up more of the writely interface for presenting your list of available docs, it was always kind of pain to always arrive at a new blank spreadsheet in google spreadsheets, when i normally wanted to open an existing sheet. much easier now. Still desparately want charts in the spreadsheet package.

A Sack of Seattle: The meeting that led to Judy’s Book insights – Andy is doing a great job of thinking out loud about his business. this is just one of a series of posts worth reading.

Was just wondering about airport facilities in some minor markets and came across AirNav – useful airport info, more than I needed

In service of the course I am taking at UW, I did a random walk thru MEMs investments this morning. Not exhaustive, just work in process notes for me.

VCs

* BA Venture Partners * Ardesta – “leading the small tech revolution” * Mobius

Investments

* IMT – a foundry * Xponent – surface mount photonics * XCom -- MEMS rf components * Translume – advanced glass micromachining * Sensicore – water quality testing * Akustica – single chip microphone

Other

* MEMSnet – portal

Remember 1974 when the #1 Buckeyes cruised into East Lansing and laid an egg. Or 1998 when the Spartans came into Columbus and beat the #1 Buckeyes. You just never know what is going to happen with MSU. Scariest game left on the schedule ex Michigan of course.

Continuing to plug away on my halloween surround sound setup – A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Halloween Surround Sound Status One awesomely great feature of the turtlebeach audioadvantage roadie is the headphone jack. You can use it simultaneously with the spdif out – so many sound cards turn off the speaker out when a headphone is detected. here you can use both. the documented use is to attach another pair of speakers to create a 7.1 setup. But for halloween you can use this extra output to drive your lightning controller such as the i-zombie.

So my sound is working great. my lighting controllers are all firing. now i am playing around with lights – halogen worklights, par lights, some low voltage stuff – to create the best effect.

Oh and i am working on my other surround sound config which won’t be lightning, but will be ambient graveyard sounds.

Bob is a smart guy – “People tend to think of the Internet in terms of the Web but the real importance is in the basic End-to-End philosophy. You build applications at the edge of the network and don’t make unnecessary assumptions about what’s in the middle.”

Tested my surround sound setup for our front yard this AM.

* For authoring using Sony acid pro. Works great, no complaints. You can mix an arbitrary number of sound sources, each traversing the listening space on independent arbitrary paths. * Getting XP to play an ac3 file is impressively hard. Of course I can play it back on the machine with Acid Pro, but if I want to use another machine, it is tough. Graphedit is super helpful for examining codec chain to see if you can play the media. Klite mega codec pack is good for getting codecs and tools. * Despite all this, wmp only plays half the ac3s I give to it. The ones that do play – wmp gives me an error saying I am missing a codec. The ones that don’t play – just silently fail. Klite to the rescue again with wmp classic which seems to play them all. * Using Turtle beach audioadvantage roadie for 5.1 output. Seems to work fine. Nice control panel to test surround features. I didn’t have to pay anything like the $80 MSRP for this device. * Feeding the turtlebeach output via spdif to a generic av amp – bought the cheapest open-box unit i could find at bestbuy

Overall it sounds good. I have a much bigger listening area than typical for a home theatre install – and the impact seems to be that the center channel is a little too dominant. I’m going to experiment with moving the sound locus to further back in the listening field. And for my big lightning strikes, I may try 5 duplicate strikes, each positioned out at one of the speakers.

Oh and I am going to try some codec options to get WinAMP to play 5.1 via spdif.

• Obscure but handy firefox extensions. I’ve used several of these, generally good.
• Ten Windows Apps You Need. I can’t agree with the Picasa reco, Picasa doesn’t seem happy with my photos stored on a remote server. But Notepad2 is awesome, ffdshow is nice, etc.
• Fineprint raves. It doesn’t excite me but I guess I should try it for a week
• Windows Live Writer. Phil seems to like. I don’t know, I just don’t have the time to install software on the 4-6 machines I regularly use.
• EasyPrototype. I could see using this occasionally.
• Dymo stamps. I’ve got a dymo label printer so maybe this is worth trying