Upgraded to 3.31. Also migrating all my keywords to tags. Probably some funkiness until I figure out all the tagging stuff.

Met Kurt today – Grimvisions.com – another Seattle Halloween enthusiast. Some great stuff up here and some stuff I should have thought of – bending PVC with a heat gun instead of just depending on finding the right fixtures. Also in person Kurt gave me another great pointer – Sculpt or Coat to weatherproof props.

la la - View Album – Psoriatic by Scott Walker. Probably needs voice to be ,uddied.

Early look at some stuff for next summer – Minnesota Vacation Rentals - VRBO? is Vacation Rentals by Owner Minnesota - Minnesota Hotels, Minnesota Lodging, Minnesota Travel and Tourism – Ely rentals – Grand Ely Lodge – Superior charters

UPDATE: homeaway.com from today’s wsj is another site. Also lakeplace

A minor little tool – LVD1 Volt Light – and not unique to Fluke at all, but super handy. Works great for detecting live outlets, works thru drywall to find live lines. Way better than the old studfinder tools for finding wires.

* False Positive by Childman – best if you use a voice filter to distort the voice into near-recognizability. * Bach – Toccata in D Minor, Fugue in C Minor, Passacaglia in C Minor, Prelude in G Minor, Fugue in B Minor – all these are great organ pieces

* “Beyond Oil”:amazon by Deffeyes. Excellent, breezy book looking at the production and supply issues behind oil and all other energy sources, by a very smart scientist. An essential read if you care about energy policy. It is difficult not to be an advocate of nuclear power after reading this. * “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World”:amazon by Weatherford. A reasonably engaging history of genghis khan and the mongol empire. Sadly neglected in the history I was taught. One wonders how the world might have turned if just a few events had gone differently – the spread of the plague, the japanese invasion, the indonesian invasion. * “The Ruins”:amazon by Scott Smith. Stephen king-esque. A little slow to start but finishes with a bang. Tho I never really cared about the characters.

Oh and stuff I should be reading – Marginal Revolution’s recommended reading list for PhD Macroeconomics.

Great source of data on makeup of various food products – NutritionData’s Nutrition Facts Calorie Counter

jkOnTheRun: LogMeIn buys Hamachi – a while back I was all excited about remote pc access software, and i still occasionally use it. But increasingly I store all my data in the cloud in various places. OR i completely replicate my really big datasets (like music), and i just don’t really get the remote access scenarios anymore.

Crazy depth stats on college football games at CFBStats , via EDSBS ? Archive ? STATISTICS. WOW.

Now a free site – BuckeyeXtra – more Buckeye coverage than you can shake a stick at. Unfortunately today it is all about Clarett.

The Red Stare by Wang Chung off the TO Live And Die In LA soundtrack. What, you don’t have that disc?

As i previously mentioned, my widowpc gaming computer has been acting up – it has always had thermal issues, and their support has been weak. I finally ripped open the box and figured out exactly how the liquid cooling system worked, forced some bubbles out of the system and probably broke up some vapor lock in the pump. WidowPC shipped no doc with the system and their support staff doesn’t really know what it is in my box, so I can’t recommend them highly.

I was hoping Alienware: High-Performance Systems - Notebooks, Desktop PCs, Workstations, Peripherals would be better, given their Dell ownership and longer tenure in the market. My new alienware arrived yesterday and ominously, the shipping box had a big gash in it – the shipping materials were very flimsy. The front of the case was marred in several spots and when I turned the unit on, it sounded like an Oster Blender. Not Good.

I took a bunch of pictures of the shipping box and the PC and emailed them to Alienware last night. Response email this morning directed me to call in. So call I did. I had to walk three different people (none of them native English speakers) through problem and all the pictures. The last guy wanted me to open the case and figure out exactly what component was grinding itself into bits. This was 45 minutes into the call, I refused. I paid top dollar for a machine that was broken out of the box, and I paid for 3 years of onsite support – I didn’t realize I was the onsite support. He backed down and agreed to take the machine back, it took more than an hour to finally get receive an RMA and Fedex label – nearly two hours total. Everyone was nice but this is crazy, way too much time. So I can’t say I am thrilled with Alienware so far.

I bounce back and forth between building my own machines/providing my own frontline support, and buying retail and demanding retail support. My time is constrained right now and so I fired myself as an assembly/support person and have gone back to retail. But this is no fun.

Outstanding grassroots support – The Top 10 Ways You Know You’re a JB addict… (We are investors in judysbook)

Basically consumers will end up paying directly for hardware (though in many cases this will be subsidized – consider the xbox or entry level PCs), for the pipe, and for entertainment (and again a lot of this will be subsidized by sponsors).