• Process Library taskmanager plugin. Just OK. does make it marginally easier to get process info but i had hoped it would pull info right into taskmanager instead of just a generic link icon. and processlibrary hides so much of its info behind a subscription wall. Still I appreciate the effort.
• Snarf. Seemed intriguing but I just don’t retain enough email to make it interesting.
• Griffin ifill. Need to try.
• Gamedrive. I tried virtual cd drives a couple years ago and gave up, they were too clunky. maybe time to retry.

• “The Cloud Atlas”:amazon by Liam Callanan. A little slow but builds nicely. A tragic tale set on the margins of WW II. Well researched. Ultimately I’m not totally sure I understand the main character’s behaviour tho, I can’t imagine most people enduring the abuse in this way.
• “The Innocent”:amazon by Harlan Coben. Ok but not his best work. A little too mary-higgins-clark-“I am your twin sister separated at birth”-ish for me.

Martin is always a great read – latest diesels in europe, audi a8. man I wish these were available here. as he says the citroen is hot looking.

Also a link to some of the discussions around energy balances of biofuels

64,000 attendance for a meaningless scrimmage. Outstanding.

via hitormiss, the books that move men – analysis and the list. fascinating differences between the sexes.

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found.

and

Men’s reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality.

and

Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men’s formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 - indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence.

Good discussions of the final tiebreaker puzzle over at crossword fiend and crossword bebop. Personally I sailed through the first 6 weeks and easily made it into the tiebreaker round. But today’s tiebreaker puzzle crushed me. I knew there was a nonstandard trick involved, but I didn’t figure it out in any kind of reasonable time. Hat tip to the mystery winner who may have just made a lucky guess at the right answer – if I had smartly applied game theory to today’s tiebreaker, I would have called in with an educated guess as well. I know that I am nowhere near the crossword solver that some of the participants are, my only chance to win would have been to make an educated guess. Someone did that and won, smart thinking.

• New version of network magic out – congrats guys. coverage at ehomeupgrade. (i am on the board)
• Jobster zeitgeist via phil. very nice.
• Phil also has a new version of berry411 in beta. the essential blackberry app.

• Moto m5 miniblue bluetooth headset. Nice find rich. I will get one of these as soon as they exist.
• A mobile wifi hotspot like the kyocera kr1.
• Dymo handheld printer for labelling cables, etc.
• SPU-based storage adapter like the xfx revo. All the benefits of raid, hot pluggability, way more flexible.
• Hardware for routing A/V over cat5. I have a lot of cat5 in the house.

• The Elder Scrolls Oblivion. What a massive game world. You could get lost in this thing for years.
• Secondlife. kind of yawn. the graphics aren’t as good as online games and the action isn’t as fun. but obviously a lot of people like it. the customizability and persistence features are cool. just shows again that you can’t go wrong giving people ways to form communities and to express themselves.
• Newsgator inbox. I depend upon newsgator. But it seems I have to pay for it yet again if I want the latest outlook integration. not clear to me it is worth it. UPDATE: no you don’t have to pay again, the newsgator team pointed me towards the right download. thanks guys.
• Direct2Drive. Tried this for one game download, worked great. Nice to not have to shuffle cd/dvds to play a game. A little nervous about what kind of drm hackery it might be installing on my system.

• “Mr Midshipman Hornblower”:amazon by C. S. Forester. What a great yarn. And the first of a series of ten or so books. If you’ve exhausted all the current popular serial fantasy (Potter, Tolkein, Narnia, etc) and you need to branch out, this would be a fine series to read. Great for young male readers. Not so good maybe for young women – as a product of its times and its genre, there are few female characters of note.
• “I, Claudius”:amazon by Robert Graves. History comes alive! Impressive work of story telling and of scholarship. Makes roman history fascinating.
• “Holmes on the Range”:amazon by Steve Hockensmith. The “deducifyin’” of Holmes, as practiced by a cowhand in the historical american west. The author creates a very interesting set of brothers and does a nice job keeping in voice throughout the story.

I’m a sucker for maps. Some great ones at Marginal Revolution, weighting countries by things besides area – population, tourism, exports, etc.

Speculations by kevin kelly on the future of science. Interesting. Thanks to marginal revolution.

Sounddogs – “Welcome to the world’s first online sound effects library.” I think I blogged this years ago but reminded of by kevin kelly

The Jobster team has one of these new typepad widgets. cool. seems like several of our other portfolio companies should have one too – judy’s book (they already have a way to integrate content in a blog), pure networks, perfectmatch, etc.

Imagineering blog. great insight into the disney imagineering culture – “A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals passionate about the Disney Theme Parks to catalog past Imagineering missteps and offer tenable practical solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management at Imagineering can restore some of the wonder and magic that’s been missing from the parks for decades”

Related post: Sounddogs