Very happy with the the ipod video and ipod nano. the nano is just so nice looking.

Reasonably happy with the Xbox360. Nice hardware, everything works well. And looks glorious on highdef. But the games are not very exciting yet.

Happy with the Plantronics 640 bluetooth headset. Comes with a nice accessory kit. Good sound quality.

Incomplete on the widowpc gaming pc. The unit that I received had a malfunctioning liquid cooling system – air in the tubes, vapor lock in the pump. Had to ship back. still waiting….

OK not necessarily a Halloween item bu this looks like a great tool to have if it really works – was sold out everywhere this holiday season – The LightKeeper Pro is designed to solve the frequent problems associated with Miniature Light Sets and Bulbs. By simply plugging your light set into the LightKeeper Pro and pressing the Trigger, most problems can be fixed automatically.

OK the last 6 weeks have been personally…complex…but I have managed to read a few things.

* “Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead”:amazon. Good (but not great) picture of warfare. The primitive communications technology, primitive logistics, byzantine command structure – all led to disaster. Personally, I find “Black Hawk Down”:amazon and “The Red Badge of Courage”:amazon to be more memorable, impactful, but this is still a compelling book. * “Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan”:amazon. I keep torturing myself with this series. Something about the inventiveness behind the core characters and society has me hooked. Certainly not the pacing of the story or the writing. The pacing is better in this installment but still slower than it should be.

Oh and here is a great compendium of Best Of lists for the year – books and more.

The economics of owning an iPod are finally getting to me. I collected a list of 30 artists/discs I wanted to try out recently, and it would have cost me like $300-500 to get all their cds, a lot of time to rip them, and then I might have liked only 20% of the music. So I decided to try one of the subscription services and settled on Rhapsody for random reasons.

After 48 hours of use, the pros:

• they had all the artists I was interested in.
• almost all of the music is downloadable to one of their supported music players. Only exception I ran into was Tom Petty’s greatest hits Cd
• there are a variety of players available, many that are available as cheap refurbs.

The cons:

• If rhapsody hits any problem at all, it just fails silentlly and confusingly. In my case, I stored my library files on a network server and the server had gone toes up. this totally confused the rhapsody player.
• another example – I had an old samsung flash mp3 player that I tried to load up with music. this particular player is not able to support the rhapsody-to-go drm and so I was unable to place music on it. the error messages around this were massively confusing.

I can’t say I am a convert yet but I suspect I will stick with Rhapsody for a while as a way to trial music. If I decide to purchase I will go buy the Cds.

I have to say – if the iPod economics are so unfriendly that they drive a guy in my socioeconomic strata to try out alternatives – well this doesn’t bode well for Apple in the long run. Apple is going to have to come up with a subscription offer.

• Another online component of office – slideshows – Ajax-S. Oh and Jotspot Tracker for spreadsheets
• Found via spywareinfo.com, msft utilities to temporary elevate or deflate your rights – dropmyrights, makemeadmin
• Yubnub continues to intrigue me. Combining with the rubnub extension to firefox makes it tremendously useful.
• I’m sure i’ve posted this before but the 46 best ever freeware utilities
• Not that essential but a cute trick – transparent command prompt
• And to use in that command prompt – 99 useful run commands
• Aardvark firefox plugin – if you ever print a webpage, you need this.
• One man’s best of web2.0
• One man’s must have firefox extensions. I’d really like to know what people consider to be their must have greasemonkey scripts – there are so many, I don’t have time to wade thru
• Copyurlplus – a useful extension. I haven’t tried the customization options yet.
• msft tool to stamp gps info into pics – and pointer to other similar tools
• How to run asterisk under windows (along with a stack of other software)

Interesting article at A VC – “So I think online backup is at an inflection point. Consumers are going to be adopting this approach to peace of mind in droves over the next couple years. It will only take one lost photo of a newborn baby or a birthday party to cause “post crash stress syndrome”. Trust me. I know how it feels”.

I really agree with his articulation of the consumer disaster scenario – lost kid photos are going to drive people batty. I am not convinced that datacenter-based service is the right answer. Something like foldershare might be the more economic answer for most people.

OK I am easing this box out of my network. It has been a disaster. The drives disappear of their own accord. The drivers are not certified (not that I am anal about certification, but this is sloppy and indicates perhaps deeper sloppiness). The software causes strange side effects like an inability to uninstall software using the “add/remove programs” cpl. Files have the read-only flag set despite my constant resetting of the flag. iTunes barfs because of the read-only problem. And on and on.

Oh and Netgear support is unresponsive. And I even tracked down the email addresses for the technical managers at Zetera, the software provider to netgear, and those guys were unresponsive.

So I give up. I’ve uninstalled the client software on all machines but one. That machine is the only machine connecting to the Sc101, and then that machine is resharing the drives out to other machines. Looking now for a good NAS. Watching Martin’s experience with the LaCie box.

The Sports Economist turned me onto this Daily Bruin article which further pointed me towards the raw data. Interesting stuff. I’ve summarized below the total athletic department revenues, football revenues, football expenses, and net football contribution for the BCS bowl participants and near-miss participants, sorted by football revenues:

What observations do I make?

* This is a big business, and getting bigger. * There is a dramatic difference between the top and bottom revenue producers in just this list, and this is the cream of the crop. The bottom tier Div1A schools are way behind * Ohio State players must be sleeping on silk sheets and eating Kobe beef at every meal. (Note that there are a lot of uncategorized revenues and expenses at every school so this could be just a matter of different approaches to cost and revenue allocation) * Texas and Ohio State are the revenue goliaths. * West Virginia is the model of efficiency – great results on a (relative) shoestring. Cost of living must be low in Morgantown. * USC needs to hire someone to focus on their business. How can they have the on field results and the brand they have, and yet be so far behind in revenue generation?

Ok well really this is the Jobster blogging roundup.

* Jason on Where do you want to be in 5 years?. Great interview question – and moreover a great question to ask yourself every week and see if you are on the path or not. * Phil’s data on what people are looking for when mobile. I am proud to have driven “buckeyes” so high in the rankings. * Phil has also added more sports capability to berry411

Boy I am not convinced that the Netgear SC101 net storage box is the way to go – i got past my install problems but the behaviour of the system is really funky. Windows just doesn’t expect drives to have the file system locally and block storage remotely. Strange things I have seen – Windows thinks these are removable drives and tries to autoplay them; iTunes thinks it doesn’t have write access to the files; the Add or Remove programs cpl doesn’t work anymore, never enumerating programs. I’d approach this one with caution.

Martin went with a LaCie box – 2TB sounds great. I used to have a NAS box but was unhappy with the bugs in the old version of Samba it was shipping with – Martin’s box has Windows in it.

And then there is this Buffalo box.

I’m using the Netgear box as my “master” store right now, but then using beyond compare to copy much of the data around to all the pcs. And using foldershare to dupe critical stuff (photos) to a machine at work.

Apparently my use of my blackberry to get sports scores must border on the fanatic as my usage made the WSJ, as also noted in the Seattle PI (with some empathy as John Cook is also a buckeye fan).

I need to stand up for myself a little bit tho. My “check scores 40 times during a game” estimate was just a quick estimate by me, and is probably way off. In actuality if it is a game I care about, I check the play by play results every minute, so a realistic estimate is more like 100-200 times a game. I know, pathetic.

I bet I am not alone tho. I wonder why no one has done an ass-kicking mobile app to track baseball, football, basketball play by play.

Having problems getting this net-attached storage device to work. Fully documenting my case here so the Netgear support folks can see it.

* Config: Netgear SC101, serial # 16W3594U00994. Hosting two Seagate Barracuda 7200 400 GB ST3400832A drives which are on the supported drive list. Running the latest firmware, 4.14.0 * Client PCs: I’ve installed the admin utility on 3 different WinXP Pro with all latest patches. Running the latest version of the SCM utility – 1.5.5 * Running DHCP on my LAN. * When running the SCM utility, I can see the two hard disks. Separate IPs – 192.168.168.90 and 192.168.168.91. I can see that each disk has 372.6G available. * In either wizard or advanced mode, I can select a disk and try to create a drive. I have tried a variety of drive sizes from 120G up to 372.6G. In all cases I am trying to create a shared, no password, non-mirrored drive. * when I try to create the drive, the utlity tells me it is allocating space, and stays in this state forever. “forever” is at least 12 hours because I let it run overnight and it never completed. * the utility does appear to create a partition with my desired name. but the partition is not recognizable as a mountable drive by the SCM utility, and is marked as non-shared.

Let me know if more detail needed.

UPDATE: working. I connected the SC101 up with my existing LAN cable which was a patch cable. The old PC in its place knew how to deal with this. The SC101 apparently didn’t. When I switched cables, all was well.

Latest links culled mostly from the MoM Forum

* Simple Dimmer. Lots of other kits and components here too. * Simple prop controllers and some nice application notes like this skull idea (zipped pdf) * I’m sure I’ve blogged this before, the hauntmaster controller – “The Flex ECT is an externally triggered, dual timer that is connected between a sensor (switch) and the electrically operated event device as shown in the diagram to the right” * Plans to build your own event control timer. * A range of LED fixtures and drivers. Seems like all halloween lighting should move to LED over time? * Some hints in here on silencing pneumatic solenoids – the exhaust noise doesn’t really bother me but maybe I will want to do this some day. * Some very basic intro guides to haunt lighting * Lighting control units. These look like overkill to me, better for Christmas applications.

* Via Gadgetopia, 10 Killer Post Ideas. My posts are more of the model “Stuff John Wants to Remember” but these are good guidelines * Micropersuasion with ten favorite blogging hacks.

* Wolverines sue Big Ten over “Hostile Work Environment”. Hah. * Nice posters of the Dispatch coverage of the victory – for the Buckeye fans on your Christmas list.