Catching up with all of Martin’s postings:

* Responding to the negative energy balance FUD around biodiesel – good stuff * Seattle leading way to embrace Kyoto – great news. I think we’re way behind in fully embracing eco-friendly industrial policies in this country. Put it this way – if you want to defend your economy and markets from high growth, emerging producers – raising the eco-bar way high is probably a good thing to do. Emerging producers may be able to produce basic high volume goods cheaply, but it will take them a while to catch up with highly-engineered green goods and services. * Martin discovers process modelling software – I have no real use for these tools but they are incredibly fun to play with. * Current supply and demand numbers – fuel prices are only going one way. * From Bits to Barrels – Martin’s contribution to SNS, journaling his transformation into the John D. Rockefeller of the next century :). Hey martin, go read “Titan”.

I’m doing some research on automotive engineering education for high school and undergrad students. Wonder if anyone has any tips. The things I’ve found so far:

* The SAE student site is a fine place to look for information. Competitions, awards, internships – more college student focused. This supermileage contest looks fun. I wonder if there is an opportunity to create some biodiesel version of this project. * The SAE website for college selection has some good tips about programs. * Kettering University -- formerly GMI – a highly regarded school, but Flint is tough duty. OK I haven’t been to Flint in 17 years, maybe it has improved. * Of course UM has all kinds of programs – Transportation Research, ARC – but you have to cheer for the Wolverines and there are some lines I just can’t cross. OK full disclosure – I spent my freshman year in college at UM, I was a traitor to the state of Ohio, but I finally saw the light. * Down in NASCAR country, Clemson has a program. There must be other NASCAR state schools that have programs? * Colorado State from the SAE site is supposed to have a program of some sort. * The art center college of design in Pasadena has a program, more focused on aesthetics.

* Kiko – an ajax calendar. looks nice. Walt reviewed two others today – it’s an explosion of web calendars, it’s 1998 all over again. Not sure I understand why people will migrate to this new generation. I guess people are more trained to use web services now, and in broadband households, it is easy to always have the calendar live. * Via furrygoat, No-install.com – apps that you can put on usb keys. * Monad and WMI – cool. * Greasemonkeyed.com has like a jillion greasemonkey scripts to install. Playing around with book burro at the moment. * I am easily bought – I use a9.com frequently now. Not because it is great, but because i get another pi/2 percent discount on my amazon purchases. Same reason i got an Amazon Visa card. * Via cpumag I found Free-codecs.com and the K-lite mega codec pak – every freakin’ codec you could ever want. Videozilla looks interesting in this vein as well. * I should try viceversa to manage backups in the house. * I’m tempted to renew my MSDN sub so that I can get winfs beta – because who needs a stable filesystem? * Via geekman I found myprogs. Given my appetite for software, a community ranking site for software seems great. * also given all the software i install, why doesn’t windows have something as nice as ppm in perl for downloading addons/packages/etc? ppm is so easy. * Movable type style generator seems cool * JK on the run talks about something that i thought was just me – the impossiblity of doing system restores for tablet pcs . I have a tablet pc collecting dust for exactly this reason – after struggling through 2 system restores i gave up.

From my road trip last week:

* “Century rain by alistair reynolds”:amazon – Modern nanotech-infused space opera. A fine read but not memorable * “Saving faith by david baldacci”:amazon – a great pageturner.

Nice review today in PC Mag – good job guys! (I am on the board of Pure Networks).

As usual Rich has been a posting machine during the last month. Some of the highlights I’ve noted:

* Iceland travel. I hear they have some fantastic river rafting there. I’m ready to go. Just added to my 43places goals. * Grilling resource – I can always use grilling tips. * Rich’s small camera recos. I’m about due. * Tips on HT PC setup – sounds like zoomplayer is essential. * NTFS resizing tips. I am sure I will need these some day. * Rich is playing FEAR. I think I need a new PC. * Rich on Gaming PCs. Having bought 3 and bult 2 others, I am inclined to buy from Falcon Northwest for my next. Debugging the assembly of a high end machine with 2 SLI cards, 10K sata drives, raid arrays, fast dvd/cd drives – well it is just a lot easier to let the Falcon guys burn their time.

Very remiss in noting some of the good press that Judy’s Book got in the NY Times – happened when I was travelling. Nice work guys. Number of postings is growing quickly. (Ignition is an investor in the company)

My favorite Judy’s Book game – be the first to post in a city or area. I’ve staked out Salt Lake City. Love the maps feature.

Other big ignition news – Jobster closes its B round. Congrats guys!

I’ve upgraded to MT3.2 and decided to blow away all my templates in the process. Because they were old and funky and corrupted and it was just easier to start fresh. In fact I completely blew away my old blog, and reimported all my postings into this one. And just republished over the old one. I am sure there are old files left around from the old blog, that is probably good for google indexing and searching purposes.

Over the next few weeks I’ll start selectively adding back features to the template like my Judy’s Book posts, Ohio State football status, blogroll, etc.

Check out fanblogs for the best college football coverage including the fanblogs poll. I am an occasional contributor to the site.

* What is up with the speed limits in Oregon? Vast stretches of empty country in the eastern part of the state, and speed limits set at 65. No other state in the west is stuck back at this level. * I didn’t expect the bars in Salt Lake City to be so rockin’ on a Saturday night. They are wilder than Seattle bars. * Littering is illegal, but trucks are allowed to leave huge horking pieces of blown tires all over the highway? * The security at the parking garage at the Bellagio in LV was tighter than the security for driving over Hoover Dam. * Prescott is a very nice town. Has to be my favorite spot in Arizona so far. The granite dells are beautiful. * Phoenix on the other hand – LA, only hotter and without the ocean.

* Mathmos air lights – the lab flask will be nice in a scary laboratory scene * Using really old PCs as prop controllers * Names I saw somewhere for tombstones – Eva Destruction, Helena Handbasket * makezine’s halloween controller

A bit of rain today which made my hike a little damp. My one essential piece of raingear is the Seattle Sombrero – I picked up at REI. This hat is great for Northwest weather – a wide-enough brim to keep the drizzly rain out here off of almost my entire trunk. Won’t go out without it.

* Yahoo Widgets (the software formerly known as konfabulator) is nice, what Active Desktop should have been. We were just too early, ahead of the hardware and ahead of the software. And I was too big a fan of Active Desktop, I learned lots of painful lessons from this experience – just because you want something to be great, doesn’t mean it is great; listen to your team, the truth is there. * Fanblogs pointed me to a great widget – team schedules. Nice. Can’t wait for September. * Who needs powerpoint when S5 is around. * Phil recommends NVU for site authoring * Monad continues to impress – bulk image rotating and scaling * Rich summarizes some good photo tools * Walt reviewed evernote while i was out. Sounds cool but…i use 5 machines regularly…I want it server-based…basically I want my blog to work this way. * Technorati mobile – nice effort. For me tho technorati has not yet become an essential tool, for my searches it doesn’t provide materially better results than existing search engines.

Can’t wait for the season to start.

To put a little damper on my enthusiasm tho – The buckeyes are already #3 – in football revenue. The Sports Economist points out that expenditures don’t seem to correlate strongly with success though. But they don’t negatively correlate with success either.

Either way, about 85 kids are generating $46M in revenue for the school, which is getting used up to support other sports, build nice facilities, and pay some big salaries to adults. I still have a problem with the morality of this, more of the money should flow to the benefit of the players on the team. Some small suggestions – give the players 8 years of free tuition so that they can realistically get an education and play football. Or underwrite the tuition for the children of former players. Fund a modest disability insurance program for the players.

Anyway, kickoff is 17 days away…