Back from two weeks of radio silence up on lopez island. Minor IT disasters on return – 3 power strips blown at home (can’t be a coincidence), one machine that forgot its hard disk config and was trying to boot off its 7200rpm data drive instead of the 10krpm raid0 array of system drives, and of course my web server had gone toes up for some reason (nothing in the logs??). All is well again.

I just installed Homenet Manager, a competitor to Network Magic (Ignition is an investor in). Man I feel great about Network Magic after this experience. Homenet Manager has lots of UI bugs, doesn’t let me know what is new on my network, and doesn’t seem to correctly share folders when I ask it to.

* A lot of Ignition faces at Gnomedex. Thanks to Clearsight, Intelligent Results, Cloudmark for nice swag and samples. And huge kudos to mfoundry for their efforts to get all the attendees using the mfoundry gnomedex app. * Not everyone could be there – notably the mpire guys were launching down at ebay live * Phil was there and he keeps improving berry411 – he showed me the ups tracking plugin. awesome. * Also phil found this cool jobs map, and jason at jobster had a good talk with john connors about the ceo playbook * Phil also points towards Bus Monster – wow, google is really becoming the platform for truly interesting apps. * Rich found this fascinating site that tracks our aircraft carriers. * Martin found a good blog on energy investing * John has posted one of his presentations on the marketing playbook as an mp3 or show. * And last, but definitely not least, check out adrian’s latest project – vacuum forming. I have to borrow this for halloween prop creation.

I’ve been intrigued forever by a couple of phrases that have entered the vocabulary and so I finally read:

* She by H. Rider Haggard. I’ve always wondered about the origin of “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” A classic adventure yarn with moments of brilliance. And who can pass on a book with a jacket blurb by Freud: “a strange book…full of hidden meaning.” * “Catch-22 by Joseph Heller”:amazon. I knew the reputation of this book, but I didn’t realize it was such extreme farce. A little offputting at first, but I got sucked in. And the last couple chapters really slam the book home for me, as some of the farcical elements are left behind and you are forced to confront the realities of war. A timely read.

Oh and some book pointers over on marginal revolution, always looking for more suggestions.

We have a WFR in the house now. Congrats. Totally cool program.

How can Dancing With The Stars be the #1 show on TV??? I can’t even identify the stars. I clearly am out of step with most of the country.

Interesting article in Sunday’s NY Times re Steve Case and areas of interest for healthcare investing:

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* Online reviews and rankings of doctors and hospitals. * Information and breaking news about medical ailments and treatments. * Software and tools that let people manage their medical records online. * Health “concierges” or “coaches” who help patients navigate the medical system. * Walk-in medical clinics where, say, in 15 minutes and for $39, you can discover whether your child has an ear infection.

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Near and dear to my heart.

Scott’s latest list of essential software – always some great gems in here.

Hit Tiger Mountain this morning for a hike. It is a nice area and incredibly convenient – maybe too convenient as it was quite crowded particularly at lower elevations, and the trails are pretty beat. But a gorgeous morning so I can’t complain.

Here’s my good morning video (3Meg), about 500 feet up from the trail head. And a little later on, on the backside of Tiger Mountain, walking and thinking about doughnuts (7Meg), the logical conclusion of any hike.

* New Monad build available – intriguing. Wish it worked for web content – Wish you could plug yubnub commands into it. * Installed: Microsoft’s RAW Image viewer, Autoruns (another tool for understanding startup processes) – both worthwhile. * Congrats to Trumba team for shipping. * MT plugins and mods I should be trying out: eliminating plugin envelop errors, tagging plugin, mt-protect (i REALLY need this functionality), mt-blogroll (i’m tired of pageload latency due to blogrolling.com). * Phil keeps cranking on berry411. the guy is amazing.

I’ve added per-category XML feeds to my blog – helpful guidance at Learning Movable Type. They are all at www.theludwigs.com/archives/.xml.

So what? Well now I can create meaningful tagclouds for my categories. I’ve got one for the most recent posts for the whole blog. But more interestingly I’ve got one for just my halloween postings – this gives a great sense of what topics dominate my halloween category, what themes are most popular. And is a nice way to autogenerate tags and hierarchy for the category – I don’t have to do any work! I’ve just added one for my book posts as well (not yet updated) and my software posts (also not yet updated).

Now it would be even cooler if i could yoke tinyurl functionality to this, so that you could ask for the page www.theludwigs.com/faulkner or www.theludwigs.com/books/faulkner and my site would find the tag in a tagcloud and return the relevant page. Some people have posted sample tinyurl clone code in response to ed’s posting, in my copious free time i may look at this. I want my own tinyurl functionality anyway for other reasons.

Per Fanblogs, GWB may attend the Texas-OSU game on September 10. Man I bet Ohio is sorry it went for Bush now…

In case you find yourself in Seattle with time on your hands:

* A friend recommends the following hikes: Lake Serene near Index off Highway 2, and Mount Pilchuck off the Mountain Loop Highway. * He also recommends Attrition.WS for trail info. * In an entirely different direction, Raymond recommends the Seattle International Juggling Festival. I bet this would be a hoot.

I find these fascinating:

* Fred is openly soliciting podcast submissions, he’ll listen to whatever shows up. * Rich is selling an hour of his time (proceeds to charity) on ebay.

I’ll be interested to hear if anything ever comes from these.

OK I can’t leave well enough alone. I have to take every opportunity to turn everyday human experiences into geekfests.

So I got a Samsung SC-X105 Sports Camcorder, attached the remote lens with the provided straps to my head, and went out yesterday morning. You can see and hear what I saw – a little waterfall (1 Meg), a nice tree covered trail (2 Meg), griping about my ribs (2 Meg), and the Bagley Seam trail (6 Meg).

These videos are “sports videos” – you see it as I did it, handsfree video shooting, so very jerky and hopping all over the place. The camera is a great fun toy tho some serious aggravations as noted by other reviewers – you have to keep telling it to use the external remote lens every time you turn it on, it doesn’t remember this setting. But it is incredibly small, the camera comes with a caribiner clip instead of a belt loop which is great, and the remote lens is just way cool.

Oh the other problem is the video format – the doc all says “MPEG video” but it is using some Samsung-tweaked codec that nothing in the world understands. So you have to install the Samsung app, force it to convert the video to DVIX or DVI, and then you can use another app to play with – I used Windows Movie Maker as I had it lying around.