* “Once An Eagle by Anton Myrer”:amazon. Had this on the shelf since reading Absolutely American. Purportedly one of the most popular novels at west point. A rousing tale following an infantryman from WW1 thru vietnam. Tends to glamorize military life and demonize all other careers, also denigrates spouses who don’t support the life fully. How do I feel about our armed forces after reading? A lot about honor in here but too much demonization of all other roles in society, and a little too much glorification of the warrior. * “Natural History by Justina Robson”:amazon. The old “encounter with alien artifact/culture which exposes the true nature of the universe” tale, but future potential variations of the human form and their attendant character implications are explored nicely. * “The Mill on the Floss”:amazon by Eliot. What great, fallible, deeply human characters. No supermen here, just people bumbling through life.

So had to relearn a bunch of cabin life skills from my youth over the last two weeks:

* Power and heat. where is the propane turn on for the cabin? for the stove? for the grill? How do I check propane supply? Who do we get propane from? * What is that munching sound in the wall? What do we do about it? * Securing a boat. Installing an engine lock, storing the gas can and gas line separately during our absence, hiding the kill switch. Not a deterrent to a determined thief but the casual thief will be frustrated. * Saltwater, 4-cycle engine maintenance. New to me, I grew up with 2-cycle Evinrudes. Flushing with fresh water, checking oil, spraying the engine to keep salt from getting a foothold. * Garbage disposal. The joys of hauling your own trash to the dump. As someone on the island said, the dump is the great equalizer, sooner or later everyone has to go there.

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.