* We celebrated Cam’s birthday this past week and instead of the normal cake, we had wine and cheese in honour of Cam. Cam’s recommended red – Barrister. * ehomeupgrade has a nice pure networks giveaway going on… * Looks like gnomedex is sold out nearly…we’ll be one of the sponsors of the friday lunch … some of our companies have some nice giveaways planned. * Phil just keeps making Berry411 better and better. I’d love a UPS/Fedex tracking plugin… * The true reason for Martin’s interest in alternative energy – so he can afford to run his souped up beetle * Jason likes Beauty and the Geek as well..and more importantly, showing off the jobster blog plugin * Rich on the evolution of blogs…I think tagcloud is cool, I’d just like it to be an integral part of my blogging software – autogeneration of keywords and a keyword directory.

* Microsoft’s Acrylic. Installed. I’m not a graphics wonk but certainly seems easier to use than GIMP. * Sysinternals process explorer. Another great tool for finding out what is going on in your PC. I wish it explained rundll hosted DLLs a little more clearly. * Dumeter. Nice for seeing what traffic is really hitting the net from your system. Wish this tied back to something like the process explorer so I could see by process. Hey Pure Networks folks… * Phil is hosting an infocom interpreter for blackberries on his site. Fun memories. * Biopassword. Thought about trying but passed. But I like the idea. * Gadgetopia recommends BitLord for torrent downloading, I haven’t tried. * A pointer to FireANT. I may start videoing some of my hikes and may want to play around with this. * Something here about Ajax debugging, seems interesting. * Matt Croydon thinks A9.com rocks. I haven’t looked at for a while, I did today, it does seem to be getting cooler. * Several bloggers pointed towards the real-time update log of Wikipedia, so much so that the service went down. Too bad, this would be fascinating to watch. I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t contributed anything to Wikipedia yet.

Ok I watch way too much video – broadcast tv, sports, dvds, tivo, bittorrent downloads. I like to think that a lot of it is inspiring, thought-provoking, inspirational, or at least well-produced.

But I do have some guilty pleasures. Beauty and the geek is great fun. Shallow babes and socially inept geeks, forced to help each other.

Even further in the gutter, cheaters. Nothing like a surprise public confrontation of an adulterer for fun. And the smarmiest host on TV. Not to be missed.

I’ve been pretty skeptical of tagging. There is a lot of evidence that most people don’t bother to associate keywords with content, no matter how easy the software makes it. And tags drift over time, and people disagree on the meanings of individual tags. And search engines make it easy to search the raw text of sites, so why bother with adding keywords? If I want to annotate a site with keywords, well I can just create a blog entry that uses those keywords, and I will be able to find it later on my own blog, or on Google.

But I am intrigued by Tagcloud, thanks Phil. And by the Tags Power Tool for movable type. These both make it way easier to automatically create a category hierarchy for my own site. I try to use categories today but they have all the problems of tags; these tools would perhaps help me to automatically create tags and categories.

I guess I am still skeptical about tagging schemes that require people to explicitly tag content, but tools which smartly autogenerate tags seem interesting and possibly useful.

* Great Jobster momentum – man this is a great and fun team. I am proud that Ignition is involved with them. * Tim Dowling of Pure Networks has a blog now… * Martin blogs on the morphing of allconsuming (I’m a sucker for anything about books) and energy independence * Phil has found some greasemonkey-like plugins for IE – trixie, turnabout. I have converted so totally to firefox, it is hard to find the time to go back and try these out. I would love a realtime CSS viewer/editor plugin for IE, like some of the web developer plugins for firefox. One probably exists. * Rich on digicam reviews and GPSs for biking – I too need a GOS tho for hiking. Some requirements are same – durability, weather proof, low weight – but some are different – topo maps, trail maps. * Rich on the gayot guide for restaurants and his remembrances of Chez Shea – for me, Place Pigalle at the market has the same great memories associated with it.

I’ve done a good job since rededicating myself to exercise – getting out on the trails 2 or 3 times a week. And I am still having fun.

On the downside, I fell and broke a rib Sunday. Ouch. Doesn’t prevent me from hiking but quite painful. Basically a rookie mistake – climbed onto a moss-covered fallen log and my feet flew out from under me. I have crappy instincts yet when it comes to the woodlands. As a kid I spent all my summers on the rocky shores of georgian bay, and to this day I am pretty good at scrambling along rocky, slippery shorelines – I have great instincts when it comes to mossy, slippery, unstable rocks. I have none of those instincts for woodlands terrain.

Two recos on podcast recording setups:

* Rich’s recos – low end podcasting * Dan Bricklin’s setup – higher end.

I haven’t done a podcast yet, and well, it just needs to get way easier and simpler than this if I am ever going to. I can’t see podcast creation ever becoming mainstream, certainly not at this level of complexity. Maybe if I could just talk to my cell to record a high quality podcast, i’d do it.

Probably as good a reason as any to read these.

OK we had intended to hit Rattlesnake Ledge this morning but life got in the way. Perhaps next weekend. Instead I got back out to Cougar Mountain for the second time this week. Starting from the RedTown trailhead, i went out on the Wildside trail and then did a counterclockwise loop on the Marshall’s Hill/De Leo Wall circuit. A nice circuit, I strongly recommend the counterclockwise direction, or you face a killer trail up the De Leo Wall.

Also I love my new REI Summit Trekking Poles – first poles I’ve had and man they can really make a difference in stability and speed. Now I’m starting to think about getting anti-shock poles or ultralights . Thanks to Terry for turning me onto these (Hey Terry you need a blog).

From my latest reco on Judy’s book – “We used Cascade to do a small move from our house to Lopez Island and they were great. Showed up on time, friendly solicitous staff from quote through the move, unpacked everything carefully. I would use again for any local move.”

You could dress up one of these balancing robots and make a great halloween prop.

Steve found this vga extender idea on make. A lot cheaper than the optical-based solution I blogged earler.

Tom Evslin has a great post on negotiating. “Lesson #3: start winning right away, even on modalities. Demanding and conceding are habits.” I would not want to be across the table from Tom, I always want him on my side. Thankfully, during the course of my career, I’ve always been on the same side of the table when I worked with Tom.

The hype sucked me, I got a Dyson Ball. I have to say, this thing is seriously cool. It really does have great suckage. Super easy to clean out. My only beef – a cord you have to collect yourself is so 1980s, even my cheapo kenmore vacuum has a self-retracting cord.

* Geez I am now like two generations behind on cooling technology – liquid metal coolers for pcs, liquid metal cooling for video cards. My cooling problem though is a little different – with 6 computers in 2 small rooms, plus printers, monitors, scanners, speakers, etc etc etc – my problem is room temperature, not pc temperature. No amount of liquid metal cooling is going to make my room cooler. I have installed a small Carrier single-room air conditioner to deal with the issue – so I guess that puts me at the bleeding edge of homes, not many have dedicated AC for computer rooms. So I salvage a little geek pride. * I’d love to explore using these bifurcated computers as a heat solution. Put all the electronics in one room, and just run fiber to the I/O devices in another room. * An interesting observation on home storage – gary asserts that home storage needs are surpassing busines storage needs. I guess this is not surprising, the video subsystem in PC is driven by consumer apps, not business apps, so why not storage? But gosh we need a consumer-friendly reliability and backup solution – RAID and tapes aren’t it. * Gigapixel cameras are coming. OK it sounds like you need a small team of scientists, a truckload of equipment, and some incredibly expensive optics, so I guess we won’t see a Nikon Coolpix version soon. But hey that sounds like what it took initially to make a mainframe computer run and look where we are. Actually I don’t care that much about gigapixel cameras – but boy would I give an arm and a leg for gigapixel eyeglasses – realtime zooming in on images miles away would be handy. * Have to get a Babble when they are available – “In essence, Babble turns you into a small crowd–and changes how other people hear your voice,” he added. “The result is that those outside your workspace cannot understand your actual spoken words.” . I can’t claim to need one but how cool. * And this has nothing to do with PCs – but I need this weedburner. Why trim weeds when a flaming torch will do just as well? Actually this seems like a disaster in the making.