* Looping skull -- not sure what I’d do with but if I have a spare monitor might be worth running at a window. or maybe i should find a cheap projector… * Free circuit designs at redcircuits. Some of these may be useful. * in the money is no object category, fog screens.

* Cuban lays out the case that the maximum damages the RIAA can demand of a user are $5 a month – brilliant. * Newsgator and Brad Feld doing an RSS rollup – none of our companies have played this game, perhaps we need to learn more about. * Opensource developers team up with open usability experts. Wow. Can marketing, PR, and other business functions be far behind? * Radio stations are responding to ipod use. With format changes, cost cutting, podcast repurposing, etc. * Martin starts reading the peak oil theorists. I am just way more optimistic than the peak oil crowd. * Politicians scrambling to align themselves with biodiesel

* From Geekman, broadcast machine -- become your own bittorrent/video publisher. * Rich has a little roundup of CDR tools * Steve isn’t a fan of rss reading inside your mail client – I am different, I love newsgator, the way I read email and feeds are very similar. * Firefox 1.04 released – increasingly putting the lie to the belief that Firefox is inherently more secure than IE. Security threats rise with popularity. * A comment on my earlier post about what I want from Longhorn – some good points. But I differ on the view that some of the problems are the hardware manufacturers’ issues. MSFT has created the PC industry, MSFT sucks up most of the net profits, MSFT has to own the problems. * Also from Steve, a teeny wiki – GTDTiddlyWiki. I have to play with this. This thing is fascinating. * AIM Mail – now you get a 2GB email account with AIM. This seems like it will be huge. Boy the install bites tho, feels like your browser is getting slammed with so much crap. And this AOL Browser thing is just strange, some hack of IE. * Clay Shirky on ontologies – nice discussion, relevant for people thinking about tagging. One of the core points is dead on – tags shouldn’t not be binary systems but probabilistic systems. * IEEE Computer Society RSS Feeds. Need to sub to these. * Phil Bogle on roaming browser state. Gosh I wish I had a firefox plugin that would export a list of installed plugins, and then auto install this list on another machine. * Some good dhtml ideas in here – crazy-good dhtml

Another hiking area close to home is the Mercer Slough. Not that much altitude variation but a really beautiful wetlands area – ferns, dense trees and brush, waterways, birds of all sorts. It was pouring by the time I was done this morning – but that just added to the beauty of the place, it is all about water and life.

* Adrian is trying out metal casting – this lindsay books catalog is truly amazing * Andy is recommitting to his blog (kind of) * Rich is enamored with the mt spamlookup plugin – personally i’ve given up on trackbacks and have reallowed typekey-registered commentors. I don’t have time to futz with all the plugins and tools to allow anything else. * Rich also continues to play with podcasting – looking at a better portable mp3 recorder (I’ve put on my father’s day wish list) * Phil is a blogging animal - looking at password composer (which is cool but i regularly use at least 6 different machines), playing with google mobile and his 411 app, calling out for more large-type support * Great unintentional press for PerfectMatch (one of our investments) * Also, Johnza on the fourth place – “Why can’t the Internet become a 4th place. A place that we’ve never really had before, where we get many of the things that we get from the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places but without the physical limitations”

Here’s what I want:

* Samsung MP3 player – for podcasting * a good pedometer+altimeter for my reentry into hiking. plenty of good pedometers and altimeters but are there any combos – preferably belt worn, not wrist?

I had my annual physical this week (man I am glad we signed up for MD Squared) and while I am generally healthy, I weigh 3 pounds more than last year. Maybe not a big deal, but I already weigh too much, and if I extrapolate 3 pounds a year – well this is what’s going to kill me.

A big reason for this is that I basically don’t exercise as I find it boring (I guess an early death will be even more boring!). So I need to remedy this. And I need a goal that I care about.

So I’m dusting off a goal that I set four years ago and have made no progress towards – backpacking significant portions of the pacific crest trail. I need to get in good enough shape to carry a 60-70 pound pack for 5-6 hours a day, for 10-15 days, through up and down terrain, and still have the energy to cook, set up camp, etc.

Step one – get comfortable hiking extended periods of time through tough terrain. I got new boots at rei – some zamberlans -- and went on a 2 hour hike this morning to start to break in the boots and get my feet toughened up – Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park is close to home, has 36 miles of trails with a mix of inclines, and has a Nike missile site! Found my first blister-prone spot.

I’m going to keep this up. I’ll spend the rest of this summer getting into a regimen that I can sustain – the most important short term goal is accomodate excercise in a sustainable way into my schedule, if I am not still on a program in 3 months I am in trouble.

* John Zagula on the “Yes, But, So” methodology – “The Yes lets your listeners know that you’ve heard their position and you understand. But announces that you know there can be a better way. So presents your idea for how to get there. These three little words are the only ones you really need to kick off any logical argument. And they will help you keep it down to three sentences.” * Martin on offshoring in the most minimal sense -- no need to go 1000 miles when 12 will suffice * Another post on power from Martin -- this one on foreign energy dependency in trade dollar terms. Boy this analysis, and our growing trade imbalance with China etc, makes me start to appreciate DRM and IP protection more than I have in the past – our IP heavy businesses (software, content) are areas where we can and should make up some of the trade imbalances we face. * Interesting analysis of the Newsweek high school rankings – our local Bellevue schools have certainly learned how to game the system * Lastly, belated kudos to MSFT for changing its position on gay rights. We loved the tolerance of the West Coast and MSFT when we moved out here, and it is great to see it is still a core value of the company.

Martin has been an enthusiastic blogger about alternative energy -- his biodiesel commuter car, a new cellulose ethanol plant, new biodiesel pumps in seattle. I admire his putting his investment and consumer dollars on the line.

It’s made me intrigued about power. I’ve started at the DOE site on power use by consumers. I learned that, as of 2001:

* We’re using about 95 Million BTU per household per year. About 4 3/4s short tons of coal for each of our homes if I did the math right. * Most of our use in the home is for heating (our surroundings and our water) and cooling. * The big story from 1993 to 2001 is declining power usage for heating, offset in part by greater cooling usage. I assume our heating systems are getting more efficient though there could be other reasons. * Appliances and lighting are about a quarter of our use.

I am very curious about the next 10 years of use:

* What will hybrid cars do to our consumption in the home? * How will the entry of low power lighting into the home (compact fluorescent, LED) affect usage? * How will the explosion of digital technology in the home affect our level of use – and our demand for uninterruptible power? * How will all this affect our HVAC needs? * What about home power generation? Good article in Wired about home power generation. and look at this cool sharp system for managing your home power generation and grid connection

As a bleeding edge user, I am starting to see strains on the power (and HVAC) systems in my home:

* A sea of wallwarts generating DC power and heat in various places in the house. * Significant heat disposal issues in my office and at media centers. I’ve had to do crazy special things to deal with these problems – a special air conditioner for the office, a venting system and fan for the media center. The existing HVAC system, designed for whole house human comfort, is not designed to deal with waste heat from appliances. * Low end battery backups in a couple places in the home to insure continued operation of phones, pcs, etc.

No conclusions here today, just wondering. I’d love to talk to some home builders and understand what they view as state of the art hvac/power systems in the home.

* From sifry, tried out the latest version of ecto. it seems to handle textile2 formatting now or any other movable type text processor plugin, nice. * Thanks to Scott, I’m trying out exchange rpc over http – no more vpn’ing into work! Seems stable, maybe a little slower than a vpn connection. * Nice tip from ed bott on how to find out what code is hiding inside of svchost.exe instances. Now I need a decoder ring for all these widgets. * i’d love to try out mylifebits * a cool mac widget for seeing what’s on your tivo – i really have to upgrade my tivo.

Phil Bogle of Jobster is one great guy. Now he has created Searchme – makes it easy to create a google search spanning multiple sites. I’ve added the ability to search all ignition blogs over in the search sidebar area.

Phil used the tool himself to create a job search across all ignition portfolio companies.

Great stuff.

In the last couple weeks I’ve been to Lopez, Vashon, and I’m heading to Port Angeles this weekend, with more trips to Lopez in the offing.

There are instructions up at the WSDOT site about how to get a ferry schedule on your PDA – sign up for avantgo, download avantgo client, configure a custom channel, blah blah blah.

At least for a fairly recent blackberry, this is all unnecessary. Just point your blackberry browser at the pda schedule link and you will be set.

Of course if you are on Shaw Island or someplace remote with no GPRS or whatever access, well, sorry.

And if you are new to the area – well there is nothing better than a ferry ride on a nice day.

Other handy Northwest links of recent note:

* Wifi finder (thanks Danny) * Shop for inflatables at Ballard Inflatables or West Coast Frogs. While in Ballard I hear that Souvenir is a cool place to stop – this whole inballard site seems cool. * A slightly stale article on the decline of the EMP. Visit soon before it is gone. Personally I found the place to be boring – I should be able to hear a lot more music at a music museum, not just read about it.

So last week seemed like a yawner for the windows business. Msft’s quarterly results showed a mature business. People at winhec were bored with longhorn – at best.

It got me to thinking about what I really want in the next version of windows. A lot of the discussion around longhorn concerns what I would classify as middleware – tagging, searching, graphical layout, media, etc. I can get a lot of this today without buying a whole new OS – and in fact would prefer to get this unbundled from my OS, and would prefer to get my OS unbundled from middleware.

What I really want an OS to do is get the most out of my hardware, and more to the point, make my hardware work. Here are some things I want

* Smart hard disk failure prediction. All the hard disks are instrumented, most of the utilities suck, but Microsoft should have the data to do a great job of failure prediction, especially if they pool real experience across all Windows users. * Video card stability. I play games, I have to download unapproved video drivers all the time, I wish the latest cards had better driver support. * Correctly working Usb attached drives. So often my XP machine decides it can’t find the drives. Why? I have no idea. But it happens on all my machines and I’ve heard it from other people too. * Bios patching. I’ll leave it for another day why we still have to deal with BIOSes at all, but given we do – why can’t windows find and apply all the patches for me? * Overclocking support. Give me a nice UI to deal with processor, ram, videocard clocking, and save me from doing wrong things. * Real working hibernation and suspend. I don’t use these features ever because so many devices don’t respond correctly to these state changes. * Sata support. It is terrible that using a sata drive requires me to insert a floppy at windows install time – who the heck has floppy drives any more??? * Software raid – please let me bond together heterogeneous drives, stripe across them, replicate across them, etc. * Power usage monitoring and budgeting. As my buddy rich tong has pointed out, a ton of system failures are due to insufficient power supplies. * Wireless USB. Please support asap! * Better printer and camera drivers. I hate all the shovelware that the printer and camera guys provide. Just please include the simplest possible drivers to print pages and to suck files off the camera. Phone drivers too so I can sync with ANY phone, not just msft’s smartphones – and don’t tell me to use ActiveSync, that thing is a confusing and confused piece of software. * Multicore support. Do something interesting with this. Don’t let the additional core just get sucked into the miasma of windows startup tasks, etc.

My point is – the OS should make my hardware work great and work flawlessly, that should be the point of an OS release. I don’t want delivery of these features slowed down by middleware integration, and I don’t want middleware delivery slowed down by inclusion of all these hardware features.

* Install Tiger on Mac Mini. painless. * Rip latest CD purchases. * Update ipods * Install and tune surround sound system in game room * download last 5 alias episodes using bitcomet. (lest you think i am a rampant pirate – i pay directv for satellite service, i pay comcast for hdtv service, we’ve purchased alias seasons 1, 2, and 3 on dvd. i am paying to watch alias every freakin’ way the industry will let me pay, so i don’t need to hear any crap about my downloads. give me a legal way to pay for HD alias downloads and I’ll pay for that too.)

Someone from 100 years ago would find my chore list to be incomprehensible.

Great little tutorial on halloween lighting – we’ve found that lighting, fog, and sound are the critical elements to mood at our house. Props are the least important element.