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.

I previously posted that I tried litefeeds and it didn’t work. One of their developers read my blog and contacted me for details, and so I retried.

I am happy to say that litefeeds now works fine, and there was never really a problem except for a rookie mistake by me.

I read my subs using newsgator, and I regularly export the OPML file from newsgator to blogrolling.com for my blog’s sidebar. Blogrolling.com will export my blogroll in opml as well, and I grabbed that for importation into litefeeds, blithely thinking “hey all opml files are the same”. WRONG. The newsgator exported file contains RSS feed urls. When imported into blogrolling, blogrolling determines the base blog url and just saves that. And so the exported opml file from blogrolling is not rss feed urls, but blog urls.

So litefeeds works fine now. And now that I can play with it I have some more constructive comments. It does install nicely and has a small memory footprint. But it is too hard to see content. First, when I have a feed or item listed, the space bar or return key should perform the default action – open the feed and show me the posts, open the post and show me the content.

Second, I don’t want just the entry excerpt provided by the feed, I want to push thru and read the whole post – litefeeds should integrate with the blackberry browser and let me read the posts.

So…happy to report that litefeeds works, and appreciate the support from the team. Hoping that they will add some more features so that it is even easier to read content.

The range of ignition blogs keeps growing. Here’s the current list of personal and topic blogs that I know about:

* A Little Ludwig (John Ludwig) – technology, Ohio State, Halloween, etc * Tong Family Blog (Rich Tong) – technology, biking, marketing, chess, etc * Zagula Spells Trouble (John Zagula) – wine, arts, etc * Deep Green Crystals (Martin Tobias) – technology, energy, etc * Smithstuff – ok not really a blog but if you like Make magazine, you’ll like this * VCMom (Michelle Goldberg) – VC, Mom. We need to encourage Michelle to post more often. * The Hoopers (Steve Hooper) – technology, life * Bob’s Planet (Bob Wise) – technology, telecom, etc * B100 Fuel – biodiesel, energy policy * Geekfishing – technology * EOQ 1 – production economics, mass customization * Marketing Playbook – all things marketing

And here is a little tool – if you want to search across all these at once, here’s a constructed google link to let you do that – for say “vacation”

And for more cross-ignition fun, here is an RSS feed that aggregates all the feeds from all these blogs thanks to rssmix

Failed:

* Via blackberryblog, litefeeds.com. Promised to be a nice RSS reader for the blackberry, and the blackberry client looked OK and installed easily. But lots of bugs on the server side handling my imported OPML so I gave up. * Olivelink. Promised to be a way to easily share video with friends and family but like most of these apps, couldn’t handle firewall/nat traversal without a bunch of tweaking, so i gave up.

Meaning to Try:

* Alternatives to newsgator – intravnews and You Subscribe. OK I love newsgator and it has been a rock for me, but worth looking around as I haven’ gotten any new features from newsgator in a while. * orb. Another videosharing app. Blogmatrix might be worth trying too. * Flexwiki upgrade. I use flexwiki for some personal projects and generally like it. Looks like a worthy upgrade.

* Stompbox in-car evdo router. Hey kevin at benchmark motoring, this is what I want to do in my car. mobycar is another interesting in-car solution. (An interesting aspect is the crushing effect this is going to have on all the dedicated telematics plays – once we all have a hotspot in our car with evdo/umts routing back out to the net – who needs all the captive, controlled services from onstar, etc?) * PC mods – Sunbeam 20-in-1 front panel, cooler quieter video cards, * A PSP and this hack for controlling media gear. Oh and here is a whole roundup of psp hacks * Slingbox – another way to serve up my video anywhere. * And I’d like to set up a neighbornode, this seems totally cool. * And an hdtv that prints – gosh I am always wanting printouts of tv pictures

For fun, went to the WinHEC blogger lunch today. Hosted by Joe Peterson, a great guy I worked with years ago. Well attended, probably thanks to the nice lunch at Tulio.

Joe opened with a message about community – how important the blogger and developer community was to Microsoft and how important events like this are. Talked about the recent 64bit Windows release. And for longhorn, mentioned a beta in early summer, beta2 in fall, and release to manufacturing next summer.

Questions from the bloggers present for Joe and team:

* Tagging in longhorn. How does this work without WinFS? Where are tags stored (in the files as file formats permit)? What about tag collisions (bummer. some talk about per-user tags but sounded like it won’t be in the product)? Personally I don’t get the excitement about tags in the audience or among the blog community, I don’t think users really want to use tags – they just want free text search. * Sidebar? cut for now. * Working to improve multimonitor support by pulling more out of display-specific drivers and into general level. display driver stability a big goal * By default, users will operate in “protected admin” and “standard user” rights levels – prompts for installs and admin ops. * Longhorn target – work on 256m system, prob will reco 512. 1gig proc. Will work with all old drivers. * Skinnable ui? working to add more skinnable features. * Dev team is purchasing only 64bit machines going forward. Daily builds of both, will simship both, you’ll be able to choose. For my money – if the dev team is running 64bit machines, then that is what I want to run, I know they will make that work well. * Will virtualpc ship in longhorn? Looking at.

All in all a great lunch. Thanks Joe et al.

Yet again this year we purchased a license to Ridemax prior to our disneyland trip. Recommended. It is not so much the great schedules it prints out that we love – but the general data on ride wait times at various hours of the day is incredibly helpful. Knowing that there is no need to wait in the Peter Pan line midday, you can get on the ride at 11pm with just a short wait, is incredibly valuable.

* Google just keeps cranking – Google launches search history. Google allows multiple Site: specifiers – an undervalued capability. RSS reader now in gmail. Desktop search plugins. Hey google, give me a simple document app (notes and simple spreadsheets and simple presentations) and I can quit using office… * Wikicities -- doesn’t look like it is taking off, but applying the wikipedia model to restaurant/travel reviews seems like a natural * Ourmedia.org. Something is interesting here… * Rich found flytecomm -- realtime flight tracking. cool.

Tom takes a break from his excellent series of posts on VOIP to advocate for nuclear power. Certainly my feeling as well, especially after reading The Bottomless Well. We have the opportunity to make a significant switch away from fossil fuels over the next 30 years and we should grab the opportunity.

* The rise of developer communities targetting the hometheater experience is interesting, something I’m fascinated by. For example, this itunes plugin for tivo. Tivo2 and Windows Media Center Edition are fighting neck and neck for plugins and addons; the Mac Mini is the dark horse. There will be some real breakthrough products and companies here. * Meanwhile the cable industry is trying its best to screw up the experience – good posts here on their reticence around cablecards. my personal experience with cablecard is terrible, in fact it has quit working at my house. Getting HD content into the Mac Mini and PC is critical for the success of these platforms. * Hilarious post from Evslin on TV usability – “…A true geek, of course, can play a coffee table full of remotes like a xylophone…“

* Andy Sack – “Like my last post – local search is hot, hot, hot” * Local school survey results available up at Judy’s Book * Phil keeps cranking away on bberry411 – this app is mandatory for blackberry users * Phil has also discovered Greasemonkey and plugins – way cool

Spent a couple nice days there this week. Great weather. Here are some essential links:

* Getting there. WSDOT Ferry schedules – read the footnotes carefully as there are a lot of intricacies in Lopez service. If you don’t need a car on the island, Paraclete Charters is a great way to go – avoid the ferry lines, and they can drop you anywhere, and they are nice people. * Staying. Lopez Farm Cottages are delightful – clean, completely invisible staff, lots of wild bunnies to entertain you. * Eating. The Love Dog Cafe is great – we had a great halibut dinner, they do great pizzas, good crabcakes, pastas, etc. Holly ‘s Bakery is great for deserts and pastries. Isabel’s for your coffee fix. Vita’s for takeout sandwiches, food, and wine. All these are in the village, along with the grocery store. No shortage of calores in our two days there.