* Rich is in Hawaii – luaus, Waimea, Valley of the Temples * Sourcelabs releases their AMP stack for Windows * Andy on having a good relationship with his board. Andy another benefit of sticking with the truth – it is really easy to remember what you told people * Hey all you ignition bikers, you need bike LED spokes * Recent mentions of the book. John returns the favor by pointing out some good business blogs * Martin on biodiesel – King5 coverage, filling up your car at McDonalds * Rich’s usual spew of tech posts – OpenOffice2.0, Outlook and DEP, ARPU and churn stats, Yagoohoogle * Bob is new to Ignition – welcome bob! * Great book review by Martin

OK as anyone who has mucked around with fog machines knows, it is hard to get the fog to lie low. You can buy fog chillers or build your own, plans abound on the web.

But here is a simple solution on the MOM forums – basically run your fog machine output through a pile of mulch. Apparently the temperature and moistness of the mulch cool the fog enough to keep it down. Good idea, I will try this year.

Our friends at Mpire are looking for some parttime usability design/test help. Let me or them know if interested or you know someone.

added a new section to my sidebar, a summary of my postings on judy’s book (an ignition investment). this is cool, i am far more likely to post at judy’s book now as i can see a summary of my activity back here on my own page. i’d love to be able to bring my judy’s book posts inline into my blog – interspersed naturally with posts i’ve done here. I guess with some coding i could do that but i am lazy, i just want some MT tags that let me aggregate posts from N places into one stream on this page.

* El paso was dusty, hot, and windy. So brown compared to seattle. * Stayed at a decent hotel in downtown el paso – the camino real. An oasis of higher income activity in the downtown. * Downtown lively in day – every store rolls their wares out onto the street. But absolutely dead at night. And no one speaks English – I felt like a fish out of water. * You need to head out to the northern or eastern burbs for restaurants, shopping. I ate dinner at the State Line BBQ – it was decent. Good potato salad. * UTEP is on some hills overlooking the downtown. Banner year for men’s sports, both the bball and fball teams did well. The Sun Bowl is played here annually. * You can walk into Juarez for 35 cents. I spent Saturday morning wandering into Juarez. I was wondering “why do people visit Juarez?”. I wasn’t 25 feet across the border before I had my first Viagra offer. The main tourist street was lined with pharmacies. At 100 feet a cab driver offered to take me to a woman. * It took about 8-10 blocks of walking to punch thru this part of Juarez into the market area with more normal shops, bakeries, restaurants, etc. Much more pleasant.

Net/net, can’t say I’d ever want to come to a sun bowl.

Reminded again this week how crappy the built-in ftp client in winxp is. Struggled for a day with uploading some simple cgis to a hosting service before it dawned on me that the xp client was sending them in binary mode, not ascii. I upload cgis to a windows server all the time using the xp client, apparently msft does something special between xp clients and windows servers to fix up the uploads because I never had a problem with this config.

And the builtin client doesn’t have a way to force ascii or binary, at least not that I could find.

“Filezilla”:google proved to be a great answer. Reasonable browsing ui, automatically handles ascii/binary selection for most files, handles disconnects/reconnects well.

We love ipods so much that we have four in the house.

And itunes really sucks at handling this. we like to keep all our music on one server and this just creates a legion of problems. Getting itunes on all machines to take notice of new music on the server. Sharing playlists across the network. Ratings collision – we all have different ratings we want to maintain. And doing different loads of music onto each ipod.

Here’s how we manage the last item today – getting different subsets of our collection onto each ipod.

* We keep all our music in one huge directory, with subdirs per artist and album. Makes backup, searching, and all other operations easier. * In itunes I create partitioning playlists. Basically a playlist per user that represents the music they want on their ipod. In our case this is fairly easy as our interests break cleanly on genre lines, and it is easy in itunes to create playlists like “female vocal OR male vocal OR new age OR holiday”. * Then I configure our respective ipods (in the itunes app) to only pick up these playlists on synch.

As I said it is not perfect. Ratings collide. We have to avoid fights over genre tags. I have to do tag maintenance every once in a while. But it works ok for our household.

I am playing around with a different approach – using Beyond Compare to fully replicate our music collection to a bunch of individual machines, and then letting people tag and rate their music as they want on that machine and sync on that machine. This creates a whole bunch of other problems, best solved if we only rip cds on one machine in the house (which is the case today), but it does work better in some ways with itunes.

A burgeoning interest area of mine is adult or continuing education. I seriously considered in the last couple years enrolling in a phd program but the traditional university structure just doesn’t work well for adults with families, jobs, etc.

I wonder if programs like Capella University are viable.

The web is an amazing thing. Saved us from a cooking disaster this weekend.

We hauled our rice cooker out of the small appliance graveyard in our house – wedged in between the juicer and bread machine, just in front of the waffle iron, on top of the paninni grill. Sadly tho, we had no manual for it. The cooker is like 10 years old, I figured we were hosed.

But hats off to Panasonic for putting all their product manuals on the web, even old ones.

* Centerstage status. I really need to get the alpha running on my mac mini. * Rich has discovered cable cards but let me tell you rich, it is a PITA to get these cards and to make them work. I have one TV limping with a card from Comcast – but the overall experience (ordering, install, daily use) is awful because comcast does not want you to use this product. and per this article, the movement towards cablecards is not accelerating. * Good article here on coercing a settop box to accept an additional hard disk – wish the comparable work was done on the msft/comcast/moto box – and a reminder of what a great resource avsforum is

* “The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy”:amazon – One of the better nonfiction books I have read in years. If you are thinking at all about energy policy, you should read this book. Its explanation of the energy economy in our society is lucid and insightful. I’d understood intuitively for years that to create the advanced products of our modern society – cars, computers, etc – you have to start with mountains of raw materials that get refined down into a small amount of useful goods. I hadn’t intuitively grokked that the same thing happens with energy – we start with gross amounts of highly chaotic energy (running water, burning hydrocarbons) and refine them down to the highly ordered, highly valuable electrons/photons used in computers, telecom, medical equipment, etc. These authors explain this in length, and clearly articulate how technology is pushing us even more towards an electricity basis and away from raw fuels. The authors take a light hand on policy recommendations but an obvious policy question to consider – would you rather have nuke plants built in our country, or our armed forces deeply engaged in battles in oil-rich parts of the world? It is probably not a direct tradeoff, but they are not unrelated choices. * “Under the Glacier”:amazon – this is a very challenging novel. deep references to the bible, to catholicism, to nordic myth, indian myth, and probably a thousand other creation myths, religions, and philosophies that i didn’t catch. the author was incredibly well read and wrote this in his 60s – i probably need to do another 20 years of reading to be able to begin to appreciate this novel. * Another list of great novels of the 20th century – nothing shocking but a good reminder list

It is all coming crashing down around me right at the moment. I don’t feel like I have gadgets and gear, I just have problems.

On my person/in my bag: my blackberry keys are sticking and i have to replace it, my casio digital camera won’t hold a charge.

In my car: the kenwood phatdisk hard disk is corrupt, my nav system is out for repairs.

At work: the vpn has become slow as mud, our firewall is crashing daily, my server box has only 256Meg of ram and is thrashing, i can’t quite configure properly my hosting service for 3 new domains.

At home: firefox 1.02 crashes repeatedly on my main machine. Firefox won’t run at all in user mode on the family room machine. I have hard disk corruption on my game machine. The hard disk in the PC I use to control all my halloween sounds is whining suspiciously. my 10 year old phone system is creaking as i attempt to slam voip into it.

A whole host of things are working ok – my ipod, my tivo, my comcast hd, the two other pcs and the mac mini at home. But the problems are all a little overwhelming at the moment. I may need to massively simplify. I can’t keep spending 3 hours a day fixing things…

The good people at Jobster launched today – coverage on king5 morning news already – good luck folks!

Tried and liked:

* CustomizeGoogle via Larkware. And the required greasemonkey addon to firefox is great. * Firefox search plugins. I had no idea you could add these in. Cool. How do I create my own? * After months of footdragging, finally installed this gmail shell extension. Very cool. * JimH’s rumour city. Loved the ancestor of this toy back in WFW days… * Power Supply Wattage Calculator via Pirillo. I’ll never build a PC without it again.

Meaning to try:

* Essential Mac Software now that I have a mini. * ipodder. i’m so late to this game. * Olivelink. downloading beta now. * Never miss an episode with rss and bittorrent. i’m still bittorrenting the old-fashioned way. * naslite. Lightweight nas software for the home/office. * picasa 2. I’m kind of burnt out on photo software – none of the packages ever seem to really help me that much. But i should try again. * divx codecs. Actually i already have some variant of these, just a reminder here where to look for them – http://www.divx.com/divx/download/, http://www.divx-difest.com/software/xvid.html

* Melodeo coverage in BW article on music phones. * a little blog coverage of mfoundry. * Rich is getting into podcasting – using the iriver, enabling our blogs to support podcasts, publishing a podcast. and John Zagula pointed me towards podshow * Martin finds more great stuff on alternative fuels – the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the biofuel community. * Phil’s on a tear about open relationship networks – XFN tagging, Zoominfo nee Eliyon, network visualization tools * Also, Phil on mobile search. Phil’s little bberry411 app is more useful than any other mobile search app i’ve tried… * Rich also has been trying all the spam fighting plugins for MT, like this one. The flood of trackback spam has become truly painful.