I got a couple questions about my post on LED lightbulbs. While the LED bulbs are not ready for primetime, I have had good luck with these compact fluorescents from HDb. They fit a standard socket and provide a very warm light, almost a little too yellow. But certainly no hint of blue.

I also recently ordered from http://www.lumitroncop.com and from http://www.1000bulbs.com. I ordered compact fluorescents to replace r20s and r30s (spots), we’ll see how those work.

I was motivated to move to incandescent alternatives because my office at home is too hot between all the PCs and devices and lights. Now that some have worked, I am motivated to move the whole house over for the energy savings. The one application that I am stuck with incandescents is for lights on dimming circuits – fluorescents don’t like variable voltage.

* Judy’s Book is running a survey on local schools – give them a hand! * More nice press for Jobster at Seattle24x7 * Johnza on Salumi – great great Seattle food establishment. * Martin found the collaborative symptomometer – very cool seed of an idea. * Rich found this CPU decoder ring – not clear it helps me know what to do, but a helpful resource. * Adrian is motivating me to upgrade to a Tivo2 box – I only wish the togo feature worked with macs. * Rich points towards StumbleUpon – kind of cool, I do like to find random new web sites.

I need a car for about 6 months to use up on Lopez Island. You can do long term rentals at places like Budget but very expensive.

Assuming an existing lease may be the way to go – Swapalease and Leasetrader both seem to have a lot of inventory.

I wonder if contacting some local leasing agents directly might not be the smartest thing to do – they must have some leases in default that they need someone to pick up.

I am a big fan of non-incandescent light bulbs – I am moving the whole house slowly to lower power/lower heat alternatives. I found these LED bulbs recently and tried a couple.

Not ready for primetime. Light is too directional, too blue, and not bright enough. But great for places like the garage where those problems aren’t an issue.

* Brad has a nice article up at BW Online, heavily influenced by Mssrs Tong and Zagula… * …following the nice press on Ignition last week in the WSJ (thanks to Jobster dudes for the link) * Not an ignition blog but a nice pithy maxim about our business from A VC: “Momentum venture investing is an oxymoron and anyone who does it is a moron.” * Martin is hooked on Windows Remote Desktop. Me too, but now I have a Mac Mini in the house and may have to try some others again… * Nice link by Martin to a good article on energy independence * Rich as always has a whole potpourri of links – Gelsinger on virtualization (rich has been high on this for a while), some great small pc links, a bunch of links to things we talked about over breaks at our LP meeting including bit comet.

* Very excited about centerstage as the media center UI for my mac mini. One of the missing components that this machine needs to be the perfect hometheater pc. * Rich wonders why people aren’t using notebooks as hometheater pcs. It’s a fine point. Price, styling are probably partial blockers.

* Tim on limits – “The most important is that the less you can put into a solution or system, the less risk there is to it failing to provide a return on the investment of time and resources. Conversely, it provides the potential for a higher margin if it is indeed successful.” * Ballmer on being first – “When Ballmer gets talking about how Microsoft must be first with technology innovations ? which, so far in Microsoft’s history, has not often happened…” – amazing how critics continue to miss the obvious areas where Microsoft was first. The refactoring of the PC industry from vertical all-in-one boxes to today’s horizontal build-your-own didn’t just happen by accident, there is a ton of software innovation that occurred to support and motivate that shift. * Mini-Microsoft pulls no punches – “Is something rotten in Redmond? Yes! It’s the rotting, fleshy mass of way too many misdirected, underutilized, and unneeded Microsofties.” And on a more prescriptive note: “My humble suggestion: flatten the Microsoft product team management chain.” * Which ties nicely to some good stuff Tom Evslin has been writing – the flattening of organizations, the flattening of information retrieval.

Man these guys at Cendant are abusive.

Not for the first time, I got a $10 “check” in the mail apparently from Budget Rent A Car. In the fine print on the check it mentions that cashing will activate a membership in the National Home Protection Alliance program.

More fine print on the back. Wow, I also get a 2% rebate on all credit card purchases. Oh capped at $5000 of purchases, but $100 bucks is something. Oh and I get more discounts, and some kind of insurance benefit on household expenses.

Now the kicker. Well on in the fine print, I see it is going to cost me $39.99 a month for all this. $40 a month!!!! My gosh.

The entire piece of mail is designed to deceive. The true nature of the offer is buried in fine print. The casual customer of Budget will think they overpaid or something and are getting a legitimate refund.

I was going to write a letter to the CEO of Budget, suggesting that they might want to stop selling their customer names to Trilegiant, the organization that is sending out this abuse. But of course – Budget and Trilegiant are both subs of Cendant!

Bastards.

Recent items of note:

* One man’s list of blackberry add-ons – Phil’s 411 app gets a nice mention. * Rootkitrevealer. Not really sure I know how to make the most of this but another nice tool to sniff out malware. * Haven’t tried Replay Music yet but seems to be the ultimate tool to bypass all the lame DRM in various players * Another great list of small software utilities – Pricelessware * Thanks to Jon Udell for the pointer to Linky, a great firefox extension. * Logparser 2.2. Loved earlier versions, haven’t had time to play with this yet. * Via Mike Gunderloy, XMLMarker -- great little XML editor.

Sadly I have no great utilities to recommend to Steve for home/consumer-oriented backup – I too have a ton of storage at home, I use scripts to copy precious data to backup locations every night, very kludgey but cheap.

* Man, Dodge is making the coolest trucks – the SRT-10, the Rumble Bee. * Freitag Credit Card wallets. I went to a card-only wallet years ago, these look great. * A ridiculously over-engineered but cool looking CD player. Not that I use CD players anymore. * Custom printed M&Ms.

Light week this week:

* Great in-depth review of Network Magic on Engadget. * Jobster Pilot ships. Congrats team!

Blanket disclosure: I have a financial interest in both these companies.

OK while I was sick I found it hard to even read, but a few books did make it through:

* “Samaritan”:amazon by Richard Price. A great story of a guy whose need to help people is his undoing. A great cautionary tale – when you are trying to help people, don’t do it for your own gratification reasons, as this will often cause you to do the wrong things. Really put yourself in their shoes and help them in a way that is about them, not about you. * “The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 18th Annual Collection”:amazon, editted by Gardner Dozois. Always a great collection – a great way to get names of authors and books that you should read, rather than what the bookstore is promoting. * “Wolves Eat Dogs”:amazon by Martin Cruz Smith. I have no idea what moscow and the ukraine are like … But gosh, smith is good at transporting you, with very few words. Story drug a little long but great imagery. * “The Laughing Sutra”:amazon by Mark Salzman. Reco’d by a very smart friend. Interesting story, intertwining of myth and today. But compare/contrast with Martin Cruz Smith title – I never felt transported to China in this book, the imagery and dialog just didn’t do its job, this story could have been set anywhere.

So after a week of playing with my new mac mini as my hometheater pc, i am mostly happy. I’ve configured it to grab downloaded AVIs (via bittorrent) off my windows file server – the mac connected pretty easily to windows, in some ways it is easier than connecting two xp machines. Per this guide, i installed vlc to play the downloaded avis – works great. (Wow I had forgotten how easy it is to install apps on the mac).

Still looking for two things to complete the experience:

* a great 10 foot ui for playing avis and dvds. Myth is overkill, i don’t want all the pvr functionality, i just want the 10 foot UI. * a wireless remote. I have the bluetooth kb and mouse but I want a remote. Maybe this griffin airclick tho it doesn’t seem to be shipping yet?

So just a few more pieces and it will be perfect. And for once the mac is the price leader – compare with windows-based systems that people are building. And of course the mac is the style leader – compare with this ugly brute.

I’m way behind and so missed a lot of good stuff. But a few things I noticed on Ignition blogs (or blog posts about Ignition or its portfolio)…

* Rich is tracking the emerging voip wars, and the most recent skype device announcement – wow, isn’t this device the kind of thing that HP should have made back in the “HP Way” days? * The Jobster team has gone live with a company blog. * A post I’ve been hanging onto for a while, Martin points to a blog all about the best of 2004 and wonders how to make a business out of. Does seem like a natural starting point for a nice little ecommerce business. * Martin also continues his biodiesel adventure… * One of the folks at Ignition has some Ethiopian family members – here is a cool post on the Ethopic number system, I had no idea. * Some criticism of Melodeo’s service – not sure I totally agree with, I think the Melodeo offering is a reasonable tradeoff of convenience and fairness, but I understand the point. * Rich’s pc hardware investigations – iscsi at home and Does SLI matter (yes!). Crap, not only do I not have a water-cooled PC, now I also don’t have iSCSI or an SLI config. I am a loser. * Martin likes these web radio stations. I’ve never really understood the attraction, I am an ipod and in-car music listener. But I should try. * Nice press for network magic (disclosure – I’m on the board). * Fred points to Martin’s posts on tag systems. I am not a believer in tag systems. I think humans just want to do free text searches – let the computers figure out how to parse and tag content. But certainly a lot of heat around tags right now.

My Chevy Avalanche has a blind spot in which you can hide Mount Rainer, it is just huge. Backing up has always terrified me as I could easily be running over a child, a horse, a small car, and I’d never know it.

The good folks at Benchmark Motoring helped me out – they installed a rearview camera with fisheye lens, just mounted above the trailer hitch. When I shift into reverse, it takes over the nav screen and displays a rear facing video feed.

I didn’t think it would help that much…but I am hooked. I can’t imagine ever getting any car without this again. Not only is it a great safety feature, but your parallel parking becomes brilliant with this. So much better than a rear view mirror. Highly recommended.