Microsoft buys Groove and Ray Ozzie named CTO. Because you can never have enough CTOs, joining David Vaskevitch and Craig Mundie.

Two more and they have a basketball team!

* Thomas Hawk summarizes a great Barron’s article on the state of the industry. Suggests the cable operators are the ones to beat – that certainly seems to be the conventional wisdom. * an Ebay plugin for Windows Media Center Edition – with the popularity of shopping channels, this seems like such an obviously good idea. * Centerstage is apparently going to go alpha this weekend – great news for mac minis.

Jon’s latest is a great read. I’ve often wished that I could search just a subset of the web – I’d like to give google not a single domain to scope a search, but a list of domains. Jon’s article is a great articulation of that idea in depth – the list of interesting domains he focuses on is your blogroll, but the idea could be used with other lists as well. Like Tom Evslin, I don’t think I believe in vertical search engines. But I am certainly convinced that people/sites can provide an “editorial voice” on top of the existing search engines, by scoping a search to a set of domains.

This Seattle Times series on Infospace is fascinating and brutal. An incredible collection of misbehaviour. I am very glad Rick Thompson comes out looking relatively good as he is a first class guy who was stuck in an ugly situation.

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.