Just got one of these, in the course of a remodel. What a beast!

One astounding part of this beast is the i/o ports available.

Input: analog coax a, analog coax b, hdmi, dvi + stereo audio, component input 1 + stereo audio, component input 2 + stereo audio, s-video + stereo audio, center channel audio input, 2 I.Link (1394) terminals, digital coax in, a cablecard slot, and a regular pcmcia slot for content on pcmcia storage cards (or any format card or drive with a pcmcia adapter). Oh and an rs-232 control port, and power.

Output: s-video+stereo audio monitor, digital audio, analog coax, stereo speaker terminals, headphone jack, a dc output jack for unspecified future expansion.

I admit I have a perverse desire to hook something to every input and output just to see if the tv melts. The power consumption from a fully provisioned system must be immense.

More realistically I am going to try to get a cablecard out of comcast. I am going to see just what the pcmcia port can handle. And the dvi port is just screaming for a mac mini.

* Sony’s new tv/pc combo – ok is there any reason why every new TV won’t someday have a pc next to it or in it? the cost of a reasonably competent pc core is driving down down down. The new mac mini seems like a great pc to put next to a tv. * And every TV will be able to deal with multiple inflows of video, internet (bittorrent) plus the proprietary cable/satellite feed. A common UI for these sources would be great… * For these reasons alone, a dedicated Tivo box is in trouble, but to compound the problems – Directv is going to build it’s own dvr as comcast already has. Poor strategy by Tivo and huge egos at the pipe owners have combined to sound the deathknell, which is really too bad, the Tivo experience is so much better than the Comcast/Microsoft DVR…

Microsoft is clearly making the right bet with Windows MCE (and here’s a great MCE wiki) but not clear to me that WinMCE will be the winning software on the tv computer. It is clear tho that there will be a pc in/next to the tv.

Love the discussions by raymond and larry about computer browsing and enumeration on windows. i worked on the windows for workgroups team back when all this was first created and deployed – i still remember the day that the microsoft IT staff came flying into my office with their hair on fire because internal betas of windows for workgroups were bringing the whole company net to a grinding halt because of all the broadcasts and enumeration. A good problem to have – wfw was being adopted within the company.

Thinking about going to the seattle blog business summit…

Jon Udell points to these great posts about vm-enabled polycore computing. Fascinating stuff. The writers are excited about server-side, datacenter applications. Personally I get way more excited about consumer applications. So not many consumers need to run thousands of vms simultaneously on their machines – but cheap creation of ephemeral vms would be great, the end to spyware and viruses – just give me a new instance of my “known good” vm every time i sit down, and throw it away when i get up – any malware that managed to worm its way into the vm is gone.

Had our board meeting today. Man I have to say I like our board. Chris (and Ted) from Ackerley Partners are great guys with domain experience that is so different than ours, and very complementary. I admire Jerry Colonna hugely, his openness and honesty on his blog are inspiring. And of courze the management team at Judy’s Book is awesome, Andy and Chris are rock solid. Very inspiring group, very inspiring discussion.

So doing early Halloween ‘05 planning. I’ve talked about my ideas to substantially update my sound system, and in talking to my local theatrical supply house, PNTA, I’ve been pointed to SFX from Stageresearch as potentially the right control package for my audio needs. I’ll be digging into this month.

Other random halloween things that have caught my eye:

* Assuming i go to a centralized sound console like above, i’ll want a wireless remote for it. So i can change up the sounds from anywhere in the yard. Need to understand these wireless mixer controls better. * Shapelock moldable plastic seems like to could be great for making a lot of props, gravestone elements, etc. * I used some of these zwave controllers this past year. way more robust than x10. A little goofy to program. * Want to try some mat switches this year too.

In the northwest:

* On Vancouver Island, the Aerie or the Wickaninnish Inn. Ok probably cold and grey right now too but would be great in the summer. * The Stephanie Inn has always been a winner for us. And we love Cannon Beach. * Further south is the Tu Tu’ Tun, we’ve heard good things about.

Further afield:

* We love Kona Village but we may want to try the other islands. Turtle Bay Hotel looks like a good place to try on Oahu. * The nice folks at Exclusive Resorts have recommended Miraval, and we’re game to try that…

Our big news – welcome John Connors, it is great to be working with John again.

Around Ignition blogs –

* Andy’s home stereo nightmare. Man there is opportunity here. * The book has some staying power. Hey John, an interesting pointer to a study of the physics of book sales. * John also looks at strategy as the study and uses of communication. Interesting. * Martin’s moving his biodiesel postings to a new blog. * Not an ignition blog – but Adrian you ought to love this project. * As usual Rich has posts covering all kinds of technical bases – fighting comment spam, AMD mobos, border crossing sites, HDTV options, the poor state of non-apple audio players, ipod add-ons, expired domains. Rich is a one man wrecking crew.

Software I’ve tried recently:

* GamesKnoppix. Yawn. Buggy and mostly in german. Games aren’t anything to write home about. * Acrobat Reader 7.0. Recommended. Loads much faster than prior versions. * MT 3.14. I don’t really notice much but it was an easy upgrade. * Tag&Rename 3.2Beta. Yawn. Complicated and wasn’t very good at figuring out tags for my mystery tracks (mostly classical cds or low volume compilations) * A9 toolbar for firefox. Works fine but I just can’t get in the a9 mood. * MS antispyware beta. Recommended – found a couple problems on my machine that others hadn’t, and has free signature updates. * Tweaks to speed up firefox. Despite the caveats, they worked for me. * Spell check for firefox. I’m usually ok on spelling but a nice tool to have. * True Launch Bar. Nice that it is a transparent upgrade to the quicklaunch bar. But a little overpowering.

Software I’d like to try:

* Great smallware list. I love these little utilities. * 46 best freeware utilities. Another good list. * Sokkit -- solves a need for me, easy install/config of AMP on windows.

Intriguing readings on software:

* Public ontologies. I don’t think end users will ever put keywords/classifications on all their output – but I do think a shared public ontology that can advise free text searching is pretty useful. When I search for “theatrical lighting control”, i’d love it if the search engines could benefit from the collective wisdom of the net and realize that “dmx” and “dmx-512” might be useful synonyms for my search, for instance. * Bayesian tutorial and code. Cool. * p2p in 15 lines of code. Unstoppable. * One man’s advice on how to better secure your system.

Motivated to post this by someone who saw my gear bag and asked where to get one. I carry a bag from Duluth Trading – designed for tools but I use for carrying around all my gear. (I use them for tools too – one for pneumatic, one for electric, one for electronics, etc).

In the bag or on my person I carry: * Blackberry 7210 with ATTWS service. I’m not going to move to one of the 7100s, I like the full keyboard * iPod Photo. The photo functionality is lame but at least I have a backup of all my photos now. * Etymotics Er6 earphones. Love these. Theyv’e been very durable. * JVC subnotebook. The best subnotebook I could find when I looked months ago. There may be better choices now. I like a subnotebook because I can easily carry it anywhere. And I am not trying to replace a desktop. * This great connector kit that rich got me. * Blackberry and iPod wallwarts tho I think I can consolidate here * Casio Exilim camera. An older model but may upgrade in the next year or so. * Usually 3-4 books. Right now i have “Democracy in America”:amazon, “The Fermata”:amazon, and “A Coffin for Demetrios”:amazon * Business papers * A couple empty notebooks and pens

I’m setting up a new machine soon, and mostly for myself, I’m documenting the full software set I need on the machine (or will need access to:)

* OS: Win xp pro. I use the remote desktop feature a lot within the house and between house and work, so XP Pro is necessary. I’m also evaluating KnoppMyth and Windows MCE 2005 as I may use one of them on a media center machine soon… * AVG antivirus. The price is right. * Firefox of couse, tho I keep IE around to run WinUpdate and Outlook Web Access. ..and I have a lot of firefox extensions loaded, but the must-haves are Adblock, Tabbrowser Preferences, Download Manager Tweak, Googlebar, Searchkeys, and EditCSS. * Aim. I don’t have a love affair with AIM but other family members are committed to it, so I am too. * Adobe reader 7.0. The latest version is worth the download as it loads a lot faster. * Yahoo toolbar. Ok I don’t actually care about the toolbar but the free spyware detector which is included makes the download worth it. * Azureus for bittorrent downloads. There are probably codec sets I need to download as well but I have forgotten them all, I will have to rediscover. Videoinspector is helpful in discovering what codecs i need. * Itunes of course, as I am an iPod user. For ripping I use Exact Audio Copy and the codecs implied. * PKzip or any other reasonable file compression/decompression utility. * Google Desktop. Actually I am not sure that I have to have this or not, it is still in the evaluation stage. The idea is nice – but in practice I never seem to use it. * Outlook for accessing work email. Don’t love it but it is a fact of life. Back when I was wearing the CIO hat for Ignition I tried to move us to some other server alternative but calendar management and people’s familiarity drove us back to exchange and outlook. * Newsgator for feed reading. * Cloudmark for spam control (ignition is an investor in cloudmark). * one of DZsoft’s tools for structured editting. Pretty lightweight which is all I need. I also use Notepad2. Oh and Spread32 is a nice little spreadsheet – I honestly don’t need most of the function of office.

While I don’t need these installed on every machine, I would feel remiss if I didn’t mention Movabletype, Activestate Perl, Blogrolling, and Sitemeter. I use these tools every single day, in many ways they are more irreplaceable than most of the desktop software I use.

I need to meet a good audio engineer with practical theatre experience, I am willing to treat you to a great lunch or dinner to start.

I have some ambitious goals this year for my halloween haunt sound systems. This past year I had 7 separate stereo tracks running – 4 looping from cd players, 2 from a pc synched with some effects, and 1 pair of speaks driven by a handheld mic and voice modification box.

This year I’d like to yoke them all together into a single soundsystem, driven by a single pc/mix source, and then I’d like to be able to switch dynamically between several configs:

- all speakers playing a single surround track. So I can have ghosts or other invisible things moving thru the courtyard - speakers broken into pairs playing stereo tracks – so i can play the loops as i do today - any speaker pair carrying the wireless mic track – so my voice can move from the tree to the coffin to the graveyard

I don’t want to spend a billion dollars on this of course. Ideally I could put a couple cheap sound cards with 7.1 or 9.1 support in a pc, drive them both from some pc program, and have a remote control (or a remote control program running on a pocketpc or some other device) that would let me switch configs around on the fly.

I need a basic education on what is really possible – what software exists today to dynamically control a large speaker setup, what devices i need to learn more about, etc. I’ve started to grovel thru mags and internet sites and I can probably figure this out myself eventually but the right conversation with the right person would save me a lot of trouble…

“Sweet and Vicious”:amazon by David Schickler. An entertaining yarn. Reminds me of “Pulp Fiction” with an injection of Forrest Gump sweetness. Reads very much as if it wants to be a movie or was written as a screenplay – and the author gives thanks to his film agent among others, certainly suggests an eye towards a film.

“Ammonite”:amazon by Nicola Griffith. A lot of common modern science fiction themes here – all female society, a symbiotic organism/virus that sinks into humanity and creates an enhanced species, gaia, first recontact with a lost colony – all put together in a compelling story, a nice effort. I picked up at a Border’s on the big island that had a huge selection of less popular but critically acclaimed science fiction from female authors. Must be an interesting buyer at this store – certainly a more distinctive collection than at your normal bookstore.

Hey Phil passed this on – an agency doing great work on the ground in sri lanka – if you need more ideas on how to help.