These have intrigued me recently:

* Graphical representation of Apple’s strategy via Gary Turner. Who would of thought 5 years ago that Apple would become oh so relevant again? * Conversely, Charles Cooper grades Bill Gates via the Seattle PI. Ouch and probably unfair, but an interesting take. * Kind of long in the tooth now, but analysis of IBM’s PC business sale – it’s all about China. Time to learn chinese. * Also a bit long in the tooth, but…GM is blogging. Great way to reach out to influentials and build community around products. * Via Scott Loftesness, good whitepaper on customer economics (pdf). * Mark Cuban on private social security accounts.

* “The Fermata”:amazon by Nicholson Baker. Reardon recommended this book to me, and I am worried for his soul. Very artfully crafted, very engaging, a nice moral redemption of sorts for the main character. And some interesting early discussion on moral relativity that isn’t ever really fully explored. But…all wrapped up in a story that is so smutty and demeaning that it sinks the book. Maybe that is just my midwestern upbringing. All I know is that I’m embarrassed to have the book on my shelves. I’m not sad I read it, but I won’t pick up another book by Baker. * “A Coffin for Dmitrios”:amazon by Eric Ambler. What a fine fine tale. My first ambler, a great story of crime and human nature. I find it far more approachable than le carre, and far deeper than the popular crime and suspense novels of today. * “Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, Second Edition”:amazon by Briggs et al. A fine reference. A little dated re browser details. Nothing probably to separate this from any other CSS reference, I just needed something reasonable.

* Jobster is hiring – Web Developer, Core Developer, Lead Program Manager, Lead Product Marketing Managers, and Senior Marketing Communications Manager. OK all ignition companies are probably hiring, but phil is the only guy who’s asked me to post about it. Oh and nice press in the PI about jobster today. * John summarizes recent reviews of the book. * Martin has a bunch of posts about building a home nas. My counsel – build your own box using Windows or a recent Linux/Samba dist – i’ve had trouble with the appliance boxes that have some older build of samba burnt in. * Martin and Rich point towards the network magic beta (disclosure – i’m on the board). * Z-wave vs Zigbee from Martin. Useful for halloween projects. * Rich has some good htpc info – here on using dothan-based mboard. Me, I just ordered a Mac Mini. * Rich also has a ton of ipod utility posts – defrag hints, mounting an ipod.

Landed in Duluth at 9pm Saturday. Temperature on the ground: -20 degrees F. Airport has one ticket counter, a handful of gates, and a luggage carousel the size of a small bedroom.

Hey, everyone here sounds like Frances McDormand in Fargo.

Checked in to the brand new Country Inn near the airport. Very pleasant, brand new. A million kids in the hotel – hockey teams in town for a tournament. All running thru the halls in swimsuits to the indoor heated pool and slide – who knew I should bring a swimsuit to Duluth in January?

Watching the local NBC affiliate news was an education all by itself about northern Minnesota. The news anchor and the weatherman both looked to be about 24 – they are the backup team at the station – I guess if you are a new journalism grad, Duluth is the kind of market you can start in. The weather report was all about “how many consecutive hours will the temperature stay below zero”. Record is 160+ as I recall. We’re at 60+ now, the weatherman doesn’t think we’ll break the record.

Sports report – Div III college hockey, Div II college hockey, Div I college hockey, high school hockey, minor league hockey. Oh yeah at the end he mentioned the NFL playoff results.

Down to 24 below overnight. The building popped and cracked all night long – a constant battle between freezing weather and our room heater. And not a gentle popping and cracking – more like the last 30 seconds of a bag of microwave popcorn, all night long.

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