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.

OK we missed the most recent episode of Desparate Housewives while we were in Hawaii. I hadn’t kept up to date on bittorrent in the last couple months so time to try again.

Went to download Azureus. Oops, needed the SUN JRE first. Installed the JRE, then Azureus. Both pretty painless tho the Sun website has way too much info on it.

Then off to http://www.torrents.co.uk which is a great source of TV torrents. Found the Desparate Housewives episode which aired on 12/20, and started up the download. Very painless, full HDTV quality, no commercials.

And once done, it played perfectly in the Divx player that I already had installed, so I didn’t have to hunt around for one of these, tho there seem to be a number of alternatives out there.

OK so now I could play this great looking show in my office, but I really wanted it down in the family room, and i don’t have a media center pc yet. So I thought gee, I’ll just burn it onto a DVD and go!

This is where everything turned to crap. First off, i tried a bunch of different DVD burning tools that I had on my machines – most of them bundleware with DVD burners. Ulead, sonic mydvd were a couple of them. None of them could parse the downloaded show. So I googled around and downloaded a few more – HT Burn, DVD Lab Pro. Nope they couldn’t import the show either.

Figuring I had some strange codec problem i downloaded Videoinspector, this was pretty helpful. Analyzed the show, and claimed I didn’t have the necessary xvid codec (tho how did the divx player play the show then???) and took me right to a download site. Ok so i installed but I still had trouble getting any DVD authoring software to consume the file. tmpgenc seemed to be able to crack the file thought to what end I am not sure. DVD lab pro hung hard.

After the hard hang i updated my sony dvd burner firmware and checked my bios and scsi/sata firmware, all ok. Still I could never coerce anything into burning a dvd, ht burn got the furthest and actually burnt the video but no audio.

So I gave up. We all watched the show in my office.

What have I learned? The last time I tried to burn DVDs in earnest was about 6 months ago. The software sucked then. It still sucks now. And the other learning is – get a media center PC.

Wow, just a total ass-kicking by the Buckeyes. Zwick and Ross played like they had something to prove, they did. Nugent finished an incredible career. The defense was smothering. The team played like it is excited about next year already.

Sportsline’s grading of the game…Cfnews stream of consciousness…SI’s coverage…

I got one of these power/fm transmitter thingies for christmas, and plugged a thumbdrive into it with a bunch of directories of mp3s. It is a very nice little solution, the sound quality actually seems better than my ipod/itrip combo. A couple of reflections:

* Man I wish there was a “bring your own storage” ipod. I’d love to be able to plug arbitrary storage into my ipod headend for a couple reasons – one the ability to upgrade my storage as i see fit (at much better prices than apple supports), two the ability to sync using normal file tools – the syncing in itunes is the worst part of the experience – slow and gets confused at times. * this seems like a better podcasting solution than an ipod. I don’t plug my ipod into my pc every night, i sync it infrequently (probably because syncing is such a pain). I could easily stick my thumbdrive into the pc every night tho, especially if i could then use regular file utilities to create my syncing solution.

So a gift for Christmas was sent by FedEx Ground to my work address on December 17. It arrived at the local FedEx distribution center in Auburn and was put on a truck on December 23 for delivery. However, it was not delivered, and on the tracking website over the weekend a posting was made that said that FedEx was waiting for an address correction from the recipient, me. FedEx did not call the sender, did not call me, did not leave a notice at my workplace, they just put this notice up.

Well actually that is not all they did. They also sent a postcard via US Mail to the apparently incorrect address asking for an address correction. Said postcard arrived today.

I have no idea how FedEx holds this idea in their head. Either the address is correct and they can deliver the package, or it is incorrect and sending a postcard is not going to help. As it turns out the street address was fine but the zipcode was off in the last digit – not a problem for the USPS but apparently something that brings FedEx to a crashing halt. Not a problem for UPS either since they do address verication at time of shipping (or at least they do everytime I ship).

I’ll use UPS and USPS, thanks.

Traded mail with Phil yesterday who is in Sri Lanka I believe for the holidays – says he and his family are OK – great news amidst all the general bad news.

UPDATE: Phil says that Unicef and the local Lions club seem to be doing great efforts at relief, if anyone needs ideas for what charities to support.

The Dispatch has the full story today (paid sub required) on the booster who gave Troy money and other benefits, resulting in Troy’s suspension. Pretty ugly picture of this booster, Robert Baker of Springfield.

So as a result of the actions of this booster: Troy is suspended; everyone else on the team and the coaching staff is directly affected due to the loss of Troy; and nothing happens officially to the booster (though he has departed from his company, sounds like there may be more general ethics problems with this guy). Gee this seems like justice.

As I’ve said before, college football is broken until more of the money generated by the sport starts going directly to the players. With the millions of dollars floating around a big program like Ohio State, it is just wrong not to give some of that largesse to the players who are directly responsible for generating the cash, it is wrong for adults associated with the program to make big salaries when players make nothing, and it is impossible to prevent 18- and 19-year-olds (who are cash-poor) from being swayed by a couple hundred or couple thousand dollars.

This holiday season, we particularly wanted to help out the families of servicemen and servicewomen who have made or are making significant sacrifices for all of us. We gave to three organizations:

* Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund – “The Fund provides unrestricted grants to the families of military personnel who have given their lives in the current operations in defense of our country. The gifts, $10,000 to each dependent family and an additional $5,000 per child, are intended to help these families through any immediate or long-term financial difficulties they may face.” * Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund – “On May 18, 2004, a small group of concerned Marine Corps spouses founded the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund to provide financial grants and other assistance to the Marines, sailors, and families of those injured serving our nation.” * Army Emergency Relief – “AER funds are made available to commanders having AER Sections to provide emergency financial assistance to soldiers - active & retired - and their dependents when there is a valid need.”

Thanks again to Winds of Change for maintaining this great list of pointers for ways to help the troops.

From the blackberry blog, 4.0 software for attws devices available now. I’ve installed, seemed to go ok. I enabled the certificate manager feature which may have been a mistake, like all certificate software I’ve ever used, it presents me with an enormously complex UI with no clear value.

Spent the last week in Hawaii – while on the beach:

* “Amnesia Moon”:amazon by Lethem. In the philip dick vein. Intersting core thesis about fracturing of reality as a response to an external threat. And I am sure that this is the only book I’ve ever read with a blurb by “mc 900 foot jesus”:amazon. How many people on the planet own cds by mc 900 foot jesus and have read this book? * “Snowfall”:amazon, “Kingdom River”:amazon by Mitchell Smith. Decent post apocalyptic yarn. In this case, set in north america sometime after a new ice age, and society has become much more primitive. In the first book, the action is paced well, and the unhappy endings for many of the ?good? protagonists creates a level of reality and pathos that tales of this sort normally don’t attain. The second book falls off quite a bit – pacing not as good and the hero is a bit too invincible. * “A frolic of his own”:amazon by Gaddis. Ok I hate to give up on a book part way thru. I feel like I am wasting the time I’ve already invested in the book, and I feel like I am letting the author defeat me in some strange intellectual contest. But I have to put this down after about 75 pages. I have no idea where the author is headed, I am not intrigued by the characters. The writing style is particularly annoying – we have perfectly good ways to punctuate conversation, why invent new ones which obscure meaning? I assume the author is making a point with this style, perhaps it ties back to the theme (a critique of our litigious culture per one of the jacket blurbs) but it is tiring. One of the jacket blurbs, from richard lacayo of Time magazine, says ?Practically rebuilds the Tower of Babel from the sounds and furies of the late 20th century.?. I have no idea what this means, I can’t make any sense of it, and so I guess it is a very fitting description of this book. * “Icarus”:amazon by Russell Andrews. Like mary higgins clark, only longer. And a bit dull at times. Length kind of beat some of the suspense out. * “Democracy in America”:amazon. I can see why this remains on so many recommended reading lists after 150 years; it is still a very relevant discussion of American politics and history. I am only partway thru but finding this very readable. When you’ve grown up in a particular system, you take so much of it for granted, it is fascinating to see it through someone else’s eyes. A great rehash of inheritance and estates early on that reminds me why estate taxes are not such a bad thing. * “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”:amazon. A trendy choice that I expected to dislike, but thia is a very good tale. Thematicallly like “tim powers”:amazon but with very deep characters. Like all stories of this ilk, the metaphysical windup is a bit mushy and nonsensical, but this is no worse than most. I found norrell’s transformation at the end a bit unbelievable, I’d like to have seen deeper development throughout the book of his guilt around introducing the main antagonist into the world, as I think this guilt was the motivator for him to eventually transform himself. Without this development, his transformation seemed a little pat. I’d give it an a- lots of loose ends, but I hope the author avoids doing a sequel as I don’t think wrapping up the loose ends will improve the story.

Rich is looking at solutions to go all voip at home.

Rich some things to look at:

* Mega list of sip products up at pulver.com * Another at Sipcenter * open source pbx – asterisk

The problem I struggle with is this – I have a lot of cheap handsets around the house connected by cat5 back to my wiring closet to my existing pbx. If i replace this pbx – what hardware bridges out to all these analog handsets? Or do I replace them (at great cost) with sip handsets – are there any really cheap sip handsets?

Some great posts I’ve found on the disaggregation of the PC in the home – we aren’t moving to bigger and bigger PCs in the home, but to elements of the computing environment spread all around:

* Furrygoat summary and his external storage box. His main point is all about pulling storage out of individual PCs and making it a household-wide resource. * From decafbad, these gumstix are very cool concepts, it would be nice if assembling computing at home was as easy as throwing a couple of these together. * A more general post from decafbad about single purpose devices in the home.

All the most aggressive users of technology I talk to are moving to disaggregation of storage in the home, despite the current designs of pcs which generally don’t encourage this disaggregation.