First, an interesting article about profitability in the hard drive industry – classic commodity economics are at play, and as consumers we are all benefiting.

At the same time, enterprise storage functionality is transitioning down to consumers – external sata connectors allowing really high speed detached storage, lightweight nas solutions, a bunch of software raid solutions – but it is all way too hard to use for most people.

Seems to me like there is a path out of commodity pricing for the hard drive guys. The first player to bring enterprise storage functionality – replication, auto-backup, hot swapping, pooling, etc – to consumers and small businesses in a brainlessly easy to use package could be a big winner.

Per Kevin, Google News is now incorporating Fanblogs as of today. Congrats guys!

Places we’ve hit recently…

* Supreme in Madrona. Loved it! Great neighborhood place, super service, great food, a calm and relaxing place. * Serafina. The food was good, we’d go back, but it was very crowded and a little frantic. Good if you are in the mood for that. * Firenze. One of our consistent favorites. Not in a very promising space, but great food e.very time. * Queen City Grill. Another consistently good place. Not as trendy as some of the places in Belltown, but always good. * Flying Fish. Did the chef just change? We were very disappointed there recently. Every dish was bland and poorly cooked. It will take some dramatic change for us to ever go back.

* Adrian finds a great wireless blog, and Rich points to a lot of interesting wireless sites and companies. Ignition’s original investing focus was wireless data, and while we have broadened a bit, it is obviously still near and dear to our heart. * Cloudmark gets good reviews as the best anti-spam solution – and they’ve extended the product to deal with phish as well. * Martin continues his dive into all things biodiesel… * People talking about cellphones as the real competitor to the ipod – hence our investment in Melodeo * Rich discusses the import of the browser share shift to Firefox – the movement of influentials is very important…and Rich is playing around with headphone amps

Reardon reminded me recently that I read a lot of books. I looked over the list this year and was a little suprised myself. And what a lot of dreck in there, I wonder why I plow thru some of this.

But to save others from plowing thru the dreck, here is my short list of good reads this year. Some new, some quite old.

Fiction:

* The Glass Bead Game by Hesse. 3/4s of a year later and I can still recollect vast swathes of the book as well as particular scenes. Well worth the time. * The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Totally expected to hate it, thought it was just trendy, but this was a solid and memorable story. * A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. Great great characters, dying to be a movie. * Musashi from which I picked up my favorite quote of the year.

Non-fiction:

* The 9/11 Commission Report. Again, every US citizen should read this. * And while you are at it, read Imperial Hubris. At the very least, thought-provoking and internally consistent. * And lest these two depress you too much, read At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig for a view on a country and culture that is really screwed up.

* Via lockergnome, XrayPC – another useful tool for isolating spyware and other malware. Also note this review of spyware fighters. You probably should be running a couple tools on all your machines. The free tool as part of the yahoo toolbar is a great value. * Drivesitter. I’m not sure why but I love these tools that watch your harddisk and attempt to predict failures. I have backups of everything important and so a HD failure is not catastrophic for me but it is a time waster and I’d like to know if a failure is imminent. * MT Posting plugin for Newsgator. Promises to combine two of my favorite pieces of software – alas it doesn’t work for me yet due to my security config, I’m in contact with Newsgator support. * Mike points in here to PDF speedup – man everyone needs to run this, the adobe reader is jammed so full of crap that most of us don’t need. * Now that I have finished Halflife 2 missions (though am still vastly entertained by the online deathmatch – gravity guns rule!), here’s a whole trove of free games * Chris points to a bunch of nice editors, one of these will probably find its way onto my machines. * PortQueryUI from MSFT. Haven’t had time to play with this yet but will soon. * Another from MSFT – a tool to see if have a good MPEG decoder. Why does the Windows Media Player make your codec config such a mystery? It is hard to tell what you have installed, unless you grovel the registry.

Lastly a nice post from LarryO about hiding complexity. This sure feels like the reason a lot of software goes wrong…

I picked this up based on Rich’s reco. So the first 90% of Imperial Hubris just pissed me off, I thought the author was just being an apologist for Osama, explaining again and again the rationale for his actions and the support he enjoys.

But the close of the books was great. Two messages. One, we are at war, let’s quit pussyfooting around, let’s apply the full weight of our force on a focused effort to win. Two, let’s at least have a discussion about the policies that have forced us into war – our energy policies, our support for autocratic regimes, our unflagging support for Israel. Maybe these are the right policies, maybe not, but let’s at least have a discussion and agree that they are worth a war.

I feel a little shamed that I am not sacrificing much personally in this war. Here’s a pointer again to a great post about how we can support the troops.

Things I’d like to add to the blog…

* From Windley, the blogboxes look cool. * from the javascript weblog, Feedsplitter looks like a nice way to integrate RSS content. mt-rssfeed is another interesting tool… * this filemanager thingee seems cool…always looking for something better than ftp…at the extreme end of the spectrum i could host a personal wiki for my files, twiki seems interesting * lots of pointers and recos for log analysis tools in the comments here * Converting to fluid styles in mt templates – good overview. * Yet another color scheme generator – I’m a sucker for these. This one is pretty good. * Fixing the sidebar to go all the way to the bottom * A javascript image gallery – cool and simple.

Martin’s been doing a lot of posting on his experiences with online retailers this season. Thought I’d share mine:

* Best. Amazon, Cyberguys, REI, Red Envelope, Duluth Trading. None of these sites are price leaders but they accurately report what they have in stock and what you can really get. I hate sites that promise stock they don’t have. They all report status well on orders and let you know tracking numbers, etc. Red Envelope does a really nice job of reporting when a gift has been delivered to a recipient. Amazon has had some site flakiness the last couple of weeks but still has been good. Oh yes, Shutterfly should be in this list too, they have consistently gotten us our pictures in timely fashion – I can’t imagined wasting time printing pics myself. * Good. Newegg, Organize-Everything, Mountainmiser. Sites a little harder to navigate than the best, and online stock reporting not as accurate, but good communication and we were able to work things out. * So-so. Abesofmaine is a price leader, but their online inventory info is a sham – they claim to have everything but in fact…so they did call me and we were able to work out an order, and it showed up, but I don’t feel great about the experience. * Danger Danger. Computerstufffree on ebay – will I ever see my product? Purchased weeks ago and no communication about shipping status, transaction status. I’m nervous… * Incomplete. Colorado Kayak, watchclick. Transactions pending…

I love Marginal Revolution, always great reading.

* How to fix social security – “Did you get that right? Just stop boosting benefits.” It probably is that simple. * Economics and Religion – interesting thinking.

* More on digital camera file formats than you wanted to know. Hugely helpful to understand pros and cons of RAW, TIFF, and various levels of JPEG. * Genesis joypad. Old games never die. * VINC upscaling DVD player – I’ve noticed a couple of these recently, do I need one? * Wireless gamepads – boy i’d love to get rid of the console cables. None of them seem to work with the xbox headset tho? * The sonos system looks cool but i really really want my ipod to be the remote controller… * Media PCs I’ve noticed – FSC, HP (pdf). I’m not getting one this Christmas but soon…

* Windley’s tutorial on creating podcasts * Satellite iPod rumors

Rich and I are having a running discussion about the iPod and Apple’s ability to continue to dominate this business. Certainly the development of a community of developers and partners as the above links illustrate is a powerful asset for Apple. As a 4 iPod household, I’ve certainly voted with my feet. But…it is not a very sticky experience, I could move all my media to a competitive player tomorrow and lose very little. A network of related apps and solutions might start to create stickiness.

Kevin says Texas has gained enough points to jump over Cal. Man this sucks, I hate to see the Rose Bowl screwed again out of a Pac10/Big10 matchup.

UPDATE: sigh. Hey I hear this BCS thing sucks. Anyway, I have a hard time cheering for Michigan, but here’s hoping they thrash Texas. The politicking by Mack Brown and Texas supporters drove the BCS to a new low from which it will never recover.

* Nice story via Gizmodo on one of our investments, MobileLime * Rendition Networks acquired by Opsware, congrats! * Andy Sack points to a sarcastic NYTimes piece by friedman – as always a fun read. * Adrian found a nice roundup of wifobs and an incredibly valuable nokia headset adapter. * Johnza has a nice post on how to switch customers away from a competitor. Great lessons in here. Also a good post on PR around funding events. Across both these posts, I draw a great lesson – clear focus on your exact goal can always pay off. But you have to know your goal and you have to focus. * Rich as always has a cornucopia of tech posts – Yahoo Toolbar (I agree, you have to get this for the spyware tool), RockXP for PID recovery, a good set of podcasting links, his recos on must have software, the beginnings of his quest to build a htpc. how does the guy have time for a life and job?

For some reason my site is the top google listing for exclusive resorts, based on a simple old posting I did. Unclear why.

I recently refreshed the posting to have the correct url, after being contacted by one of the co-founders, a nice guy.

I’d really love to be a customer, their sites look great. It just doesn’t work for us now tho because a) we have limited vacation times, driven by conflicting school and scholastic sports schedules, and b) we just love a couple places – kona village resort, canyon ranch tucson – and don’t have the time or motivation to branch out.

But if we could, exclusive looks great.