* A tale of two condiments – more than you ever wanted to know about the design, production, and marketing of mustard and catsup. I am not a catsup user but this made me reconsider. * The future of television advertising – interesting thoughts. the one thread I find interesting is the notion of late binding of commercials at the point of consumption – rather than creating one commercial that is slammed into a show at the point of broadcast, perhaps we will move to a model where commercials are inserted much later and on a more personalized basis. Interesting.

Great weather! Near full moon, clear and crisp, no rain, very little wind. Perfect for fog creation and fog persistence…

Had our first visitors saturday nite – friends. Plus a lot of drivebys that evening.

Sunday the traffic started early – 4pm – some friends, and parents bringing children who were too scared to come at night.

Crush started at 6. Last visitors at 9:20. We had a shopping cart and a half of candy, and had to start rationing at 8:00. We ended up with just a dozen pieces of candy left.

Lots of ?scream? masks. Lots of teenagers with the slightest attempts at costumes. Princesses, witches. Martial arts.

Best props – fog as always, kids love fog. My demented disfigured monk costume, a lot of people thought I was a prop. Lots of tombstones and skeletons. Our haunted talking tree – popular with all ages.

Bugs: Pneumatics good but finicky. Need to invest a lot more in the offseason on testing and construction of pneumatics. Audio – sound quality great but inflexible – discrete sound sources hardwired via speakerwire to outdoor speakers. Really need a virtual soundboard and retargetable delivery over ip, but weather and power present issues.

Pix later this week.

Comments busted while i disable anonymous and enable typekey. even with blacklisting and required approval, just too much crap to deal with. I may turn off comments completely as there hasn’t been anything interesting in them in weeks and weeks.

I can’t get fiber service to my house unlike some people. I don’t have an HDTV DVR (though I do have HDTV). None of my PCs are watercooled. I am not currently using a cameraphone. I fear that I am losing my geek credentials.

In case you are stopping by, here’s when props and effects will be up and running:

* Wednesday Night: 7pm-830pm. All lighting; primary fog system; Thunder & Lightning. * Thursday Night: 630pm-8pm. All lighting; primary fog system; Thunder & Lightning. * Friday Night: 6:30pm-9pm. Everything – all lighting, all fog, all sound systems, all props. * Saturday Night: 8pm-930pm. Everything – all lighting, all fog, all sound systems, all props. * Halloween Night: 530pm-930pm. Everything – all lighting, all fog, all sound systems, all props.

* Halflife 2 coming and will require online activation – we just downloaded the new counterstrike variant with the HL2 engine – oh my god does it look gorgeous, it has toppled Far Cry as the best looking game ever – on an x800 xt anyway. * Lamp stacks a popular notion * Save this for later – how to fix Media Center autoplay DVD behaviour * Monitor IM traffic on your network – if you don’t want to see it in tomorrow’s newspaper, don’t type it. * FlightSim history – I remember the old Apple ][ cassette version, just stick figures for mountains. You could fly off the stick figure grid and just start randomly flying thru Apple ][ memory, and the game did it’s best to render the contents as stick figure geography.

Found via LarryO’s blog – Jim Horne and Danny Glasser now blogging. From Lan Manager, Windows for Workgroups, Messenger days. Danny you need a feed…

* Photo iPod launched – my order is in * The Bose Sounddock – cool looking.

It is fascinating to watch Apple and Microsoft hollow out the consumer electronics industry. Apple building from the iPod base, gradually wiping out all the other audio (and video) products in the home and car. Microsoft starting from the WinXP Media Center edition, wiping out all the other home video and audio products. Then you have the content owners using DRM to force their proprietary decoder hardware into the home. A fascinating collision of giants. As much as I love Apple’s products – how is their strategy any different than the Mac strategy vs PCs, and how did that work out for Apple?

From Paul Thurott, the Firefox marketing team is aiming for 10% share: Bart Decrem, the marketing contact for the Mozilla Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Friday that he expects the browser’s market share to reach 10 percent by the end of 2005. “I think we’ll get to 10 percent over the next year. We don’t have 10 percent of the Web at the moment, but we have the momentum,” claimed Decrem.

C’mon guys, get aggressive! Strike while the iron is hot. You should strive to get to 30% over the next year. If you don’t set an aggressive goal, you won’t get great results.

* Rich and John’s book launch is looking good… * Rich points to discussion of Intel dualcore plans…I feel totally bad that we did not invest in a dualcore-focused software company, I think this would have been a great trend to latch onto. * Martin gets the new blackberry and is reasonably happy with it * Rich is moving to MT 3.x and has collected pointers to some problems and solutions. * John Zagula’s thoughts on blogs, brands, and other top of mind issues.

From interview on Microsoft Watch:

_I actually don’t know what goes on in large corporations any more. But there’s something strange about SharePoint. Whenever you have a technology that’s sold only to the enterprises ? SharePoint, InfoPath or whatever ? it’s always going to be at a competitive disadvantage, in terms of mind share than something that gets sold to the whole world.

For example, nobody’s ever going to use SharePoint in college. Ever. So no startup is ever going to use SharePoint because none of the kids who leave college are going to know it. This was BEA’s big problem. Kids in college, when they want to learn about Web development, they learn Perl, PHP, maybe Microsoft’s (ASP.Net) stack. They don’t learn about Domino or BEA. So the only way those guys have hope of getting mind share in the market is to have an extensive sales force. They’re always going to be sweeping back the waves against the force of the cheap, easy way of getting started in college._

Dead on.

* Spiderman reviews crayons from angiemckaig.com * Worldometers from the Scobleizer

* Nimcat eliminates PBX – pretty cool, the PBX functionality is distributed throughout the phones, they autodiscover each other. too pricey tho at $300+ per desk. * Grassroots ISP including IPTV and VOIP – a great low end ISP offer. * Jon Udell reminds of the difference between VOIP and computer telephony and the value of computer telephony

All makes me hopeful that as we move to IP telephony, a lot of innovative energy could be freed up and applied to the market.

* WinXP Media Center 2005 unbundled – hey anyone (rich?) want to go in on a 3-pak with me? * Raymond on WMI – this scriptomatic thing sounds cool * fireFTP -- an FTP plugin for Firefox * Slashdot thread on VNC software – I didn’t know all these choices existed. * Firefox tips and tricks * 43folders – lots of cool mac software – have to buy a mac again * Rich is playing Call of Duty UO – hey rich try Tribes Vengeance as well. * Nanocrew blog – all kinds of good DRM avoiding links

* Rich and John’s book is out – big congrats guys! * Rich is looking at new phones. Hey rich a lot of people seem to like the new audiovox smartphone * Andy on mission statements – andy is a consistently thoughtful guy