OK I’ve finally got some pictures to post for Halloween. I took all of these with a Sony DSC-F828 using the nightshot feature – IR illumination. Hence the odd coloration but I think it captures better the mood of the evening. Clickthru for bigger images.

I have to say I am not very happy so far.

I am using the iPod with a windows laptop that has no cd drive. So first i downloaded iTunes 4.7 and installed (well, updated the version of iTunes that was on the machine).

then I attached the photo iPod. oops, doesn’t work, i also need to download the iPod updater, install, and reboot.

Reattach the iPod. It is auto updated. Then I need to detach it and plug it into the wall so it completes the reflash.

Reattach again. All my songs and photos are on a network drive and iTunes claims they are not available. Well they are. Looked all over iTunes for an option to force it to recheck availability. Never found anything, finally selected all of my tracks and told itunes to play them. after a looooong time, itunes finally decided all the songs were available.

detach and reattach the ipod photo. songs updated automatically. now i grovel thru the options dialogs to point it at my photos. looonnng time synching as it downconverts all my photos.

ok i don’t really want downconverted photos, i want the ipod to be a backup of all my photos. click the option to bring over full copies and resync.

ok finally i am ready. i hook the ipod photo up to my tv thru an aux port and try a photo slideshow. hmmm, the photos show up on the ipod photo, but on the tv i only see the first photo, it never changes.

sigh. will try again later today.

UPDATE: The iPod support site has a relevant discussion which seems to have made my slideshows work. So I am happier, the iPod is fully functional now. Still a total pain to set up tho.

All over the map here. Probably some pithy summary to write about how apps and data of the future should be partitioned and hosted.

* Adam Bosworth’s Weblog: Evolution in Action: The user interface customized itself to the users needs, location, and data in a dynamic way through the magic of dynamic page layout. Today, a full ten years later, most windows apps still don’t do that. But heck they are only 2 or 3 or 4 generations evolved. Services, in the last decade, may have evolved 600 times by now all in reaction to what they have learned directly from customer use. A pithy observation. * From windley.com, Amazon’s Simple Queue Service. Interesting that AMZN would offer such a general purpose service. * Jon Udell on the myth of the one true device. Very wise. People don’t really need or want convergence of devices – they do want convergence of data. * The twilight of Passport. Some people never thought MSFT should offer a general service for the web, some people thought Passport should just make it easy to have a single login for all MSFT sites – which is where it seems things are ending up. * Jon Udell under gmail’s hood. * I haven’t really dug into the newsgator online feature allowing ratings on your site but it seems like a great notion. I love the idea of spewing ratings around (for articles, restaurants, books, etc) and then letting someone aggregate them, rather than having to post my rating and content to someone else’s site. * From windley.com again, a web-based slide show system. Hmm. How long til people can give up powerpoint and go to a server model? * Beinsync -- one of the N services that lets you keep folders in sync across the net.

…is not the presidential results. I am sure the country will muddle through whoever is inhabiting that office.

The thing that is of most local, immediate importance to me is the failure of I-884, the education funding initiative. I’m suprised about the totality of the failure here. Obviously the electorate does not like new taxes. It is obviously going to take way more effort to increase our educational funding – it is going to take unified statewide political support – both parties, all major state and federal elected officials – as well as private sector leaders to ever push any significant educational funding package through.

* I like the thinking behind The Project PC: A New Windows Form Factor? – I’m not sure you need wholly different form factors for different tasks, but I suspect there are rich veins to mine here * Matrix Raid explained up at Tom’s. I love this idea, what a great use of all the cheap mips and gigs i have. * Silenx fans – 11 db fans – i need to move all my machines to these. * Sonos digital music system – seems cool but I really want my ipod to be the controller…or I want the controller to work like an ipod when i am not at home.

I’ve had comments off for 4-5 days while i started to move towards typepad registration required … but i loved not having to deal with comments anymore since they have been 99% crap (either spam or “i need a product key”). i concluded i didn’t need them at all. send me mail, or send me a trackback (until trackback spam causes me to turn that off).

* Martin gets his first Skype spam * And he is getting into alternative fuels – biodiesel from algae, alternative fuel price index, energy lifecycles, and more up there. * Johnza has great observations on Nike vs New Balance, and the Dave Mockett site – I agree, I love this site * Rich pointed me towards justblogit, another great firefox plugin. * Rich is also into ipod gear and ipod knockoffs. We’re a 4 iPod family now, I understand Rich’s desire to get on board. * Rich summarizes the reviews for the book, and John mentions the upcoming talk at Entrepreneur U. * Martin points towards Eliyon, this is a pretty cool tool for people searching.

Oh yeah, we raised our 3rd fund at ignition

* 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?