Nothing Like It In The World by Ambrose is a good but not great recount of the building of the transcontinental railroad. A great factual overview, a good sense of the broad themes of the time and effort, but I’d have liked a little more depth on some of the characters involved.

It is very fascinating and topical in its discussion about the government incentives – land and capital – that were provided to the entrepreneurs. These incentives were tremendously lucrative, and they had many good and bad impacts – a speedy buildout of the railroad, large private capital commitments that might otherwise not have happened, an increase in the value of public lands, and a huge amount of financial abuse. It is interesting to parallel this to buildouts of our time – the internet buildout, the glacially slow buildout of broadband in the US, emerging private exploitation of space. In the broadband arena, the government has not created the incentives for rapid buildout, rather they have left the buildout in the hands of conservative incumbents and well see where we are.

For private space exploitation, the government hasn’t done much either. I wonder if we could stomach the abuses and the human deathtoll from a highly accelerated buildout – certainly the railroad was built with a somewhat cavalier approach to the lives of the workers, could we stomach this in today’s society?

* Wired article about the long, profitable tail of publishing. Not shocking perhaps but a good read. * Buy your place in a novel. $150 currently. * Ross Mayfield on productivity and value shift – This is accelerated commoditization, where value shifts to people; and managing risk and complexity.

Interesting to think about given the current discussion of offshoring in our economy – these links make me feel that there is plenty or work yet to do that is not readily moved offshore. It does require a different kind of education…

So my dad is building a house and wants some advice on cabling – what should he run, what topology. He is building from scratch, all the walls will be open, so he can do whatever he wants.

So based on my experience and the wise counsel of sam and rich, here is what I’d do dad.

* establish a wiring closet in your basement. All your exterior lines will enter here – phone, cable, satellite, etc. * run all cabling in a star topology from this closet. * as a basic cable pack, try to use standard ?structured cable? – cat5e + 2 coax, can be purchased in a single bundled cable (http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat%5Fid=314&sku=43075) which makes install easier. With this setup you can handle 4 phone lines, gbit enet, and two video feeds (for say dual tuner tivo boxes) * do not let anyone talk you into cat5 instead of cat5e * make sure the coax and all coax connectors/splitters are HDTV friendly – ie 1ghz parts, not the old 900mhz parts. I had to replace a bunch of splitters on my patch panel this year to allow for HDTV signals, you don’t want to do this. * if you have extreme video needs you may want to run additional rg6 (coax) cables to your home theater setup. Sam explains: currently, four RG6 cables are required to support unlimited DSB devices (four cables come out of the satellite dish; these are multiplexed onto a single cable for each tuner). That number could increase as the number of LNB’s increase (currently 3 for HD DirecTV). I recommend running at least 4 RG6 cables to each location that will potentially host a multi-tuner receiver (e.g., Tivo). * run your standard cable pack to any spot you have a tv or phone – family room, den, kitchen, bedrooms, basement, garage. For rooms that may see a lot of use – family room, office – run two or three sets. * and I’d run an extra set of cables and leave them unused in the attic or crawlspace for the family room and office. When you remodel later and want cables in a different place, you can easily pull the unused set down.

What about wireless lan and wireless phones? Well I have a whole pile of discarded wifi and wireless phone gear at my house. I personally am unsatisfied with coverage, quality, and security/complexity. I’d reserve wireless use for particular rooms – you can always put a mini wifi access point in a room for wifi in that room if you need it at some point. But as long as your walls are open, I’d run the cabling.

What about multiroom audio? I don’t think running special analog cables is worth it, the scenarios that this supports are pretty limited. You can always slap a small pc or remote media player box like the squeezebox in additional rooms if you want access to your music collection in these rooms.

What about intelligent lighting? Well I don’t have it and haven’t missed it. Sam has some more sage advice if you want to go down this path: If home automation is of interest, I’d consider adding a control line to each switch box (cat5, for example). At a minimum, make sure power, neutral, and ground are available at every switch box (light switch-boxes sometimes are missing neutral or ground), so that powered components can be added at the box.

Via Winds of Change, The Lessons of Noah’s Ark.

And from my Dad: There are only two essential tools you must have in your toolbox – wd40, and duct tape.

* If it is supposed to move and it doesn’t – wd40 is the answer. * If it is not supposed to move and it does – duct tape.

* Both Paul Thurrott and Gadgetopia point towards the Gmail shell extension for Windows * Via engadget, Google SMS launches * Of course, the Google desktop launched and Jon Udell has found ways to let it search firefox history

Like the rest of the planet I installed the Google Desktop over the weekend. No noticeable perf drag on my system.

I had read that it would not work against network drives, but I have ?My Documents? folder pointed to a network drive and indexing worked fine, ben pointed this nice fact out to me. I’d like it to pick up some other network shares and I wonder if it can be coerced into doing so – I don’t see any ini file, the only likely seeming reg key is an empty key named CRAWL_DIRS, I wonder what it does?

As rich and ben and I discussed in email, we all noted the contrasts between the google desktop and winfs (and its intellectual precursor, ofs in cairo). Hmmm, there may be some architectural and project management lessons to be learned here. A light layer on existing storage both works and is shipping. Further benefits will accrue as developers and users provide fb, allowing google to incrementally improve and expand the facility – while winfs is still not shipping.

Great progress this weekend – huge help from my dad who was visiting.

All sound systems deployed and tested. All props deployed. Most lights deployed. Pneumatic cable routed. Fog cabling deployed.

The huge outstanding work item is to deploy my dmx control system. Run cabling, hook up all dimmers, debug the control program. Oh and actually test the pneumatic effects.

I was ready to flail away emotionally at the Buckeyes again, but Dan over at Wizblog has done a nice job rationally dissecting the performance. I have to agree, you have to pin the current level of performance on offensive coaching staff primarily, and on Tressel for backing them up. It is time to shake up the starting lineup and the staff.

Misery. You have to go back to like 1940 for a thrashing this bad.

What do the Buckeyes get awarded those leaves on their helmets for exactly? I thought it was good play. It must be for grooming, tidy lockers, and attendance. Because clearly the team is completely dysfunctional.

* External audio solutions – the pc is electrically noisy and the amp circuits on sound cards are not that great – maybe we should be moving all this functionality out of the pc (or the electical/amp characteristics of a pc should be more like an audio amp) * One man’s attempt at widescreen gaming. Salivate. * Raid in a single drive bay. I guess this is the natural complement to a dual core processor – dual core hard drives! * Jeff Ort on color management. Man this stuff is complicated. * A PC PVR with 6 tuners. * Saiteck PC Gamer keyboard. I totally need this.

So what is the theme to all this? Besides “stuff that I want to buy?” My observation is that the PC Hardware industry continues to innovate like mad, and is going to wipeout all the standalone media boxes, settop boxes, etc.

I’m a little late on this…

* Coverage on CNN about the molten rock emerging * Forest Service Cam * Seattle Times – “eerie red glow” at night

* Apple’s latest results – when will they rename the mac to be be the…macpod? epod? deskpod? * Podcasting tutorial – seems like podcasting may blow away all the other internet streaming audio services * iPodder 1.0 released * an older article on how to move ipod tunes between computers – helpful for me.

Don’t forget your pet – I am sure they love the experience.

* Are asset price bubbles a good and normal thing? The core idea being that “A bubble is good for growth because it creates a low cost environment for experimentation.” * Appropriate technology for the third world. Inspiring, certainly worthy of a MacArthur award.

* Rich and John have revved the marketing playbook site – looks nice to me * Andy is looking for help at Judy’s Book * Rich analyzes what’s going on with small speakers – everyone is climbing all over everyone else in an attempt to bind themselves to the iPod success. * Andy is thinking about how to make Judy’s Book indispensable – great point – people don’t have time these days for products that are just nice to have – they only have time for products that are critical to their life.

OK there are other things going on as well but these are what caught my eye.

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips – a cleverly and artfully constructed book, but ultimately not that interesting. It is pretty obvious where the story is going, the characters aren’t that memorable, I’ve read better stories about psycho main characters.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. This month’s trendy read, it started out with an interesting premise and interesting characters. But the bad guys are one-dimensional stereotypes, and the plot is explained as a typical Nazi world domination scheme, instead of a more morally ambiguous and perhaps realistic situation. I’ve read better Nazi world domination novels.