Tried to install the Airport Express last night, I’ve seen lots of bloggers talking about – Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: Airport Express.

I basically think it doesn’t work with WinXP. The install wizard died on two different laptops, in both cases complaining that I needed to let Windows manage my wireless hardware, that 3rd party tools were interfering with my hardware. Well in both cases the machines were configed to allow Windows to manage the hardware so I don’t know what the “wizard”’s problem was. One machine was a dell laptop, one was a jvc japan import. I was finally able to connect to the airport express just using the regular windows connection software, and at that point the airport express admin utility would run. But I could never get the wizard to run, and could never reliably muck with the airport config. I gave up. Another hunk of inert silicon and plastic in the corner of my office.

Redfin mentioned in Seattle Times/PI paper today – what a cool real estate search site.

Winds of Change.NET: Watch the Teachers’ Feet

”[American] public school teachers are almost twice as likely as other parents to choose private schools for their own children, the study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found. More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools. In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools.”

Per PCMag, Zensys Z-Wave is Home Automation that Works. I’m going to order a kit and try it out – it can’t be any worse than x-10 – i generally don’t use x-10 at halloween time because the robustness and latency is just not up to snuff. But maybe this will be better.

A VC: Turning Commodity Into Scarcity – great insight – it is a core challenge for many businesses large or small – I remember back in the days when I worked in MSN, where the ad sales team worked hard to turn the huge inventory of unsold ad space into limited run special opportunities – “be one of our 5 Valentine’s Day partners”, “be one of our 3 premier blah-blah partners” – great work by that team to turn excess into scarcity. A great basic business lesson.

What a great story about the early days of Excite – Bnoopy: Persistence Pays, Part 2 – never say die. Joe’s blog is generally a great read so far.

I guess we can cancel the election – Mahalanobis – Bush is the winner. From Olivier

Candy Labs - AppRocket - Download – wow, very fast.

Acrobat Speedup – awesome!!! speeds up reader loading by a huge amount.

Karen’s Power Tools – a whole bunch of useful toys

Outlook Attachment Options – finer grained control over outlook’s attachment blocking

Broken URL fixer – easy fixup of those busted urls you get in mail

Good article on the historical origins of Ohio-Michigan rivalry – thanks Mike. (The link on the second page to the alternative lyrics to “Hail to the Victors” is busted, but you can find the words here (along with a huge number of other pejorative versions of fight songs))

Per LarryO, a lot of people are running XP in non-admin mode at MSFT. Some great pointers in his article – Aaron’s blog and his post on RunAs. I’ve had problems making non-admin work on the machine in our family room – mostly when I am at the machine and I want to do something not permitted – I have to dig into this RunAs post. Particularly as it applies to running CPLs and manipulating network connections.

Just finished this bio of Ludwig II. Probably mostly of interest to folks with my name and heritage (tho my ancestors left Germany long before the events of Ludwig II’s life), but it was pretty fascinating. His patronage of Wagner, of architecture, his erratic behaviour, the plot against him, his mysterious death – a lot of interesting threads. I’m more motivated to visit Bavaria now…

Zdnet article on intel’s latest investments including Pure Networks (I’m on the board).

From Fanblogs this week so far:

Conventional Wisdom – who’s up, who’s down.

Just 46 teams left in the single elimination college football championship tournament. Go Bucks!

Minnesota and Purdue are playing out of their minds…

The FanBlog XIV – the most considered poll in the nation.

Big 10 early grades…Kudos to Purdue, Shame on Iowa.

Andy starts a blog – A Sack of Seattle – and a company – Judy’s Book (I’m on the board).