Good article on the dairy lobby. Interesting (in a sad way) how money influences our government’s dietary recommendations.

Crap! lost all the keys to one of our cars…disaster…per the dealership we have to have the car towed in! (late model car with a key coded to the car). Street Keys seems to offer a better way, we’ll give it a whirl.

Adrants: Oprah Show One Big Car Commercial – if you didn’t see this show, it is worth finding it on someone’s tivo (or finding a torrent) and watching it. The audience reaction was just incredible.

Rich recommends PHPEdit. Phil uses Eclipse, pythonwin, emacs, and sometimes dreamweaver mx. I know lots of people used to use slickedit. Sam likes source insight.

Most of these are overkill for me, I just need lightweight html, xml, perl, php editing. Maybe rich is right with phpedit. tho i love all the support around eclipse.

I’ve started to eliminate MSN Messenger and Windows Messenger clients from all my machines. Motivated to do so by a couple problems:

* too aggressive toast behaviour, when I am playing a directx game i don’t want any toast thank you. (AIM has this problem too). * poor idle detection. people were sending me messages when i was not at my machine. * wrong strategy for presence detection. messages were going to the wrong machine (I use 4 at work and 5 at home regularly) and i would see messages days after they arrived. AIM has this right, they don’t try to figure out presence, they just MIRV the message to all your signed-in locations.

If you want to IM me, i’m jhludwig on AIM.

International? 7300 CXT; – nice pointer from Sam.

Following up on my earlier post, I installed. Very simple to install, very clear doc. I’ve done my first stupid little trial use – my Halloween schedule in a sidebar on the right. Obviously need to work on formatting but this is very cool.

Dark Voyage : A Novel by Alan Furst is a moody little corner of wwII, where the nazis aren’t so evil, the allies aren’t so allied, and there are a whole host of nations in between (spain, portugal, finland, sweden, switzerland, ireland, …) who are playing their own games. A lot richer in mood and hero character than many wwii spy/adventure stories.

Note to self – try out the getxml plugin as a better way to integrate football scores, standings, etc.

Best find at hd today – buckets of “oops” paint – paint they mixed up mistakenly and are selling for a fraction of the price of regular paint. Great for my first project of the season – boarding up my windows.

OK I upgraded. Pardon any problems. The default stylesheet for the admin interface seems to be screwed in firefox and in ie.

UPDATE: ok i fixed the problem with the admin interface, config problem on my end.

UPDATE: i’ve substantially tightened up my comment acceptance practices to deal with spam, i was flooded over the weekend. i may loosen as i get comfortable with typekey, moderation features, etc.

3 machines at work, 7 at home, and I occasionally need a spreadsheet on all of them. Office is too expensive and overkill, OpenOffice is overkill. I need something lightweight. Trying out Spread32 at the moment. A couple other choices at tinyapps as well including visicalc. Actually I’d love a server-based spreadsheet, a self-hosted open source version of this, so i wouldn’t have to install anything or worry about moving my spreadsheet files around with me.

Must subscribe to phil’s blog. Also his 411 app is way cool – makes me want to develop a blackberry app.

Well the Bucks won by an un-Tressel like margin of 21 points. And the offensive numbers in aggregate look good – 462 total yards, 5.1 yards per rush. And some good individual plays by Holmes, Hamby, Childress, Ross and Pittman on offense. But really the offense looked tentative the entire game, and error-prone (4 fumbles, 2 INTs as I recall). Zwick was forcing the ball a lot, Ross with the exception of his one long run didn’t look materially better than last year. The team needs to grow a lot in the next couple weeks or the Big 10 season could be tough.

Defensively the team looked tentative the first quarter, no surprise given the number of players gone from last year. But then the guys put together three strong defensive possesions in a row in the 2nd quarter and seemed to find its legs. And was helped by a truly terrible Cincy punting game – the punter kept hitting line drives that skipped through the end zone, great for distance, but lousy for field position.

The best thing about the game – OSU was clearly in command despite all the tentative play and mistakes. With growth they could be a great team this year.

Complete Big 10 results and discussion over at Big 10 College Football - Fanblogs.com: Big 10 Results 9/5

Just One Look by Harlan Coben is the first I’ve read by him, and it was pretty gripping. OK not that original – an ordinary family’s life comes unwound when a secret from the past surfaces; not everyone is who they seem to be; eventually the cops, US Attorney’s office, and organized crime families are all drawn in. But nicely paced and interesting characters. The resolution is a little weak but still a good yarn, I’d pick up more by Coben.