I’ve been out of the country for 6 weeks and am just back to build a new PC. I am disappointed I can’t yet get all the goodies I’ve been lusting for – PCI Express, BTX motherboards, the new NVidia and ATI graphics cards – it all seems to be vaporware. Fry’s had to send back all the PCI Express motherboards they got from ASUS, i guess they were disasters. The graphics cards are nowhere to be seen. Bummer.

seattlepi.com Microsoft Blog: Silverberg on open source

Phil Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog – I have to try squeak sometime.

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Venture capitalists muse on new blog – way to go martin.

OK these are the books I hit in the second half of the vacation. Some very memorable reads in here.

* “The Good Soldier”:amazon. What a f#cked up set of people. Very interesting view into historical class dynamics. And you have to addmire the writing craft – faulkner but lighter. But I can’t say I really loved it, tho the first line is a great draw. * “362 Belisle Street”:amazon. Really crappy beach ghost story. Dumb, No theme. Go read stephen king instead. * “The Dante Club”:amazon. Good historical mystery. The Nicholas Rey character was quite compelling – first black policeman in boston, immediately after civil war, a political appointee, dealing with racism while solving the crime. I’d like to read more about him. * “My Friend Maigret”:amazon. Good atmospheric mystery, a midpoint book in a long series involving this detective. I’d read more in the series. * “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”:amazon. Completely unexpected story, I understand why this has gotten such good reviews. I didn’t expect to like this, I thought it was just a trendy choice, but really a great story. * “The Great Gatsby”:amazon. Another set of completely f#cked up people, for most of the book I thought it much weaker than the good soldier. But the last chapter, reflecting on the events of the book, was very insightful and memorable. * “The Handmaid’s Tale”:amazon. Wow, just creepy. Saw the movie years ago and was creeped by it, the book is much more impactful.

I’ve gotten several emails about I-884, a ballot initiative to add some funding for the public schools. I’ll look at on my return, seems like a good thing.

From my buddy Sam Hobson – a pumpkin case mod. You could make a permanent version out of a Funkin. Cool!

We visited the gardens and estate on Isola Bella today. Stunning! I was not very impressed with the Lakes District at the start of the day but I was so won over. The estate and gardens here were stunning, more memorable for us than Versailles – because they are on a more huiman scale, and show the care of the designers and staff better. Every room in the estate seemed to make sense – we could see living in this structure. Whereas in Versailles it felt like the architect/builders used up all their energy just making it big, and they had nothing left for the interior, so they just filled up the building with innumerable square rooms. Anyway this isn’t about Versailles, this is about Isola Bella – worth a visit! And we like Lake Maggiore much better than Lake Como – the water is cleaner, the taxi boats are nicer, Stresa is a nice hopping off point.

As always, lots of reading on vacation.

* Brazzaville Beach. Great great characters, a great story. Good reco from my buddy Tim Velegol. This will stay on my bookshelf. * Gideon. A good page turner, a good way to burn plane/train time. But two weeks later I can’t remember much about it. * Moon of Ice. Stupid. This is just a political essay, emitted as conversation by crappy characters in a stupid plot. Like the worst of Heinlein’s writing. Not sure why it has a decent rep. * The Dark Frigate. A great yarn. Won the Newbury Award back when it meant something – nowadays it seems like they give out awards every year, typically to a book published recently, whether there is a deserving book or not. Seems like they ought to wait 20 years or so before they award a book. Anyway tho, this is a good yarn. * Conquistador. A decent alternate history yarn with some fun, but way too much blathering about how different the ecology of North America might have been if Europeans hadn’t invaded in the 1500/1600s, and not enough insight into the implications. * Manifold: Space. I’ve seen this before. Average guy stumbles onto discovery that involves the very nature of the world/galaxy/universe, and gets drawn into saving the universe from destruction. Nothing distinctive about character or plot. Yawn. * Chindi. Kind of like Rendezvous with Rama – characters stumble onto massive functioning alien artifacts with incomprehensible purposes. A little more action than Rama. OK. * In a Dry Season. Good mystery. Something like 10th in a series from this author. Interesting main character, good plotting. I’d like to read more in the series but this one was fine standing alone.

Oh another vaca highlight – the complete works of william shakespeare (abridged). Hilarious. Worth seeing, I’d love to see their other productions as well.

I’m out on an extended vaca right now. Having a great time. Some of the personal highlights:

* The WW1 trench exhibit in the Imperial War Museum in London was very cool. Felt like I was at Disneyland, it was a nice simulation. * Loved everything about Paris. We stayed in the Saint Germain area and this was great for us, easy walking to lots of shopping and restaurants. Oh and Monet’s house and garden in Giverney was a great trip. Oh and also loved the catacombs, and the night time boat trip on the Seine. * Le Mas Entremont is a great hotel outside of Aix, and Aix is a great base from which to hit a lot. Avignon, Chateau D’If, roman ruins, etc. * Went rafting from castellane – beautiful town. * St Paul de Vence outside of Cannes is a great preserved hilltown, beautiful.

More later…internet connectivity is tough.

Nice SWOT analysis of Buckeye defense up at Bucknuts.com.  Certainly a lot of reason for hope this year despite the many losses to the NFL – linebacker in particular looks like a strength.  DBs and Punter are the big concerns – given OSU’s style of play the last couple years, a weak punting game could be a huge problem.

Next week Bucknuts will provide a similar treatment to the offense.

(Cross posted at Fanblogs)

Hey this CallerIP (via Lockergnome) thing is kind of cool.  Nice visual view of who is connected to your system right now, integrated whois info.

CPU Mag seems to consistently have interesting articles and ads in it.  My favorite pc mag read.  Stuff in the recent issue:

• Multimonitor displays – wow this would be fun – a wall of displays – that would be the way to play Far Cry.
• Newsmap – a great way to browse google news, you get a real sense of what is hot
• This Zalman CPU cooler gets good reviews for very low noise output.
• Cooligy may be bringing even better cooling systems to market this year tho.
• A tool just to remove CoolWebSearch variants.  That is how bad spyware has become.  Now you need a whole suite of tools to attack it.

Just ordered The Creation of the Media. Found it on Freedom to Tinker along with this pithy observation:

In his limited space, Fallows leaves out one pattern noted by Starr that carries obvious lessons for us. When U.S. policy was at its best, it refused to give the titans of one technology control over the next technology that came along. For example, the Post Office was not given control of the telegraph; Western Union did not control the telephone; and AT&T was locked out of radio. The lessons for us now, when the masters of old technologies, such as the movies and recorded music, want to control Internet technologies, should be obvious.