Kevin posts that Facilities are the new ACC battleground.  Facilities, along with staff, are the great unregulated expense items left to college football programs.  You can’t stock up on players due to scholarship limits, you can’t pay players.  But you can spend boatloads of money on first class facilities which are a significant recruiting draw.  And you can spend boatloads on staff which can provide a significantly better level of service for potential recruits and current players. 

The leadership programs in the ACC, SEC, and Big10 are all spending significantly in these areas.  I don’t know much about the Big-12 but I’d guess they are there to.  Now go back to my earlier post about Pac-10 budgets – the Pac-10 seems to have a real budget shortfall, the schools are going to have to take large steps to remain competitive.

* UV Paints – multiple colors, and can be used to give 3d effect * Hot Wire Foam Factory – somewhat expensive tools for carving and shaping foam * Making foam tools – the cheaper way to go to carve foam * Kreepers -- a variety of manufactured props - expensive but more debugged than the stuff i build * Flailing motion – a nice little system to build. * Foam for prop construction – probably beyond my ambitions but if you want to create really large foam props…

* Knoppix v3.4 out. Downloading now via bittorrent. Good article here on using Knoppix in disaster scenarios. * Java Desktop System V2 out. Somewhat intriguing but I am not willing to shell out $50/year to try it. Sun really needs a cheaper license for personal/educational/developer use. Otherwise everyone is going to be using Knoppix and its kin, or Longhorn. * OK this was at WinHEC – PCI express over external cabling. Love the idea of modular PCs. * ATI responds to Nvidia announces with the X800. With lower power consumption and single slot design, seems like ATI will crush Nvidia in the marketplace. * Silent PCs at Hush and OMWave. Interesting, both Euro companies, is the silent pc design point gaining ground faster in Europe? * Ewrt – alternative firmware for the Linksys WRT54G – seems like lots of hacking going on around this hardware.

Various posts that I found compelling:

* Evan WIlliams found this anecdote: “A 14-year-old from California, Justin Fong, asked what advice Buffett and Munger would give a young person on how to be successful. ‘It’s better to hang out with people better than you,’ said Buffett. ‘Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.’ Added Munger drily, ‘If this gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group, the hell with ‘em.’” * Seb has a list of visionaries he likes to follow * Tyler Cowen on subjective time – wow, 70+% of my life is over as subjectively perceived. * Over at gadgetopia, a pointer to PHPMath – a lot of interesting math implemented in PHP. * Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Here’s the stuff I noted out of the flood of coverage:

* John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Incubation Platform – i think a TON of isvs would love to be able to store user state data in the google store and get the benefits of ubiquitous availability, reliability, etc. * Speculation on how google will spend all their capital dollars in ‘04. Not very deep but an interesting question to ask. * Mitch Kapor’s view on the filing. Personally I find the dual-class structure a little worrying, I doubt I will put money in. * Surprising fact about Google’s license to the pagerank algorithm. * a list of google-watching blogs.

Lots of stuff to read here…just some for the things I noticed:

* All the slide decks. Update: those are apparently the ‘03 decks. The ‘04 papers are here. Thanks to Sam. * Jon Udell on web services and discovery – some people are upset because this is not Rendezvous * A review of the latest Longhorn build – “Castles” – do we really need another organizing metaphor for networks? More details on the UI bits here. * Server futures – the VM stuff is interesting * Lots of media center push – “…the PC is running out of time.” – not sure I buy that. * Tiers of UI experience – shades of Win286, Win386, etc. Interesting that the tiering is being driven by the graphics processors and not the CPUs. Will this tiering be transparent to ISVs – will XAML work across all these experiences? * Whirlwind virtual tour of WinHEC. * NGSCB is out. No it’s not. * Summary of Allchin’s talk – have you ported your driver to 64 bits yet? * Hidef audio driver released – this seems important but I have to admit I am confused about exactly what it is.

Just going thru the dogeared pages on the pile of old mags on my desk…

* Ceramic knives, for instance the Kyoceras. * wall warts – great at halloween for easy conversion of AC to DC – Jameco sells them cheaply in a variety of capacities. * Rainlender – good looking desktop calendar. * quiet cooling, i need this for my next pcs, my office right now is a wind tunnel. Incredibly expensive Zalman cases, water cooling systems by Innovatek. * Exact Audio Copy. Next time I rip, this is the way to go. And i need the Lame Encoder to go with it.

Recommended to me by a smart econ guy at UW – IDEI Presentation – some great papers up here in the Working Papers area.

VCBall, and this is a great article on regression analysis of startups. Success is correlated with good team bonding and behaviour more than anything else…

Tong just gave me a copy of MSFT’s Virtual PC – $10 at the company store, what the heck. But kind of hilarious, the box and website are in denial about Linux – there is no mention of Linux as a guest OS – even tho they proudly mention their support for MSDOS and OS/2 Warp.

VMware meanwhile is $189 (that price needs to come down!) and has clear support for linux as host or guest.

Sam turned me onto this site – UrbanDictionary.com: Define Your World – a community-driven guide to slang. Very helpful!

I picked up a JVC Interlink 7310 at dynamism.com. A great machine for the kind of portable computing I do – small, easy to carry around, but a reasonable keyboard and reasonable screen and reasonable performance. I don’t understand why this class of machine is not sold in the US market, I had an old VAIO with this form factor and loved it, and I love this one even more.

(I used it Sunday at a Starbucks in some crummy little strip mall and was suprised to find no less than 4 WIFI networks available to me beyond the T-Mobile fee-based network. Starbucks has to be happy, I still went to their store and bought a drink, even tho I didn’t use their network).

Good info up at The Health Care Blog on a variety of topics. Got there by searching for “Lipitor blog” – and I have to say, getting a prescription for Lipitor makes me feel old.

Haven’t harvested the halloween sig i follow for good ideas recently. Time to start that back up. Here are some interesting ides:

* Just use a loud bass rumble for a good atmospheric effect. * RIP the soundtracks from game CDs (Doom for instance), they have great atmospheric sound * a cubase plugin for controlling props via MIDI – Delusional Creature Controller. (ok this has nothing to do with sound effects but i drew some connection between sound and midi) * Dungeonkeeper is another PC game with apparently a great atmospheric soundtrack * Some people have been locating their air compressors within their haunt – the sound of the compressor firing up can give people a good startle – great idea, I have mine hidden behind the house right now.

Again harvesting the halloween sig, a bunch of ideas for prop building:

* When looking for scrap juicers as motors in props (for instance an axworthy ghost), look for metal body juicers – a lot tougher than the plastic juicers. * Use a Fishtank bubbler as source of bubbles in mad scientist lab – cheap and easy! * Lots of folks using windshield wiper motors for props. Some very nice characteristics – back and forth repetitive motion, speed and intermittency controllable. Trying to achieve this kind of output with a standard rotary motor would be very complicated. * How to demonify a skull * 4 bar simulation software – very helpful for pneumatic design * a bunch of skulls and skull sections for use in projects. Oh and a source for inexpensive skulls in bulk.