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.

Oryx and Crake reminded me very much of Gore Vidal’s Kalki (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) which I read back in the 70s when it was published. Both have a very haunting view of humanity decimated by a genius who thinks he has a better plan for the world. Both extremely sad, Kalki will probably stick with me better perhaps because I read it first. But O&C was a good read too; had I not encountered Kalki, I would have considered O&C one of the best apocalyptic stories around. I don’t really think we are on the path to the dystopia described in O&C but a good read.

* Ed Felten on Stopgap Security – great pragmatic counsel on securing systems. A constant stream of judicious speedbumps may be a cost effective strategy. * Blosxom 3.0 alpha available. I continue to find this solution compelling and may switch to it one day. 15K of code for a full featured blogging system. * Ross Mayfield on making do with less. Startups that start out frugal tend to stay frugal. * NETI@Home – what a great reuse of the SETI@Home name. * Dan Bricklin on software licensing. Good thought trail for startups. * Longhorn Security: Focus on Least Privilege. Man I hope they get this one right. As the article points out, it is nearly useless today to set up a non-admin account on XP because so many apps and utilities break. * The Google File System. * Furl. I continue to not get Furl but a lot of people seem to like it. To me, my blog fulfills the same need, but maybe the cacheing feature would be worth something, my blog doesn’t have that feature certainly. * Searching with A9, vivisimo, kart00. Still a lot of innovation happening in the search space. How durable is Google really? Search is so important, every startup and bigco is going to continue to throw development dollars at the problem.

Spent a good part of yesterday eradicating this Virus from one of our machines – it was pretty invasive. One virus removal tool was not enough, I had to do multi-passes and some hand scrubbing too.

This is on a machine that hasn’t downloaded anything and has no email access. The only software that has explicitly entered it is game software – I wonder if the new Counterstrike CD had a virus on it…

Sitting in the weekly partner meeting at Ignition, I couldn’t help but feel that business is booming. I heard updates on a lot of our portfolio companies – Melodeo – Tune The Planet, Clearsight Systems – Get The Right Answer (hey they even have a blog like thing), Intelligent Results, Interact Networks – Proactive Network Scannings & Vulnerability Detection, Cloudmark – Your Spam Authority, Teranode – Design Tools for the Life Sciences – they all sound like they are making great progress. Great product work in the pipeline, and good revenue progress across the board. It was a pretty uplifting meeting.

And we discussed a bunch of prospective deals, it is an active market with a lot of great entrepreneurs and young companies. It felt good to be involved with the group of people here at Ignition and with the people at our companies.

Funniest comment of the day – when asked about the merits of a prospective investment partner, someone said ?They have good hygiene and they do no harm.? :) Hey I hope I can live up to this standard as an investor, you could do a lot worse.

BeyondVC: What aisle/what shelf? – great counsel for any business from Ed Sim. Some other questions – what budget line item will companies slot your product into – if there is no budgetary category for your product/service, you have an uphill road. What is the title of the person at a company that will buy your product (and do they typically buy products) – if you aren’t sure, that is a problem.

A Confederacy of Dunces has been sitting on the shelf for 5 years, I finally read it. As all the reviewers note, this book is absolutely hilarious. Ignatius is an amazing character, I was left wanting more – I’ve been unwilling to start another book because I want to keep the characters fresh in my mind. I thought the ending was a little anticlimactic but how would you end this spiral of chaos?

Is the movie really getting made? Will Ferrell would be awesome in the role but after a flurry of news last year, all the movie sites seem silent about the movie.

* Achieve one Human Brain capability for $1,000 in 2023. * Achieve one Human Brain capability for one cent in 2037. * Achieve one Human Race capability for $1,000 in 2049. * Achieve one Human Race capability for one cent in 2059._

Good summary of Jim Gray’s latest talk over at Phil Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog. For the record, here is the correct link to Jim’s page at msft.

Tong Family Blog: Far Cry: Another Cool Game – latest time waster here on our home network. It has pretty much wiped out the ATI 9600 on one machine, while the 9800 on another machine is surviving but constant game crashing faults. But oh does the game look nice – best looking water of any game I have seen to date – great reflections!

Here’s some updated info on the college football schedules for 2004, thanks to my buddies over at fanblogs:

2004 Big 12 College Football Schedules
Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech

2004 ACC College Football Schedules
Clemson, Florida State, Maryland, North Carolina State, Wake Forest, Duke, Georgia Tech, Miami FL, North Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech

2 004 Mountain West College Football Schedules
Air Force, Brigham Young, Colorado State, New Mexico, San Diego State, UNLV, Utah, Wyoming

2004 Pac-10 College Football Schedules
Arizona, Arizona State, California, Oregon, Oregon State, Southern California, Stanford, UCLA, Washington, Washington State

2004 SEC College Football Schedules
Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Louisiana State, Mississippi, Mississippi State

2004 Big 10 College Football Schedules
Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin

2004 Big East College Football Schedules
Boston College, Connecticut, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple, West Virginia

2004 Conference USA College Football Schedules
Army, Cincinnati, East Carolina, Houston, Louisville, Memphis, Southern Miss, South Florida, TCU, Tulane, UAB

…for reading my halloween enthusiast mailing list. I actually love the contextual ads – when I am reading a post on pneumatic props, it is great to see ads about pneumatic gear, not offensive at all. I’m not sure how useful these ads would be on personal mail but they wouldn’t bother me…

ps. i’m john.ludwig AT gmail.com