Way behind on book reviews. Picked up The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’Ang Exotics more for its title than any other reason, for some reason Samarkand sounds compelling to me. The book is a little dry but interesting insight into the culture of 7th century China – makes you realize how culturally and historically impoverished we are here in the States.

Last week I finished Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason. A moderately interesting history of the gin mania in Britain in the 18th century. A unique voice, and a lot of good period details. And great analysis of the flailing attempts to prohibit or control consumption. Obvious parallels to our own country’s attempts at prohibition, and our flailing attempts to control drugs today in our country. The lessons are pretty obvious – it is probably a waste of energy to attempt prohibition, probably the best we can do is try to clean up the distribution, and overconsumption is probably a social and economic issue and needs to be treated as such.

I wanted to add Google as an information source for the Research feature in Outlook (Office) 2003 but geez look at these directions – Google Sample (Microsoft Office 2003 Research Service Software Development Kit) – install sdks, on servers, or enable IIS on your machine, …

What a pain in the a$$. Not worth it. If someone has a simpler way let me know.

Jam all your documents into your exchange drive – MS Exchange Blog : Universal Mail Drive Outlook add-in. Or do as Scott suggests amd slam everything into a sql db.

Welcome to MusicBrainz! – note to self: install. Oh – also some of these from Fred Langa

Download details: Key Events in Microsoft History – they missed my hire date, but they have this surreal item that I was involved with – “4/18/1994 Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has become the world’s best-selling retail operating system, edging Windows 3.1 into the No. 2 spot”

Bose? Home Entertainment - Companion? 3 multimedia speaker system – I tried these out recently and was really impressed. Great sound and the little desktop controller for volume/muting is very very nice. I’m probably going to get some more for an additional machine, though they are out of stock everywhere. (I am also fascinated by how Bose keeps their MSRP up – you see no discounting of Bose products, no gray market stuff, even Ebay prices stay high. They have some distribution magic).

Tong Family Blog: What is MyTues, QTFairUse and Audio Hijack? – Rich has a good summary of all the iTunes hackery that is going on. Kind of humorous to read articles over the last month that file-sharing is declining – sure seems alive and well.

Rich, I wonder how long til someone writes a CD drive emulator that just lays down the written tracks as MP3s on the hard disk. There are CD emulators today that read/write to hard disk; seems like no reason you couldn’t recode the data as MP3 along the way.

Great plans here – Build your own Blinking, Talking Skull! and here – Animated Skull – and details on creating moving eyes from a ventriloquist, Al Stevens

From Mobilewhack, news that Basic and PERL are coming to phones. I’d love to replace my stupid default phone screen with a little script that succinctly displayed the weather forecast, the most recent scores and next scheduled game for my favorite teams.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: I Know I Saw It Somewhere… … hmm, don’t I just want to use my blog as my history of interesting and relevant sites? At least for me, the blog is the best repository of sites I need to remember – I get to add commentary to the link, I can search the links, the links are available every place I need them.

Nice pointer from rich – Tong Family Blog: Ultimate Boot CD – every tool you need here to whack on a system as you build/debug it.

Trying out blogjet on Marc’s reco – Marc’s Outlook on Productivity: More on Blogjet – it is nice. But it doesn’t really work for me because it assumes you want your post content in a separate paragraph than your title, which is not how i format my entries – for short entries like mine, this creates far too much whitespace for my eye. The lack of underlying code access means I can’t easily fix this. So I have to pass on blogjet.

michaelw.net I want a keyboard with a built-in flash card reader – what michael says. I don’t want these crammed into my PC. I want them on the desktop. In the KB would be good tho I notice today that my KB is underpowered and has a problem with USB devices that suck power. My Dell monitor has USB ports on it too, this makes huge sense as a monitor has a power connection.