We aren’t using the right exchange version yet but I am anxious to flip over to this – Configuring the Outlook 2003 RPC over HTTP Client – so long VPN!

Here in the age of XML and personal publishing, we all better start brushing up on ontologies – Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Or maybe just a faceted classification, though it sounds a lot cooler to say “ontology”.

It’s Comeback Time for Luxury Watches – I fell in love with Audemars Piguet pieces thru an advertisement and sent away for their catalog. Now that’s a luxury watch – some of them are priced at ~$400K. I concluded that, at that price, someone would cut my arm off as I walked down the street, just to steal the watch.

The Occupational Adventure (sm) Blog: Goal people and river people – good article. I think I am mostly a river person but with occasional bouts of goalishness. Found via Rebecca’s Blog.

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog: Is a name worth 10-14% discount

Rael Dornfest via MobileWhack: “I’d like to see consumer mobile devices – palmtops, hiptops and handsets –scriptable” – hear hear. Not just mobile devices of course but my tivo box, my comcast settop box, etc….

Tong Family Blog: 19” LCD Monitors – me, i’ve gone 20 now with the Dell 2001FP and I can’t go back. the display looks really great with the ati 9800 on my one machine – not quite as sharp with my oem nvidia machine. but still wonderful. A little more than rich wanted to spend but worth it. My 15” at work looks totally pathetic now.

From this comments stream re tagging jpegs with metadata – Pixvue and jhead.

I’m trying to find a good KVM with Audio for home use. I’ve started with this – Belkin OmniView SOHO Series KVM Switch with Audio, USB and VGA – and while it works largely as promised, it has some real drawbacks. The video and audio switching are fine. But the keyboard/mouse/usb switching is troubled – the box is basically a USB 1.x hub which is switched back and forth between machines. And this creates some problems.

• it is usb 1.x and not usb 2.0 which creates all kinds of annoying error messages because I have downstream usb 2.0 devices.
• the usb hub introduces latency in kb/mouse interactions which is at time noticeable in games.
• the hub just plain drops some kb input – for instance if you hold down the control key for more than 5 seconds, the hub forgets. really bad if you are trying to select a lot of messages in your inbox for instance.

So i can’t recommend this box. I may try the PS2 model and see if it improves the latency and keyboard problems – it may since i think the ps2 switching is just an electrical switching and doesn’t try to get fancy with a usb hub. What I’d really like tho is a usb2.0 based kvm with low latency and no keyboard drops. Google points toward some usb2.0 kvms but they don’t have audio. Maybe i should just get one of these kvms and have a separate switch for audio?

Stopped at PCC Natural Markets and QFC today. Not a chicken breast to be found, very little packaged chicken at all. Just odds and ends. Plenty of beef on hand tho. I’d have to say that mad cow worries are definitely affecting consumer behaviour.

Desktop Sidebar … Hard Disk Indicator … XP Powertoys …

I like what Olivier Travers has to say: “The cost is so low delivery is basically free on a per-song basis. In the face of changing consumer demand, no matter how hard RIAA members try to stick to their cartel solidarity, the same kind of pricing pressure that is destroying the long distance and international phone call troll tax is going to work in the music business as well.”

Built a shuttle this weekend with a WD Raptor 36 GB 10,000 RPM ESATA Hard Drive Kit - WD360GDRTL as it’s boot drive – a nearly 40% improvement in speed over your standard 7200 rpm drive. Wow it makes a huge difference, I am very happy!

Training XP to use a SATA drive as a boot drive was a little tricky – involving:

• Installing a SATA PCI card – I had a maxtor (promise-based) card that came free with another hard drive so I used that. Installed fine, tho XP has no drivers for it, but the drivers on the CD were certified
• Connecting up the WD drive. This was confusing. The drive end of the SATA cable was a 15 pin power-carrying connector, and the documentation warned many times about NOT connecting the standard 4-pin drive power connector if you were using a 15-pin connector. However, on the PCI card end, the SATA cable was data-only, and it was clearly not delivering power to the drive. I wasted time here until I finally just connected a spare 4-pin drive power connector and everything worked
• Getting confused by XP, which was looking for some Promise SATA driver, but finally just ignoring this error message after reading some forums which said it was harmless
• Running the included WD utilities to copy all my files from my old IDE boot drive over to the SATA drive, and setting the SATA drive to be a boot drive.
• But of course the utility didn’t really set the SATA drive up to be a boot drive, you have to muck around in the BIOS to do that, enabling SCSI boot as SATA masquerades as SCSI at this level of the system

But it all works now and it is great!

We’ve played a lot of games over the holiday. Our grades:

Call Of Duty: A+. Multiplayer incredibly fun, servers easy to connect to, firewalls not a problem. The only real beef is the stupid bunny-hopping behaviour that some players adopt to avoid incoming fire.

Counterstrike: A-. Great multiplayer gameplay. But aged graphics, ridiculously painful downloading required to get up and going, and confusing game lobby behaviour.

Halo for PC. B+. Fun, not a bad way to spend time. But just doesn’t seem to have the same addictiveness of Call of Duty or Counterstrike.

SSX 3. B+. OK we are suckers for snowboarding games. This is a reasonable next version of the SSX line.

XIII. C+. A great idea and a good story line. But incredibly stupid save game behaviour makes the single player missions painful – needless repetition of solved missions is no substitute for real challenge. Oh and the end of level bosses are juvenile, making the game feel like a Mario title.

Hidden and Dangerous 2. C-. A nice looking game, but so realistic that the fun is sapped out of it. Yes I am sure a single shot from that gun would really take me out of commission, but a fun game needs to be a little more forgiving.

Post-Christmas Tips: Graphics Cards – good tips here, basically get all the drivers you are going to need beforehand, and clean off any card-specific goo before you try to update. Painful experience talking here I think.