Deep Green Crystals: Microsoft best of PDC highlights

I’m a sucker for color pickers – Don Park’s Daily Habit - Mad About Colors – you’d think my site colors would look better. I’m like the bad golfer who keeps buying the latest trimetal, titanium, depleted uranium, carbon fibre club – I’m sure if I just improve my gear, my skills will automatically improve.

cre8d journal: Blog Design Showcase Archives – i should learn from.

multineedia.com

Don Box’s view on the role WinFS and other technologies might play in getting apps and data cleanly separated. A noble goal, I would particularly love to get easy access to all my PIM data.

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.