Reading Jon Udell’s site reminded me of this new feature of Exchange 2003 – Inside RPC-over-HTTP. Seems great for users, absolutely terrible tho for the VPN market – seems to me like this will decimate the demand for VPNs.

Nielsen//NetRatings: The global standard for digital media measurement and analysis. – good source of high level summary data on net usage. Home broadband user base grew 49% year over year!

Blue’s News: Message Board – the upcoming release of Half-life 2 is causing a lot of frenzy in the video card industry. Gabe at Valve currently seems to recommend the ATI 9800, tho Nvidia is spinning hard. It is fascinating that the release of a single game can cause so much angst, and as a user it is great to see these vendors trying to kill each other because I am going to get much faster video cards as a result.

Meanwhile Valve has released the new Steam client and the website is DOA, i assume it is getting hammered with traffic, so that is good for Valve.

It’s surprising to us how little ongoing coverage there has been of the death at Disneyland last week. Maybe because we were just there, and just on the ride, we expected to see more coverage and concern. We’ve see no outrage from the family of the victim or from the other injured parties. Disney must be bending over backwards to help them all?

meryl’s notes: September 2003 Archives – some good ideas pointed to at listamatic.

We live in fascinating times. The channel for recorded music is collapsing. JD’s New Media Musings points to Moby’s advice for the music industry, all good points. I am especially intrigued by his counsel to stop spending large sums to produce music and videos. As music prices drop, it would seem like we’ll have to get back to fairly raw recordings with very little production, and videos will either have to get very simple, or alternatively will be funded in other ways – by advertisers, as part of going to a movie, etc.

Personally I think this is all good, we get back to music for the sake of music. The funding for all the other ancillary “value-add” activities around the music is just going to dry up. 100 years ago there was no recorded music industry – you went out and listened to artists if you wanted music. It would not be terrible if we ended up listening to more live music.

SEC College Football - Fanblogs.com: Vandy Eliminates Athletic Department – this seems dumb. Running an athletic program is a significant body of work, quite distinct from that of running an educational program. NCAA rules and regulations, budgeting, facilities, recruiting – it is all different than what your normal university administrators deal with. One way or another you are going to have dedicated staff focusing on the issues; denying their existence is not going to help the quality or professionalism of the effort.

Here’s the transcript – -- Andy seems quite testy in the interview, this has clearly been a trying process for the school. And I am sure he is still worried about the implications for the school and program – there is a strong denial in the interview that this will affect the school in any way but I am sure it is a concern.

Found via a comment on Rich’s site – Venture capital is hazardous to your company’s health in 9 out of 10 cases – ouch! On the other hand, maybe he isn’t talking about me:

With the first dollar of venture capital accepted the entrepreneur?s control slips away to 28-year-old MBA wonder-boys with only the shallowest of operating experience.

The age 28 is long behind me, I was off in the shallow end of the operating pool at that time, hopefully I’ve learned something.

Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog – gosh it seems like there must be some great software companies to build in this space.

Scott Hanselman’s Weblog : Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List – what a great list of utilities. I am still perusing the list. Whiteboard Photo looks like a killer.

Big 10 College Football - Fanblogs.com: Clarett done at OSU

This seems inevitable to me – Techno-News Blog – we need a stronger system of identity on the net if we really want to stop spam. I would switch to a mailsystem today that had a stronger notion and in fact I am evaluating all kinds of solutions currently.

Update: Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. So I decided to start acting on my words and I thought I’d get a certificate so I could start signing all my email sent from Outlook. I clicked on the link in Outlook to get a certificate and I was take to this page – my guess is that NO ONE tries to get certificates for Outlook based on this.

I’ll be cross-posting some of my football posts on fanblogs going forward – Site News - Fanblogs.com: Welcome John Ludwig! – it’s a great college football site, worth a read.

Regular column from the NYTimes charting the weeks most popular media – Digital Downloads Decline – yet again showing how out of touch I am with pop culture. This weeks illuminating fact – I don’t own a single one of these CDs, nor do I visit any of the most sticky websites.