The school pack of choice around here – Timbuk2 – Messenger Bags and Backpacks. We’ve had great experiences with these.

Tong Family Blog: Disneyland Ho! – rich has great tips for maximizing your time. Agree with them all – we never spent more than 15 minutes in line anywhere.
And even big kids like me like the teacups. I got blisters from spinning that darn wheel so hard.

A new offering – Antari Ice Low Lying Fog Machine. As most halloween geeks know, your typical fog machine emits slightly heated fog which tends to rise. Here’s a new unit that solves the cooling problem without having to build your own cooler, futz around with dry ice, etc. And I note it is DMX controllable. I don’t think I’ll get one of these this year, I already have 4 fog systems and they are all working ok, but maybe when one of these wears out…

Like rich, I am interested in switching to lossless compression for my music files – Tong Family Blog: Lossless Encoding. I wonder tho how well these work with non-pc devices like my kenwood/phatnoise music keg?

A large selection of fonts for halloween – Bloody Fonts. Recommended use is to for templates for tombstone lettering, etc. Tho I found some really nice stencils at Michael’s last year that were supposed to look like logs and sticks but looked a lot like femurs and tibulas.

Seems like half the planet comes to my website to find out why the program GtAOD.exe is trying to get thru their firewall – here’s my original post and comments on the issue – a little ludwig goes a long way: AOL desktop spam

Gary is doing a little survey of information clients – Gary Burd: Information clients. Very interesting space – I’ve mentioned in the past that my blog is becoming in some ways my pim, i would love to be able to do more pim-like things in my blog, and be able to pull in and export more sets of data. I really want a server side solution, and some of these codebases might work. I certainly need a much better security model tho if I am to start putting more personal data up on the blog.

Great career advice – Eric.Weblog() – and applies to anyone in any walk of life, not just developers. Learn, learn, learn. A long time ago I posted the values statement we have here at Ignition. Continuous Learning is a key part of it, a lesson I learned at Microsoft actually.

The Old New Thing

A great articulation of one of the benefits of blogs – Six Log: Encouraging Accountability through Personal Publishing. I don’t always communicate enough about my own decision processes on my blog, but when I do I tend to get great thoughtful feedback, feedback that helps to keep me grounded.

Ok I previously mentionedRidemax which is software to optimize your time in Disneyland. We tried it out and I have to say it seems to be a winner. We hit way more rides than we normally have and never felt ourselves to be standing needlessly in line. We were kind of in shock about how well the day went. Definitely worth trying.

As one of the Amazon reviewers says, Passage is a “fascinating topic, so-so novel” which “seems bloated and frequently dull”. I liked the Doomsday Book by this author (who didn’t), but Passage was trying.

Saw this – Special Lockergnome Offer for Foldermatch – on Lockergnome, looks worth trying.

A fun read – Tech News - CNET.com

Dana is concerned about the US falling behind China and China becoming the dominant world power – he even calls them the “enemy” at points. I don’t know. From a nationalistic point of view I guess I can see his point, but as a human being, I have a hard time getting upset about the largest population in the world taking on a larger role in the world.