Most books I read I donate to the library or goodwill, as I think I’ll never look at them again. Some books I keep at home on the bookshelf because I think I may want to look at again, or I may want to refer someone else to. A very few each year I put on the bookshelf in a special place where I will remember its location immediately. And then just once every couple of years have I been motivated to immediately go order some extra copies of a book and send immediately to people.

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christoper Hitchens is in the last category. A great book. I immediately ordered copies and sent to my young relatives. Great, wise counsel on how to live a principled, thoughtful life and not just get drawn into the crowd. And the style chosen makes the material very accessible, despite the many references to sometimes unfamiliar material. Every young ambitious person out to make their mark on the world should read this book.

…I’d focus on the academic market. I have two family members heading to college this fall, and they both need laptops with wifi for their campuses. If this is becoming the default at every major college campus, then we are seeding the market with a huge number of capable machines, a huge number of free hotspots, a user base that is very willing to try new services. What great services could we build to target these users and to help them?

I see that Blosxom 2.0 has shipped. Claims to have better IIS support than past versions. I wish I had time to try it again because the core design principle – leverage the file system hierarchy as your category hierarchy – is so appealing to me, no new storage system created. As a result, backup, copying, storage management, etc are so much easier. But I just don’t have the time to reimplement the blog again right now. I did play around with previous versions a lot but they were so hard to get working on IIS and NT.

Well said evan. I have a drawer full of phone cables, usb cables, net cables, s video cables, a/v cables with every combo of connector imaginable. Oh and a bunch of crappy oem mice for pcs that I never use.

This month’s buildup from The-Ozone:It won’t be too much longer before the OSU football team hits the practice field in preparation for the 2003 football campaign. The team reports for fall camp on August 5, and practices begin on August 6. That schedule represents somewhat of a departure from past years. Freshmen used to report three days before the upper classmen, but this year, freshmen will not report early. There will be other changes in fall camp this season as well, many of them mandated by the NCAA. As mandated by the NCAA, the team will practice in helmets and shorts the first two days (Aug. 6-7) and helmets, then in shoulder pads the next two days (Aug. 8-9). The first day of contact is Sunday, Aug. 10. On Monday, Aug. 11, the team will begin a 2-1, 2-1, 2-1 regimen, meaning two practices on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and single sessions on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. The same schedule will be in effect the week of Aug. 18. The second practice on Monday, Wednesday and Friday will be open to the media and to the public.

Rich reminded me of the smallnetbuilder site, a very useful source of hands-on pragmatic network info. I’ve blogged it before but worth a repeat.

Hilarious – The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation – saw in SNS newsletter.

We jumped into the spam fighting space this week – Cloudmark ? Home. We like the team a lot and like their approach a lot.

This sounds like a nice 21” monitor and the prices are getting better by the day – Samsung SyncMaster 213T review by PC Magazine

Satoshi’s Wireless Weblog: User Interface is an Art: PDA with integrated GPS – so why don’t PCs have built in GPS by now? Do the Intel Centrino chipsets have GPS built in? I don’t think so, searching for GPS on the Intel website doesn’t bring up much. It would be so helpful for so many apps if you could find out definitive lat/long info for the PC.

Lots of great info here – PayPal Connect! - Conference Agenda & Sessions – and fascinating that PayPal has a dev conference. Found via Scott’s blog.

A nice air cannon prop at Iron Kingdom – Pneumatic Props – they have lots of good stuff up here.

Seen at PhotographyBLOG -:- Home – the new Casio QV-R40 will have a shutter lag of just .01 seconds. I’m not a camera wonk but I hate the latency of my digital cameras today, so this sounds great to me.

Lots of options starting to show up for mini-PCs – Tom’s Hardware Guide PCs & HowTo: The Mailman Has Arrived: Four Mini-PCs on the Test Bench - Summary: Design or Practical Value - No Barebone System Has It All – the future of the PC lies in the compact form along with high performance and universal interfaces. The computer should do its job virtually noise-free and, above all, be based on a thermal concept. Operational convenience and ergonomics are a must, as are quality appearance and aesthetics. The mini-PC of the near future will compete with the low-cost notebook; the traditional, chunky metal PC in the form of a container on wheels will at best be confined to the shadows. I’m waiting until someone has a design that really cuts down on heat generation/power waste.

Update – Rich has had some trouble with his Shuttles but also loves the form factor. But the heat is a remaining problem – I have a room with 5 PCs running in it and the heat is terrible. I would go to a mobile CPU or maybe even blades if I could, I have to get rid of the waste heat problem.