Only 90-some days til the home opener – and here is a nice preview of one of the games this fall – Perspective Piece - NC State vs. Ohio State. My favorite part of this article – please, let’s not think that Washington has a snowball’s chance in a furnace of matching the Bucks for toughness and resilience; the marshmallow-soft Huskies should get summarily throttled by “Gray”

Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog: Bayesian Filtering in Aggregators? – this is a super idea. Now that I am reading like 100 feeds, I need some better way to sift thru them.

Rich is learning how to create coasters from blank DVDs – Tong Family Blog: Depressed: DVD Coasters Galore. This has been my experience too – at least one bad DVD for every good one created. Not unlike the experience of burning CDs about 3-4 years ago. Do I have to wait for 3 years for the PC hardware, drivers, and apps to all get shaken out? Or maybe I should just get a Mac.

Great stuff for halloween – check out the spider web in one of the sample pictures – Flexible Electroluminescent Lighting

I’ve never purchased any aftermarket car audio products but I am getting really interested in solutions that would let me listen to my entire ripped cd collection in the car. I picked up CarAudio magazine this week to start to understand the market. The PhatBox is one cool product for transporting 20G of music out to the car. The Kenwood Music Keg looks like the other generally available solution. The OmniFi from Rockford is another choice, it seems to have some wifi link so that maybe you don’t have to actually physically connect the hard disk in the car to your PC.

Now what I really want tho is just something that will connect my ipod to my car, both charging it and routing the audio out into the car stereo. I don’t need yet another 20gig hard disk with my songs on it, the ipod is just fine. And i am happy to use the ipod UI to tune things in. There are some solutions for hooking up ipods to your car system (for example see this one) but they all seem to use FM as the transport into the car stereo, I want something that connects up with wires for a higher fidelity experience.

It’d be nice if my car just had an aux/rca input jack so i could play any audio content thru the car speakers and amp.

This looks like a good one to remember – jw Electronics MIDI Servo Controller

We love watching the crows around our house. They are fascinating birds. They constantly harass the eagles and osprey that fly by – why do the eagles and osprey put up with it? And they love stormy weather, all the crows come out and play in the wind. Crazy birds.

We don’t care for most of the items sold atGore Galore because we try to run a PG-rated Halloween event, and we are just not into monsters and gore. But the air cannon they are going to offer is right up our alley, this would be a super cool addition to say our pirate scene.

Specs, etc available for a lot of solenoids at SMC site

a plug for my friend Chris’s band – LP33

Very cool – New Scientist. If I was going to college now, I would absolutely be studying materials science, there is just so much cool stuff going on.

Dude! – Eric Rudder’s Blog. Very constrained and corporate feeling tho. Eric, let it all out!

Some of these are hilarious – THE ECONOMISTS

We’ve raised our own personal terror alert to Blue – we are “guarded”. We had three police cars in our driveway this morning, after 3-4 young people celebrating a 21st birthday got out of hand, broke into the boat locker in the park next door, stole a canoe, landed at our dock, and wandered thru our yard to the street at 6:45am. Unfortunately they parked their car at the park, and were nicely caught on a security camera, so they spent the remainder of the day in jail.

I bought Links 2003 and installed recently, wanted to see what state of the art in golf games was. This can’t be it. Buggy as crap – hard to finish a round without a crash. And compared to a modern 3d accelerated game (Battlefield 1942, Unreal Tournament, etc), this is such a slow game. It renders a static background, a player moving, and a little white ball flying thru the air – a pathetic amount of motion and detail compared to one of these other games. And yet it takes Links sometimes as much as a minute to render the next scene. What is it doing?

Tiger Woods 2003 is reputedly a better game.