Lots of WinHEC coverage on the net today – WinHEC 2003: First Look at Longhorn Graphics is interesting. DirectX finally gets used deeply by the OS.

I’m looking for some good guided hike trips in the north cascades. Cascade Corrals seems to offer some good trips – and you don’t have to carry a pack. Sun Mountain Lodge has some packages with a little cushier accomodations. Canadian Expeditions has some more rigourous trips up in BC. I think I’d prefer the Cascade Corrals level of exertion and rusticism.

CRN : Breaking News : Microsoft Plans Win32 API Cleanup, XAML Scripts For Next-Gen Windows : 10:44 PM EST Mon., May 05, 2003. “Win32 has like 76,000 APIs, and they’re taking it down to 8,000 with Longhorn technology,” said one source familiar with the plans.

I installed the cd30 network mp3 player today. i’ve been playing around with for an hour or so now.

What to like: well it is nice being able to listen to all my music at my stereo location. no more dragging cds around.

What not to like: the interface doesn’t work very well for a 1000+ artist collection like mine. there is no visual interface, just a remote and voice prompts. the remote permits tegic/t9 style entry of artist names and album names so you can get around ok, but there is no visual feedback at all, just voice response, so it is pretty tedious to get thru a large collection.

Also, I could not get the 802.11 link to work. I probably had the wrong ssid or wep settings. or actually the more i think about it, our 802.11 net is outside our firewall, while my cd30 server is inside the firewall, so i probably had firewall problems. whatever, it didn’t work.

Like with the hp media receiver, to get the best out of this device, i need to go author playlists explicitly for the device so that it is easy to navigate my content.

Seattle Weekly: Food: Dining Guide: Dining Showcase 2003 by Roger Downey – this is a great guide to restaurants in the area. Seems like citysearch has been destaffing its Seattle guide, it has become pretty useless for finding restaurants in town. This is a much better guide.

I’m halfway thru My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen. What a great book, very inspirational, recommended to me by C. Best read a bit at a time I think, a reading or two every morning would be a good dosage.

I just finished a reading concerning fear, certainty, and control. The basic point being there is no certainty in life, so get over your desire for it. A great quote from Roberto Assagioli in this reading – “There is no certainty; there is only adventure. Even stars explode.”

Jim has joined GoAhead Software as CEO. Congrats and Luck, Jim.

Tong has a great idea here – Tong Family Blog: Suunto Advizor – archiving the PDFs of product manuals. Man I wish I had done this as a practice, it is so hard to find support info on older products. Gosh it would be nice if this was easy and automatic to do somehow – like when I buy a new product, I enter some universal product code on my pc, and wham I get the manual archived.

Rich has noted that disk drives are headed On to 250GB. Personally I wish a little more of the innovation was being directed at access times and latency. I just copied my 30G music collection from one firewire drive to another and it took a long time.

Halloween tip of the day – From the MoM yahoo group – Fire is usually created visually with cantalope colored orange (pale amber)and with bright pale yellow in random patterns. My suggestion would be to place the light fixture in a coffee can through the bottow with venting on the sides as too not get too warm and then gel the tops with colored gel. The plastic lid, after cutting out all of the center and leaving a half an inch of the lids outer egde and the grip , is great for a holding on the plastic sheet of gel. Gel is a plastic sheet, sold in 20” x 24” sheets for $4.99 It changes the color of your regular white light source to the color of the gel. A quick and easy way to set an entire mood in a theatrical space for a fraction of the cost of a couple of colored bulds. Best source online is here.

So why would people be searching my blog for any entry with “wife” or “daughter”? Kind of disturbing. Hey you out there on your comcast connection, who are you and just what are you looking for?

Congrats Jawad on your national award.

I remember vividly my first business trip with Jawad. We were down at 3Com. In the middle of the meeting, he excused himself, pulled his prayer mat out of a bag, oriented himself in the conference room, performed his devotions, and then rejoined the meeting. I was so impressed with this – someone who had such confidence in and commitment to their values. I have been a huge fan of Jawad’s ever since.

Sorry for long absence. The ISP that served our office went toes up. The same ISP that served my house. The transition to a new T1 took weeks longer than quoted. And to top it off, my account on our exchange server is corrupted, and my calendar is currently nonoperable. Gosh it has been fun.

I played around a lot with the HP Media Receiver this week. A lot of promise but a lot of problems.

The Promise: Once I got the receiver playing a slideshow with pleasant background music, my family was entranced. They could have sat for a couple hours watching family photos. I could easily see this becoming a family event a couple times a month.

The Problems:

• Performance. I have 500+ cds ripped and ~3000 photos. The device is slow to enumerate and browse the collection.
• UI. It just doesn’t scale to a collection this size. Browsing a big flat list of artists or albums doesn’t work. The UI needs to be better informed about my prefs based on my MRU on my PC, or based on explicit config at the PC, and needs a thumbsup/thumbsdown UI.
• Photos. Too many of my photos are rotated incorrectly or are too dark. The software should just autofix this.
• Simultaneous Music and Photo control. I never did figure out during a slideshow whether the pause (or stop or ff) button applied to the photo or the music. Sometimes it seemed to do one, sometimes the other.

To take advantage of this device, I am going to end up doing some authoring on the pc side. I am going to make thematic folders of corrected pictures, and also make folders of appropriate background music. I’ll name these folders using yellow page listing tricks to force them to the top of the browse list – “AAA Summer vacation photos”. I am actually going to do all this work because the family enjoyment is great.

Silicon Valley Hikes Wireless Frontier – nice picture of Eric, and great quotes and story. Great work folks!