25 year high school reunion. Class of 1978 Harding High School Class Reunion – wow where did the time go?

Vacation Reading List. As always, I read a lot over my vacation. The best reads: Winesburg, Ohio – loneliness takes many forms in this collection; Faulkner’s The Reivers – great characters; Agatha Christie’s A Death In The Clouds – a good Poirot mystery; and How Can I Get Through To You – great analysis of some the basic issues in modern marriages.

OK reads: Mirror Dance – modern space opera; The Talented Mr. Ripley – very faithful to the movie; Venus by Ben Bova – OK hard science fiction; Inversions – another good but not outstanding Iain Banks novel; Salamander – started out very strong but has gotten a little too mystical on me in the middle going.

I won’t bother to record the bad reads, they are better left unmentioned.

Good source of new blogs to read. Technorati: Top 50 Interesting Newcomers, with context

Stutz. Wow he left, I thought he was a lifer. Good luck David, what’s up next? Microsoft and the Commoditization of Software

Port Magic Beta. My friends at Pure Networks released the beta of Pure Networks: Port Magic while I was gone – much broader gateway coverage! (disclosure: I’m on the board and I like these guys!)

Bellevue and nukes. From a colleague who knows better than I do, answering the question “If Seattle was targetted by a nuke, would we be safe here in Bellevue?”:

Depends on the size. The Hiroshima (fission) bomb had a lethal radius of 2 - 3 miles. Large fusion bombs (very hard to make, North Korea can’t produce them) could have a lethal radius up to 30 miles. I would want to be further away then Bellevue if downtown Seattle was hit. Also, its very hard to make a long range missile accurate. The probable accuracy of a North Korean missile is 1 - 2 miles (or worse) at that range. Go to Monroe!

Back from Hawaii. I’m back – had a great 12 days at Kona Village Resort – a long time favorite of ours. and then another 3 days next door at the Four Seasons Hualalai – our first time there, a beautiful place, tho not quite as relaxed and intimate as Kona Village. Great weather, lots of humpback whales, a fun trip up to the caldera, some good stargazing. No Blackberry coverage, no laptop, no internet terminals, no cellphone, no tv for most of the stay – it was great to disconnect, I am thinking about going internet/pc/tv free on every saturday from now on.

Going Silent for a while. Tied up with some things, it’ll be maybe a couple weeks before I post or surf again. Serious withdrawal pains.

Pioneer Organics. A great service – Welcome To Pioneer Organics - Your Organic Produce Home Delivery Service – doesn’t fill the void left by homegrocer, but we have been very happy with the product and service.

Sun Launches ‘Plan B”. Sun is going to work harder to get PC OEMs and endusers to install their JVM. Duh. This should have been their plan A all along. Obviously PC OEMs are willing to ship a lot of software – look at all the shovelware that comes on a new PC. The fact that they haven’t been willing to ship the JVM is really telling – it is saying that a Java VM is more useless than every other piece of cruddy software that they ship – this is truly stunning given the quality of some of the shovelware. Sun should listen to OEMs and build a few Java apps that actually solve some interesting OEM problems, and then every OEM would take the apps and the VM.

10,000 RPM WD Drives. Coming this month for desktop machines per x-bit labs - Special Hardware Infocenter. I wonder how loud they are – I will want to get these if they are quiet enough. .

Software Strategy. Joel makes a very good and fundamental point.

Remember when I wrote that ?smart companies try to commoditize their products? complements??

RSS aggregator inside my IM client. I’d really love a simple RSS aggregator inside my IM client. One that would a) automagically get the correct URL for my buddy’s RSS feeds from the IM service – perhaps a normalized form in their comments field or other fields; b) let me know when my buddies post a new post or picture, c) let me know when my buddies post a comment to my site or a trackback to my site. I don’t want the full set of RSS headlines in the IM client, just the ones that have been posted in say the last hour (or whatever I configure the trigger to be). I started thinking about this today as I was thinking about picture sharing with my family – I already have a list of my family members in my AIM and MSN IM clients, why can’t I just put some notifications up there from them?

The APIs for plugging into MSN IM are here. Looks like you have to write a COM component, yuck, not my forte. I can’t find the AIM APIs, I am still digging.

Radio and Bugs. Sam Gentile points to some discussions about Radio bugs. I’ve had my share of problems. I don’t think it is a lot worse than any of the other blog tools, they all have quirks and rough edges that make them unusable for anyone but enthusiasts.

OSU’s football signings. Per TheInsiders.com, OSU has the 7th best set in the nation. I’ve seen other sites that rank them at various spots in the top 10. Not a bad finish.