Master Key Copying Revealed. Very interesting – Master Key Copying Revealed – and see the technical paper.

Disruptive Technologies. Pointed to by Ross Mayfield’s Weblog, a good read.

MDV closes Seattle office. More signs of stress in VC business – The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Venture firm closing its satellite site in Seattle

The Fall of Berlin: 1945. Just finishing this book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. Great account. What I take away: War is hell; If you fight one, don’t lose; If you lose, surrender to nations with a strong history of civil rights, not to totalitarians; If you lose and you have committed genocide and other war crimes, well it is going to go hard on you.

Server-based RSS aggregators. Evan believes that RSS aggregation should move to the server and we will all want to read our news thru web pages. Dave thinks not, thinks that desktop software will rule. I think the truth may lie in a new middle. I like desktop software – it gives great personal control, I can try it out with disrupting any IT staff, I don’t have to trust my data to any external service. But there are shortcomings – I use 5 different machines, all behind different combinations of firewalls/nats, I can’t always get to the aggregated news on my machine. As I get more and more hooked on my aggregator I want to be able to move it to a more accessible and reliable machine.

This is very like the blackberry adoption cycle in our office. 2-3 of us got blackberries and all started out using the desktop redirector. We didn’t need to make any changes to our servers, we didn’t need permission from anyone, etc. But as we got hooked, and started to struggle with the shortcomings of the desktop redirector, it became obvious that we should buy the blackberry server software and install it. Perhaps this is the evolution path for aggregators (and other types of software that you will want to access from many locations).

Redmond Blog Dinner. Sam Ruby: Two Weeks Notice

Lexar 64MB SD card for $10. I picked up a lexar 64mb card at compusa yesterday for $39.99, but there is a $30 rebate offer for cards purchased at compusa by 1/25. This is a great deal!

Blogrolling outage. Ouch, a brief blogrolling outage and my site rendering and responsiveness turned to crap. It’s the only blogrolling outage over many months and it was brief so I am not upset about, but I need to look at a smarter way to cache my blogroll on my server so that my site can weather outages.

Evolution of blog comments. See discussion at Simon Willison: Archive for 20th January 2003.

Need a phone for a trip to spain. Thinking about getting a prepaid SIM from Telestial and then a cheap unlocked phone. Intouch is another option. There are actually a lot of these sites out there. Hard to understand what the best deal really is. For my needs, it will basically be an emergency phone so small upfront costs seem like the optimal path.

Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust. Lots of volunteer ops available here – Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust

Quinine and Halloween. Need to remember this for next Halloween – Quinine and blakclight. Great for a mad scientist lab…

Playing my music files at work. Another way to accomplish this – Streamjack

Bookwatch. Another site tracking book mentions on blogs – onfocus.com : free to the public – like allconsuming.net.

Newspaper sports sections and sports writers. Nice set of links to sports section, writers, and conferences – FLEAFLICKER.ORG 2003?