Outdoor club. Looks like a way fun outing. This is why we live in the Pacific NW. Thanks Mr. Bean.

NAIS. Lots of good stats about private school trends up here – National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)

Megaconverter 2. Per Adrian, a super useful site – MegaConverter 2 # 11

VCs and Disclosure. No vc in the world should object to greater disclosure and accountability – hold us to the same standards that everyone else is held to. Battle over disclosure - Venture Capital Journal:

VC firms vow that they will take countermeasures against public pension funds that disclose sensitive information about private equity performance – such as excluding them from upcoming funds. Notes one VC: ‘It’s unbelievable how stupid they are-they’re winning the battle but losing the war. If I had to choose between two investors [one of which required greater disclosure than the other], I would go with the people that don’t have disclosure requirements.’ Thus far, UTIMCO and CalPERS are the two largest institutional investors that have pledged greater transparency on private equity performance. VC industry insiders now worry that other institutional investors may follow their example.

Sonics. Went to my first Sonics game last night. The Sonics look fun this year – youthful, high energy, dangerous at every position. The Jazz meanwhile managed to look both old (Stockton, Malone) and green (the rest of the team).

Shadows. Also from Lockergnome:

The human eye can see three-dimensional objects because of how light bounces off of the objects and into our eyes. Well, you could apply the same principle to your Windows environment by adding shadows to your open windows, because then your mind would perceive light and the open windows would stand out as if they were three-dimensional. Y’z Shadow for Windows XP does just that, and takes your Windows experience to the third dimension. The application simply adds a slight shadow to every open window and the taskbar. You can change the depth and color of the shadow, which can give your Desktop environment a whole new feel. I decided to give all of my open windows a little neon glow and I must say I think the effect is here to stay.

Update: this looks really cool but man does it slow down window painting. I wonder if it is implemented efficiently using the latest directx/videocard facilities. I wonder if it will be faster on my Radeon 9700 machine at home.

FLAC v1.0.4. From Lockergnome:

I don’t claim to be an audiophile, but I still love good music. I’m content with the quality and sound of an MP3 file, but I do have some friends who don’t like MP3s because of the loss of audio quality in the compressed format. That’s great, but who wants a bunch of huge WAV audio files taking up all your hard drive space? FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and basically that means that you can use FLAC to compress your WAV files without losing audio quality in the compression process. FLAC won’t let you make a file nearly as small as an MP3, but it was able to turn one of my 42MB WAV files into a much smaller 30MB FLAC file. That may not seem like a lot, but imagine doing that to an entire music directory! FLAC also comes with a plug-in that allows you to listen to FLAC files in Winamp. FLAC does run from a command prompt, but on the same Web site you can download a Windows GUI front end that makes the whole conversion process much easier. For you programmers out there, FLAC is open source, so that means that you have access to all the source code and can incorporate this codec into your own applications. I guess my best friend may not have to buy a second hard drive now!

BCS Rankings Nov 4. WHOO HOO! – Bowl Championship Series - Full Rankings Chart. Ohio State is #2!!!!!!!!!

OK here is what needs to happen to guarantee we stay there:

• Ohio State has to win out.
• Va Tech needs to beat Miami. This would ice it.
• WSU needs to keep winning. They should but the UW game will be emotional.
• It wouldn’t hurt if OSU’s other opponents kept on winning – Michigan, Texas Tech, Penn State, etc. Keep that strength of schedule gap vs Miami.
• Oklahoma needs to keep playing tough and hopefully leapfrog Miami in the USA Today/ESPN poll.

How Many Megapixels. So I saw yesterday that kodak is introducing a 14 Megapixel camera for prosumers. Wow. I remember when a guy in a camera store told me “you’ll never need more than 3 megapixels”. Yeah, just like I will never need more than 16K of RAM…

I started to wonder about the logical limit to megapixel growth in cameras. Will we want 100 megapixel cameras? Gigapixel cameras? Terapixel cameras?

Well some quick internet searching tells me that the demand for cameras in the gigapixel range will happen in our lifetime. It is pretty easy to find discussions today on the net of people needing cameras approaching 100 megapixels. For great resolution prints at 11x14, you can chew up pixels fast. I think average people will do this.

And bleeding edge people are talking about gigapixel cameras – for instance NASA mission planning and people researching petabyte database scaling (again astronomy images).

Will average joes like me want to have a gigapixel camera? My guess is yes or something close to it. I am betting we will all want to eventually have digital photos with at least the resolution of today’s film. And per some discussions on various photo sites, that means we will want 400Megapixel+ cameras for images with the resolution (pixel, color, and intensity) of film.

My gut says we won’t stop there but that will be a topic for a later post…

College Football. Wow what a great day for the Buckeyes. A super win over Minnesota, and losses by so many other contenders. I just did a quick pro forma recalc of the BCS polls and, if OSU/Miami/Oklahoma all move up as expected in the computer polls, and if WSU moves up as expected, it is going to be just about a dead heat between OSU and Miami for the 3rd spot. If the effect of WSU winning is greater than linear (ie it opens up the strength of schedule lead OSU has over Miami even more, or WSU moves up higher than 5 in the BCS), OSU could take the number 2 spot! On pins and needles…

Quick Halloween Report. Another great evening. At least 400 kids came by. We gave away a car trunkful of candy. Big successes: my tombstones, the floating graveyard lantern, the creepy shipping crate. Failures: my axworthy ghost quit running after a short time. My “Ben” rat crate fizzled totally – soundtrack died, door rattling motor died. My DMX remote failed so I couldn’t manually turn on the doghouse fogger, tho the automated system did just fine. I know I should relax but I am already starting to think about next year – replacement of all x10 with DMX, a better remote control option (maybe using a pda and 802.11), some pneumatic effects.

And where was Vin? Marking the start of the Vin Baker era in Boston, the Celtics take their worst loss in franchise history.

Air Force Loses. Check out what happened last night – ESPN.com - NCF - Recap - Colorado State at Air Force - 10/31/2002. Why do I care? Because it further weakens Notre Dame’s strength of schedule rating (Air Force was one of their vaunted opponents) and thus weakens their BCS rating. Go Bucks!

Sniper Rifle. Perhaps we shouldn’t leave enforcement of our limited gun regulations up to the weakest point in the chain – local retailers – Tacoma shop can’t account for 340 guns, including sniper rifle.

Expensing Options. Reading SNS this week, it just struck me that, rather than trying to assign some debateable value number to options and passing them thru the P&L, let’s do a simpler thing. Let’s just have companies publish quarterly a statement of ownership – who owns what shares; how many new options were granted in the quarter; how many grants expired or were cancelled; new stock issuances as a result of financing moves, etc. And then a clear state of EPS impacts of all this – I just want to know, as a stockholder, did I suffer unfair and unwise dilution during the quarter? This is something that companies could do today without solving the problem of how to value options. And it would be valuable.