Christmas Wish List. Here’s my geek wishlist as of 10-31. The Xantech MRC88 multizone audio controller, so i can centralize and control all my Halloween audio. Or maybe the AVM20 for the same purpose. The Video xb – one simple box to add on to my PCs to solve all my video capture, storage, and authoring issues. Something from Azden for wireless distribution of all my Halloween audio. The Cambridge SoundWorks Radio CD to replace my noisy cheap Timex alarm/cd player. The Samsung 24” LCD Monitor for my desk. The RCA Scenium 35-Hour Digital Media Recorder (DRS7000N) to replace my existing DVD player and add another HD recorder in addition to my Tivo box. Some nifty Verbatim Vinyl CDs. And the Nike psa[play - Portable Sport Audio by Philips for treadmill time. And a late addition, the Casio exilim camera/mp3 player.

For the garage I need the Wall-Mount Desk from Duluth Trading.

Finally for the music hour, the Yamaha SLG100N would be a nice practice guitar tho it is dorky looking. And the Chordmaster is way cool for finding chords.

BCS Rankings. I’ve been noodling over these. What a strange way to pick the teams to play for the championship. Brad Edwards at ESPN does a good job digging into the mechanics of the system. I’ve been looking at Ohio State’s numbers the last two weeks and have seen some interesting things:

• Most of the top 6 teams lost “strength of schedule” points this week. Only OSU and Georgia improved. OSU gets a double win here and for quality wins as WSU keeps winning. This is really going to come down to nonconference wins for both teams, as the rest of the way they are in conference play and their conference opponents are going to beat the lights out of each other. OSU needs WSU to continue to win.
• While scoring margin has been eliminated as a factor in computer polls, it clearly is still a factor for human voters, as OSU lost two positions in the AP Poll while Notre Dame climbed two positions. This cost us at least a point and maybe more with downstream effects
• Throwing out the worst computer ranking, it is the NY Times, Sagarin, and Colley Matrix polls that are hurting OSU the most, as they have us two positions behind Georgia. TheColley Matrix poll is out of Atlanta, so that explains that. I don’t fully understand the other polls yet.

Lockergnome. Love this newsletter. More great stuff over the weekend. Phone Scoop for user reviews of cell phones. Serial ATA Working Group website for info on serial ATA – I am dying to get this in my PCs, existing cabling is just too intimidating. Amaze your friends with A List of the Keyboard Shortcuts That Are Available in Windows XP. See how deleted your files really are with Deleted File Analysis Utility. Quick kb access to directories in open/save dialogs with Pathbuddy.

And for some reason nothing appeals to my sensibilities like Scott’s Box Shot Maker.

Orbitz. Fare Idea Returns to Haunt Airlines

Buckeyes. Nerve wracking win on Saturday but a win is a win. The computer polls don’t care about margin of victory tho clearly the voters do as OSU dropped two spots in the AP Poll. We need some help tho…very disappointing to watch FSU collapse against Notre Dame. Tho the vaunted Notre Dame schedule doesn’t seem so tough now as Michigan lost against, Michigan State has collapsed, Air Force lost again, and of course FSU is having an off year.

School Governance. Will be attending the PNAIS Governance Conference in early November. Very interested to hear the mood of private school board members as the economy continues to struggle. And when you look at the demographics of this region, the potential market of students is flat or even shrinking a little over the next 10 years. And of course public schools are improving generally. I think we are in for greater levels of competition and greater questioning of the affordability and value of private education, which means we need to focus even more clearly on the quality of our product.

Top Home Network Sites. From Tong, a good list. I also like how Rob has posted his config, I need to do that.

Network Analyser. Haven’t used one of these since the heyday of the Network General Sniffer but I have the need – The Ethereal Network Analyzer

BCS. First rankings out – Bowl Championship Series - Full Rankings Chart.

OK how can Ohio State be considered to have the weakest schedule of the top 6 teams, but have the most points for quality wins? Makes no sense at all.

I guess it doesn’t really matter now…we just need to beat Penn State Saturday and trust that things will work out.

Winter Bike. Wow does this look fun – Winter X Bike - Winterize Your Ride! - new kit converts bikes for use on snow

Netstat -O. Just discovered the value of this command on XP. When you correlate the output with Task Manager PIDs, you can see exactly what processes have what net connections open. Very helpful!

X10 Halloween. Deep in the throes of getting all my x10 setup debugged for halloween. Man x10 just sucks. The gear is fragile, all kinds of mysterious communication problems, the software sucks. I hate it. But it is cheap and widely available.

I am close to dumping the gui software I use and just write some scripts. I see that there is Perl support available here. And a web interface on top of perl support at X10 Web Control.

Next year tho I may just pick up a few more dmx dimmers and do away with x10 altogether. I don’t see anything on the web abour perl/python interfaces to dmx tho.

Maybe next year I should be an early adopter of uPNP or some such crazy scheme.

Blosxom progress. OK I have now also fixed the scripts to deal with the differences between Win2k/IIS and Unix/Apache handling of path elements after the blosxom.cgi reference in the URL. I can find no way to make Win2k/IIS treat this as a path_info argument to a perl script, so i have changed the script to make “?topic=foo” work as the argument to get a specific content blog – e.g. www.theludwigs.com/halloween?topic=props. Which meant i had to patch up the links that blosxom creates for permalinks, etc. I am pretty sure archive viewing doesn’t work quite right yet tho i am not sure I care since I don’t have an archive for my halloween blog. Also haven’t looked at the RSS output yet.

Halloween Blog Architecture. I am toying around with blosxom for my halloween blog. i like the innate categorization in blosxom as the defining paradigm since my halloween blog is less about dated posts and more about categories of things. getting blosxom running on win2k is proving to be something of a chore. the base scripts have a lot of assumptions about file system naming and file system functionality that are just broken on iis and nt. I have fixed some of this in my trial blog – notably i have changed the blosxom scripts to eliminate their expectation of symbolic links (tho i would like to go back and add in windows shortcut functionality as a replacement). The permalinks are busted tho, as there are some differences in cgi handling in iis vs apache. So still tuning – if anyone has already solved the problem of blosxom on nt, please send me a note!

Wildseed/Kyocera partnership. Wildseed announces it’s first big partnership, launching their smartskin phone with Kyocera. Congrats wildseed…oh here’s some press coverage…RCR Wireless News…Kyocera to use Wildseed smart skin technology