Halloween Status. Got the big fogger system working this weekend – now I can flood our yard and the street and the neighbor’s yard with fog. All the big props in place. All power and DMX control cables in place. Next big work items – deployment of small props, deployment of x10 control for small electrics, testing of all the above.

Buckeyes. Nice win, but Seven-game warmup is over; next six outings will tell the tale

RSS Feeds. Dave recommends BlogStreet: Top 100 as a good source for RSS feeds. Also points to DMOZ as a source for readers.

Living in the City. Friday night – take John to friend’s house in Woodinville. Out to dinner with C in Bellevue. Up to Liz’s school for Volleyball match. Saturday morning – drop off Liz in U district at UW. Stop in Redmond for coffee and errands at Home Depot. Pick up John in Woodinville and take him back home to Bellevue. Back across the lake to UW to get Liz in the midst of the Huskies game traffic. Back to Bellevue, drop off Liz. The rest of us to downtown Seattle for some errands. Stop in Mercer Island on way there to get gas, on way back to pick up dinner.

Someday I will be glad to live in a smaller town again…

Good Trial. I’ve been trialing the Good software for the Blackberry 957. The RIM software has always been a little crufty – the todo list for instance is much worse than the Palm’s. So very interested in alternatives.

The pros of the Good software: Full over-the-air sync of all Outlook items (mail, contacts, calendar, todo, notes) is great. I love that. I use notes and todo list a lot, this is a huge boon to me. The homepage calendar view is nice, much more useful than calendar popup reminders. In-band mail addressing is nice – much more intuitive than popping out to the address book browser. Attachment viewing is a nice feature tho not as useful as I thought it would be. It still takes a lot of time to download attachments, and tables don’t come across well as they get unwound to fit on the small screen.

Cons: Performance is slower than the RIM software. I have a large address book (~2000 entries) and a fairly large calendar file. Searching the address book is slower than it was with the RIM software, paging thru the calendar is slower. The RIM software could keep up with my typing, the Good software cannot at times.

Battery life is a big concern. I used up 30% in one day running the Good software – I assume because of the increased radio traffic from all the ota syncing. With the RIM software I could go for a week between cradles without even thinking about it, and 2 weeks at least if I engaged in some modest power management (turn off the device at night). With Good I will have to think a lot more about power management.

The Calendar app is clearly not done. No week view. The month view doesn’t indicate if you have appointments on days, and hence is not useful. No creation of recurring appointments on the device. Agenda view is really really slow. The “jump” dialog is busted – the cursor is placed on the “Go” button by default, not on the date fields. And when you scroll the month field past year end, the year is not auto-incremented.

Addressing doesn’t search on first names. It is great that I can directly edit the “to” field and have it autocomplete names, but i am used to typing in first names and this doesn’t work. You have to type in last names – ugh.

Net/net, based on 3 days experience – I am still sticking with the Good software for now. Over the air sync is nice. But I can’t really enthusiastically recommend it yet. They need to improve performance, the calendar app, addressing, and battery life (I hope they can do over-the-air software upgrades!). Maybe the Good device is better on these fronts.

Storm Sewer Sounds. Brilliant – from the MoM Group –

I always wanted to put sound coming out of my storm drain, so this year I did! I used a 1X2 piece of wood and duct taped my two self powered speakers on it, then I taped the CD player in between the speakers. I put two eye hooks on the ends of the wood and used wire to hang pictures on each eye hook. then I twisted it in the middle to make a loop so I could hook it to a chain to lower it down the drain. I tested it last night and it was awesome! It freaked people out as they walked by! I was talking to a neighbor who was walking her dog and she said she was wondering were the sound was coming from. she said she heard it from the next street! I took a walk down the block and sure enough the sound was coming from all the gutters! HA I found a way to haunt the whole neighborhood! The sound was traveling thru the pipes! If you have storm drains in your neighborhood this is a must try! oooo also forgot I used the whisper MP3 that was posted on the list! man did it sound cool! Imagine walking by the storm drain and hearing that!

Abrupt Climate Change. Fascinating article, pointed out in a letter to SNS – Can Global Warming Trigger a ‘Little ice Age’. The key insight being that an “ice age” could come on us very suddenly…

SlickEdit. As I get into more coding work I am going to have to pick up a good editor. Used to use SlickEdit and will probably try that again. At $299 it is a lot more expensive than it used to be tho…does the Visual Studio editor deal well with non-MSFT languages like PERL and PHP? Oh I see that ActiveState has a Visual Perl plug in for Visual Studio…that costs $295. I guess $300 is price to play…need to look around for some lower cost alternatives. Where is Borland when we need them…

Pinewood Derby. Helping my son build a boat for science class, I started reminiscing about a similar project from my youth. My Pinewood Derby entry – I slaved over it, with only help from my dad on the powertools. My car looked terrible, it was basically a box with lead weights attached, spray-painted gold. Clearly some of the other kids were way more skilled than me, or had had substantial parental help. But despite looks, I came in second that day, which was pretty exciting. I won a pen and pencil set which was way cooler than the first place prize, a canteen.

Gosh knows why I remember this day with such clarity. Clearly it had a big impression on me. In some way I was really proud of the achievement. And there is something primal about working with your dad on a project like this. I hope my son has the same memories. Obviously a lot of people care a lot about the Pinewood Derby – a lot of info up on Google about.

Happy Birthday Annie! Hope your day is great.

Halloween Lighting. Started to deploy lighting tonight. Step one – replace all the bulbs in exterior carriage lights with flicker bulbs. These bulbs can be hard to find at retail, I get mine at Kelsun Distributors in Bellevue. Next is to place all the lightning lights. I have a variety of lights that trigger off my thunder soundtrack – a mix of small strobes, big strobes, 120v incandescent floods, and this year i added in some 12V floods as people on the MoM group say they respond more quickly (basically, lower voltage lights have faster response times). All together I have about 20-30 lights that go off with the thunder spread around the yard. All I did tonight was place the lights. This weekend I have to distribute my DMX control cable and actually start triggering them.

Blosxom under IIS. Ok this is harder than I had hoped. Got Perl for IIS from Activestate, that installed easily enough and seems to work ok on a variety of samples. But blosxom craps out fast, i suspect some simple file syntax problems. Mail into Rael, and if no satisfaction there, I guess I will get a Perl debugger…

Jambient. Dug into the specs for Jambient a little. While cool, it will not do what I want for Halloween. It does let you place multiple sound sources in a 3d space and dynamically move them around. It only supports two stereo speakers tho. There is reference on the site to supporting quad speakers with DirectX8, but I want something that could support an arbitrary number of speakers. Also I think Jambient assumes a single listener at a single location and that is not really what I want. In practice the effect may be the same but my design assumption is multiple listeners in multiple locations, where the dominant sound at that location is the local sound effect (say my graveyard noises) with the occasional mix in of a panning sound (a ghost flying by). I think I need to talk to an audio engineer to really lay out my specs precisely.

Also Jambient is really designed for realtime usage by an operator, I need full scripted/programmatic control based on events.

College Football Rankings. Wow The New York Times’s Computer Ranking is pretty far out of sync with conventional wisdom. I love the buckeyes at 4 but Miami at 6? Texas at 20? I guess time will tell.

Children and the Internet. Ananova - Children ‘know more about internet than books’