Rats. One of my Halloween displays will be a cage of rats. The cage door will rattle every once in a while and a little burst of fog will come out of the central den. There will be a sign above the den – “Ben” – referring back to the movie Willard I saw as a kid. Amazingly I find they are doing a remake of Willard. I still remember the night I saw it first – at a drive-in – a triple feature – I forget the first show – then came Willard – followed by some creepy Dr Phibes movie. My sister and I were wrapped up in blankets in the back of the station wagon watching. I am pretty sure I fell asleep part way thru Willard. But it obviously left an impression on me, I remember the night well. Drive-ins are a lost treasure.

Anyway back to the display. I’ll have a creepy squealing sound coming from the cage too. I tried various rodent squeals but they are too high pitched to be creepy and loud – all the energy gets dissipated as high frequency, not enough volume or rumble. A pig squeal comes out great tho.

Sonomic. A nice site for sound effects – Sonomic: Sample and Sound Effects Downloads. Kind of pricey but you get full WAV format sounds, and when you have to have that perfect pig squealing sound, this is an ok source.

Sidekick as the perfect mobile blogging device. Some conversation about this – Sidekick, your mobile blogging pal - Quick Topic. I still like the idea of a blogphone.

Online Federal Tax payment. Tong points towards this site as the new age way to pay your taxes. But what is with the big disclaimer to not bookmark the site???? Are we supposed to remember this URL by heart? If we can’t bookmark it, am I allowed to write down the URL or blog it? Strange.

My site Architecture. Starting to think about the next iteration of my site architecture. The current site is just blogger driven+some minor template mods. There are a lot of things I want to do tho that I am not getting from this architecture – a good search interface, a good URL command line interface, categories, private password-protected posts, server-side aggregation of various feeds, complete separation of content from template. Bloxsom is an interesting alternative, and of course I have already paid for Radio.

MusicDish. Fascinating account of royalty accounting discussions in front of the Senate – MusicDish Industry e-Journal. I had little sympathy for the corporations in the recording industry before, this is eroding even that.

Lou Gerstner’s Farewell Letter. An interesting perspective – A MASSIVE SHIFT IS UNDER WAY IN OUR INDUSTRY

Carrie’s Page. Hey my aunt is the only cool member of my extended family apparently – the only relative with a web presence at all – Just My Dogs by Carrie Hutchman

Downloads from MS Research. Interesting bag of stuff up here – Downloads

National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Finally read this over the weekend. One glaring hole I saw was the lack of treatment of vendors of cyberspace equipment as a class separate from enterprises/businesses.

A motivating example: I have, on my Windows XP system, software and hardware created by the following vendors: Microsoft Corp, Award Software, Intel, ATI, Creative, Voxware, DSP Group, Sipro Lab Telecom, Fraunhofer Institut, Radius, Toshiba, HP, Buslogic, SCM Microsystems, Lotus, Adobe, AOL, Macromedia. These are just the vendors I could identify. This is just the software and hardware that comes on the PC as I bought it.

Additionally I have installed software (sometimes downloaded, sometimes purchased at retail) from the following vendors: Microsoft, Symantec, PersonalBrain, Xteq, Panterasoft, Lavasoft, RIM, Caesius, tamosoft, EasyDesk, Macromedia, Paramind, Apple, Dummysoftware, Winzip. Alkonost, Izymail, Groove. And probably two dozen more that I have uninstalled and no longer have a memory of.

In each of these cases, the corporations that created the software may or may not be located in the US, and if outside the US, may be located in countries whose interests are not aligned with those of the US. Even if located in the US, the companies may very well use foreign development offices, or may subcontract development to organizations located in other countries..

How are we insuring that all this software and hardware is performing the functions they are intended to perform, and don?t include some functionality hidden away to be accessed illicitly by some third party? Is there any inspection of this technology before it is made available in our markets? Who is doing the inspecting, do they have adequate access to source code and source design documents? Once inspected, how do we know that changes aren?t made by vendors ? is there any digital signing of executable content to permit detection of changes later?

There are a ton of issues here. Not at all sure what I think the right strategy is. But this is a hole you can drive a truck through.

Air gun. Cool! Save this one away for next year – this would be a great part of my pirate scene.

Winstep. I keep seeing cool content for this on lockergnome. Going to dive in and try WinStep. Ok I tried it. Can’t say I love it. More extreme stylistic control over my start menu, taskbar, but not clear this actually helps me any. Many of the designs are unreadable. Not for me. I want a shell replacement that is more functional, not one that is just different looking and potentially more expressive.

Squeak. Alan Kay’s latest dealie – Welcome to Squeak. Might be worth dorking around with.

UltraEdit. Another reco from Lockergnome that I need to try – Text Editor - HEX Editor - HTML Editor - Programmers Editor - UltraEdit

Halloween Status. Spent the day converting a shipping box into a scary crate. I’ll throw in some straw, some pulsing light, maybe some fog emissions.