Busy Halloween Prep Weekend. Busy busy making tombstones and other props – I love foamboard and stonelook paint from Home Depot (I can’t provide links as they don’t seem to sell them online). While a lot of people recommended electric carving knives as the way to do the largescale cutting of foamboard, I found mine to be ineffective on the 2” thick foamboard I bought. Also been horsing around with small motors to use in props – as recommended on some of the project lists pointed to on my halloween blog, small appliance motors work great in a lot of projects – for example orange juicer motors, easily available at Value Village. You just take out the pressure switch and you have a nice cheap durable motor.

From Lockergnome Windows Digest. Good stuff on lockergnome this week, saving a bunch of these here to look at later:

E-Mage for Web is a simple utility for creating HTML image galleries from pictures on your computer. HoeKey is a small program to assign hotkeys to various tasks. NetworkActiv Sniffer enables you to capture and analyze IP packets. iFind is a web search tool that allows you to query the major search engines and produces the results in a unique way. Winsonar is a simple process monitor that allows you to monitor which applications and background processes are currently running on your system. Notes By George! is a must-have replacement for Windows NotePad. Idex is a complete multimedia database and web publishing solution. Novobot is a smart headline viewer and news ticker that can dramatically improve your web browsing experience. Manage Your Workgroup. This Microsoft Knowledge Base article tells you how to create a script for Outlook 2002 that would allow you to perform tasks that are not possible using the regular features of the Rules Wizard. This Microsoft Knowledge Base article explains some of the features available for Windows XP by using NTFS version 3.1.

Volleyball Results. Big win against Bush last night – deep in this link – Eastside Journal prep sports results

Liz Ludwig 2 kills, 4 aces, 25 assists, 3 digs

OSU 23, Cincy 19. What a nailbiter. Wish we could swap QBs with Cincy. Krenzel is a solid player but the Ohio State passing game is weak weak weak.

Hollywood v Silicon Valley. Good article in the National Journal about the inter-industry politics. Kind of long but a good read.

DVD Compat. Having trouble getting my DVDs to be playable on my player – this site may have some hints – DVDplusRW.org - The ultimate unofficial DVD RW resource site

9/21 Eastside Journal. “Boeing issues more layoff notices”. Picked up from the Oregonian – “Dotcom collapse, terror attacks left puget sound economy in ruins”. Dow down 326 yesterday.

Meanwhile in another article, Harvey Pitt is quoted as saying it is “more than safe” to invest.

I guess I don’t get the boosterism of investing. There is no real good news to make me think equities are going to take off. The economy in this area at least has not bottomed out. There is no evidence for a recovery.

Nokia and Warchalking. Warchalking is theft, says Nokia. A pretty aggressive statement. I guess Nokia has to feel threatened by the rise of 802.11 public networks as it doesn’t plan to their wan-via-licensed-spectrum core business?

IEDocMon. From Lockergnome – IEDocMon. I am not sure yet why I need this but I love the visibility it gives me into web pages.

Forest Ridge. Forest Ridge School gets $4.5 million from the estate of Genevieve Albers. Incredibly generous gift.

Tombstones. Last two days spent manufacturing tombstones (lots of info on tombstone projects on the monster list). I used 2” foamboard – the electric carving knife just does not work on a 2” thickness. Tonight I start painting.

Sports Update. Overlake Gold soccer team tied Snohomish Country Christian 1-1 last night – and had way more shots on goal. Forest Ridge Varsity Volleyball team defeated Archbishop Murphy 3-1 last night and it could have been a lot worse, Forest Ridge was dominant. Wow, sports in a metropolitan private school league are draining – you get to drive all over the city between 3 and 7pm, the worst possible time to be on I-5 and I-405.

Smallville. Just saw the finale from last season. Clark/Chloe/Lana triangle, Lex vs his Dad. the threat of Clark’s exposure, mortal peril for everyone in Smallville, Lex after Clark’s secret, Smallville vs Lex, … Wow this is fun. We can’t wait for the season premiere next week.

Overlake Parent Social. Thanks to curt smith and jill potter for hosting the Overlake social saturday night. What a beautiful place on lake sammamish. And what a great community of parents.

Forest Ridge Board meeting. We had a great board retreat last week. Some really great people on the board – Mike Russell at Accenture and Walt Orlowski (formerly of MD and Boeing) are great new additions to the board. I really enjoyed their articulation of the challenging market we face – every school is getting better, we have to improve just to keep our current enrollment – and of the need to have a strong quantative assessment of the market as the baseline for our planning. Really good vibe.