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.

Floating Lantern. Got mine built and trialed yesterday – Floating Lantern. Very nice looking. I downsized a little and used a different lantern and lamp element but otherwise pretty much per these plans. I think i’d like a little higher rpm motor given the smaller diameter of the effect but it still looks good.

Yamaha DiscT@2. Love the feature that this Yamaha CD Burner has – in place burning in of a graphic label. Cool!

Faceplate Camera. Love the faceplate feature on the Toshiba PDR-T10. Shades of Wildseed…

Go Bucks! Nice win yesterday over Wazzu – all my wazzu alum associates out here are in disbelief. For my Ohio friends, check out the coverage at the Seattle Times and here too. Oh and check out Gesser whining in the Spokane paper.

Waterproof Backpack. We need a good waterproof backpack that can sit out in the rain during soccer practice and keep schoolwork dry. The Lowepro Dryzone bag is the best match I’ve seen tho we don’t care about the photog features, this would just be for regular school use.

College Apps. Liz is making great progress on these. But a lot of work. I’ve been helping on the mechanics and the process. I’ve been exposed a lot to all the online application processes. A quick review:

• the Common App site and forms get high marks. This is the application that 200+ private schools accept. High marks for posting edittable PDF forms so that you can type in the key data before giving to the school (for instance the school report form). Also high marks for having a form that can accomodate semesters or trimesters well.
• the Pomona app and Stanford app on Embark are reasonable. Reasonably clear forms.
• the Caltech app, Pepperdine, and UW apps are all on applyweb but don’t just go to the website, you need to route there through the college sites. Applyweb is a little more confusing than Embark in my estimation. Caltech doesn’t let you advance to later parts of the form until you have submitted the first part which is a downer. UW requires that you transcribe your complete transcript into a standard form on their app, this is a lot of work that is painful.
• U of California gets an incomplete so far. The online version for 2003 is not yet available. PDF forms are available for download. Like UW, you have to transcribe your transcript into their form – a lot of work.

For all the apps you will need the Acrobat reader, a high speed connection, and a good laser printer (I recommend color). I also recommend the full Acrobat product so you can overlay text on the forms, this allows you to complete the forms with a very professional look.

Thanks Ignition. I was talking to my dad the other morning:

Dad: “thanks for the nice flowers.” John: “huh?” Dad: “you know, the nice flowers you sent from Ignition to the hospital.” John: “news to me, dad. I work with some pretty nice people tho.”

Thanks so much. Meant a lot to Dad and Mom.

Extra PCs. I have 4 PCs in my house that see regular use. Because I keep upgrading these, I am starting to accumulate a pile of old PCs that are not really doing anything. I have 3 right now that are just rusting away. They don’t have enough storage by modern standards to store much. I’ve tried to use them as print servers but a) using windows nt server as just a print server is overkill and more management hassle than i want, and b) using linux as a print server with windows clients seems to be more of a config hassle than I have time to deal with. I need to find some other uses that require modest compute cycles, and for which I can find low-hassle maintenance-free software.

College Football RSS Feed. Was contacted by Andrew Koper – a michigan fan, boo – looking for a college football rankings rss feed. A great idea, i’d include on my page. Google and Syndic8 don’t seem to turn anything up. The feed only changes once a week, it would be easy to handcraft one. I might do so this weekend…

Reardon. A little dated but – congrats thomas – Openwave Announces New Executive Appointments.

Personal Music Streaming. Wow I’ve been looking for this…MP3Mystic :: Easy to set up, flexable, free personal streaming music server. Rob Bennett uses Edna for the same purpose and is happy with it.

Izymail. Trying out Izymail – outlook access to hotmail. I have found the native outlook access to hotmail increasingly unreliable and so am looking for alternatives. so far this seems to work…

Digital Audio Player. Another nice audio solution for Halloween – nice – CF Sound Player