Chester Avenue. I’m riding down Chester from downtown to the cleveland clinic. Man has it changed in 15 years. It used to be scary. It is becoming gentrified. A bunch of new houses, new condos, really nice construction.

Seattle Sports. Man it seems like a bad time to be a fan in this town. Mariners are fun but can’t quite get over the top, and my understanding of the new labor deal is that the Mariners will need to give up cash to others, thereby affecting Mariners competitiveness over the next 5 years. The Sonics seem unable to get or retain top talent, and the current management has a history of less-than-great deals. I have a hard time getting excited about the Seahawks, Holmgren just seems like a poseur to me. My favorite college sport, basketball, is not a game the Huskies excel at, and there is no arena in town that is large enough to host anything but first-round NCAA games. The football Huskies are a bright spot, tho last weekend was painful. But I am not feeling generally optimistic.

Offline. Going offline for most of week. Dad is at the Cleveland Clinic undergoing treatment for MVP. Good luck Dad!

From Lockergnome. OneClickPlay looks like a great utility to use with winamp – creating playlists is a major pain. It would be cool if this would create play lists based on search criteria across all my media “all songs by Prince, Rick James, or of type FUNK”.

This is interesting – Q315237 - High Rate of Collisions on 100-MB Networks.

And a good source of desktop wallpaper.

Real Beverly Hillbillies. Hey all you relatives in Ohio will want to check this out…. :)

Outage. Off the web most of yesterday, as was our office at Ignition. Routing problem at Conxion. Surprising how hard it was to find – you would think that they could have discovered the problem in less than 8-10 hours.

Surprising how useless I am without the net for a day. No email. No shopping. No research. I just kept running “ping 206.204.4.6” all day long, trying to see my DNS server…

Groove Usage. Ray notes that 25% of Groove users use it to sync their own files across multiple locations. The home/work sync problem is a huge one that, with broadband homes, ought to be solveable. Groove is a way but very heavyweight for the intended purpose. There has to be a solution that is much lighter that plugs into Windows and native Windows apps in a cleaner way. I’ve tried setting up my own VPN server at home but that is not worth the hassle. The WinXP remote desktop stuff is so unintuitive, it is not a good solution. I just want to be able to access any of my work or home files from any location without installing whole new app (like Groove) and without paying some service fee to store the files up in the cloud – I already have tons of storage, thank you.

Outward Bound event. Liz and I think we’ll go to the Seattle Black Tie Benefit for Outward Bound – looks like a lot of fun, more fun than a normal auction event. Interesting to read the corporate sponsorship list – Endeavour Capital looks interesting, a very different kind of investment firm than is Ignition, but very similar values – I suppose some of the principals there are Outward Bound alums.

Azure Capital. Dinner with Mike Kwatinetz and others of Azure Capital tonight – I knew of Mike while at Microsoft but this will be first in-person meeting. Really like some of their investments – hope we can work together.

Treadmills. Looking for a good one for home use. Need to get that daily exercise going!

Some models that get good press – Precor M9.55, the True Fitness lineup, the Landice Roadrunner with built in 6CD player, the Smooth lineup, the rest of the Landice lineup.

Good review sites include Advanced Fitness Treadmill Reviews, TreadmillDoctor, and the About.com Treadmill site.

Home-based Web Services. What Danny O’Brien said – I have a ton of computing power and storage at home…it is on the net all the time…why am I going to pay people for simple services like file storage and mail? The problem with my home network is reliability but I have 4 machines at home on the net, can’t software bind them together and make them reliable enough for me?

Fireball. Brad Chase is looking at the Escient Fireball as a potential media hub. certainly claims to do it all. expensive – i wonder if it is worth it. It all depends on the integration – I can do all this much more cheaply with a PC but I have to use 25 different pieces of software. If the fireball really makes it easy to do all the things it claims, the integration would be worth something.

Dynacenter. New company for which I serve on the Board of directors. Great office location in Leschi…

Dogs. Why they kill their owners – courtesy of my friend Cory. Apologize for the size.

Sight Gags. The Gag Works looks like the best source…I need some of the “arrows thru head” for my Custer costume. Or maybe a nice Monk Robe or another if I go as the hunchback again.