8/22 NY Times Circuit section. Lots of good stuff in here today. Googlemail. Jaguar review – after 14 years away, I may have to buy a Mac. Single number services – Kall8, Simulring, Linxcom -- i need to get one of these someday.

Tesla Coils and other great stuff. Nice plans in here for Tesla Coils including the 6’ tall 1 million volt version – Information Unlimited. Man I would love to have one of these on top of the house at Halloween.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Hilarious. Best movie I’ve seen in months.

Layoffs. They suck. Sometimes unavoidable in today’s capital markets but I am renewing my commitment to work like crazy to avoid them. The best way to avoid them is to keep headcount down down down early.

Just Six Numbers. I like this book a lot – fairly straightforward read about cosmology. I particularly like, in the discussion of dark matter, his analogy of the sea – dark matter as the bulk of the undersurface water that we never see, “bright” matter as the small layer of frothy stuff on top we can see. A very humbling view of our position in the universe.

And the Woody Allen quote is great – “Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.”

Shuttle. Rich found a cool PC – Shuttle Barebone System Configuration

PocketPC vs Blackberry. I’m carrying around a Toshiba e740 pocketpc now with built-in WIFI, as well as my blackberry. Some really blatant differences.

The blackberry has basically 2 control buttons – Affirmative, Cancel, and the affirmative button is also a scroll wheel. In addition there is a reset button hidden on the back and of course the keyboard. The PocketPC has 8 control buttons, one big switch, two recessed switches, a reset button, an eject button. I can’t tell you what all these buttons do. I know I couldn’t turn on the Toshiba for part of the day because the big switch was in the wrong position.

The blackberry has very limited software that does 2 things well – email and calendar, fully synched with my desktop. The keystrokes to do common operations in these apps are pretty optimized (tho could be even better). The pocketpc software is much richer but a lot more confusing.

The web just doesn’t work well on the pocketpc. It is great that I can even get to it, but no page i have gone to wraps correctly and so reading any content is painful. And javascript is not supported. The web is so clearly a PC phenomena.

Digital Cameras. Ray Ozzie likes the Canon Ex-S1. Not sure i can deal with 1.3Mpixels tho. I like the 4Mpixel images i get from my Kodak DX4900, which also has the nice dock and battery charger like the canon. a little bigger tho.

Music Gear. Looks like a good site – Harmony Central

Wildseed. Latest story in Inc magazine. If you eve rhave a chance to see a demo of the Wildseed product at a trade show, it will be well worth your time.

Jungle Robot. This looks like fun – I can certainly use this at Halloween as a bat or ghost or something overhead.

Air Transportation Stabilization Board. As I read this, about $1.5B has been guaranteed in loans to airlines so far, and there are several major applications outstanding. Most of this money goes to the bankers if the airlines fail as I read it. The damage from September 11 though is at a very individual level – families who lost members, and individuals who have lost or will lose employment as a result of the resultant economic upheaval. Seems like we ought to be directly helping these individual citizens rather than the corporate entities and the banks.

Signs. A fun movie but come on (don’t read further if you haven’t seen yet). The aliens have the technology to travel interstellar space but have no weaponry, body armor, and can’t identify beforehand that an incredibly common earthly substance will put their invasion at risk? And humanity has a problem fighting off aliens who have no weaponry, body armor, or hand to hand combat ability? Ok I am overanalyzing. My kids liked it. I had fun too.

Wine Fun. As someone who spent his early adult years in Ohio drinking Bud and fine Ohio wines, I really related with this article in The New Yorker