Oregon Trip. We’re back. Had a great time in Cannon Beach at the Stephanie Inn. And then in Portland for a couple nights. Also drove around a lot and saw a lot of central Oregon – Bend, Redmond, Sisters. Some beautiful territory there.

All while Liz was paddling her way down the Deschutes river with her Outward Bound course. She had a great time, although she struggled thru food poisoning and a day when it was 107 in the shade. But another great outward bound experience.

BTW Oregon has sucky wireless coverage. Blackberry worked in Portland and in a very narrow band around. I was surprised there was no coverage on I-5. And digital cell phones have very limited coverage on the major highways. In central oregon and on the coast, only analog roaming was reliable.

Sony Mavica. Ready for my next digital camera. I hate screwing around with the film media. I wonder if I would like this better – DCRP Review: Sony Mavica MVC-CD400

Not Me. In case it is not clear, none of these John Ludwigs are me: John with trains; John’s filmography; John with puppets; Academic John; John the power tool artist; Broker John; John the songwriter; German guys with John Ludwig in their name; more Songwriter John Ludwig.

Glowbottles. Fun idea for a laboratory setup at halloween – Glowbottles.com A Funky Glowing Liquid Party

Product Keys. So I have a file now that is one of the most precious files on my computer – a list of all my Windows and Office Product Keys. Because I screw around with my systems a lot, reinstalling Windows and Office is unfortunately something I do on occasion. It is pretty pathetic that I have to keep a file of these keys so that I can successfully reinstall.

This is actually something I wish Passport solved for me. Let me associate an install with my passport and have passport remember the dang keys for me. So that on reinstall i can just provide my passport and everything swims along. This doesn’t require huge magic adoption of passport by the industry. It just requires Microsoft product teams to set this as a goal and work together to solve. Later on you could extend to handle keys and credentials of other parties and websites but that is an option. It would be valuable if Microsoft just solved the Microsoft created problem.

Guitar Tabs. Rob Dickerson turned me on to OLGA, another good guitar tab site with a community aspect.

DVD FAQ. Super useful, particularly as I try to understand what kind of writeable DVD drive to buy – DVD FAQ.

VPNS. I’ve been thinking a lot about VPNs. Today’s products are so inadequate. There are two user scenarios they fall down for:

1) Home users. Increasingly corporations are trying to “lock down” the machines that are allowed full protocol access to the intranet, which creates a dilemma for home users who may have very different computing environments than the corporate policy supports. It is kind of crazy to give home users full protocol access to the intranent.

2) Business partners. I just want to share a few documents with my lawyer, attorney, etc. Or a few apps. Not the entire intranet. And security/account management is so confusing. Products like Groove purport to solve this but they are soooo heavyweight – I have to install this huge client with a whole new metaphor just to share a few documents. and of course the documents get copied to some groove directory and aren’t in sync anymore with my intranet copy.

Lots of opportunity here yet. We are seeing some startups thinking about. I hope we see a company that nails this.

Father’’s Day. A memorable card.

Cannons. I remember these from when I was a kid. If they made them a bit bigger they would be great for halloween for my pirate scene – big bang carbide cannons.

Hoist on their own petard. I am only surprised that this hasn’t happened sooner – Record industry turns tables on pirates

Coolmon. I like the playlist i have on my website. I’d love to autopost some other info from my system – CoolMon might be the path to that.

Comparing blog tools. This is super helpful – BlogComp: Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table.

The White Stripes. Saw them at the Moore last night. Wow. Jack has amazing stage presence. And is just a fun guitarist. This band is headed up. For those of you who live near Detroit, make sure you catch them for a hometown show, I bet that would be fun. Their recordings are so sparse, they sound very similar live.

I was about 24 years older than the mean age of the crowd and I am pretty sure the only person with a blackberry in the crowd, blogging my notes about the concert.

I obviously missed the red hair dye memo. Good thing I have that earring – I am pretty sure you couldn’t get in without at least one piercing.

The opening act was a raw trio from grand rapids. All I can say is they were earnest. The second act was the well bred boys, acceptable pop/rock.

But blown away by the White Stripes. Great American flag backdrop. Jack all in red, Meg in red and white. Played nearly all the songs from their latest cd and a few new pieces. Not much from the older catalog. Meg sang on one song. Jack had some brutal guitar efforts.

Words for us all from the White Stripes:

“Well you’re in your little room/ And you’re working on something good/ But if it’s really good/ You’re gonna need a bigger room/ And when you’re in the bigger room/ You might not know what to do/ You might have to think of/ How you got started/ Sitting in your little room.” – “Little Room”

Latest Interesting Software. Secure my registry with RegRun 3 Security Suite Features. Single word macros with ActiveWords. Ebay assistance from HammerTap.