Glowing Bubbles. I am not sure how I would use this at Halloween but it seems cool – Steel Blue Antari Blacklight Glow Bubble Juice

Simple Fog Chiller. A nice description of how to build a fog chiller – Fog, On The Rocks

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.