School Year Drawing to a Close. Liz taking the SAT IIs today – Math IIc, Chem, Writing. Tough way to spend a saturday. Annie graduation weekend – congrats! John has his Latin and Math finals on Monday – I tested him by asking him “What is MCMLXI times XIV?”

He told me I was a dork.

PC State of the Art. Your PC pretty much sucks if you don’t have a window kit, internal neon lighting, and a water cooling system.

Jack Valenti in 1982. Courtesy of the EFF.

I’m Better Than You. Try this toy out – with say “Ohio State grad” and “Michigan grad”

Blog/Mail Integration. I like the ideas Jon Davis is working on. What I really want is a blog frontend plugged right into Outlook or Outlook Express. I spend 80% of my day in these tools, they have UI constructs for editting, filing, posting, etc. Why do I need a new tool to do these things? Similarly I want RSS news aggregation built into these so I can review new headlines the same way I review new mail.

Wildseed. Latest press on them in the NY Times. Phones are looking good, I am heading over tomorrow to get a skins update.

Short Attention Span Radio. Tune to 95.7 here in the seattle market. the home of quick 96. sub-10 second snippets of songs, one after another, with a numerical tag announced for each. The most bizarre radio experience I have ever had.

Update: went off the air as fast as it came on. Replaced by KJR FM. a) I am sure this was all driven by economics I don’t have visibility into. b) Man does this tell me that the way we allocate spectrum is nuts – here is a piece of valuable spectrum that is being wasted away just because it is in the middle of the long-established FM band.

Amazon catalogs Wow this is a great new feature. I searched for motor and found C and H Sales. Totally cool ? ac and dc motors with any arbitrary rpm and gearing.

Wiring. Reading Wiring Simplified. Great stuff. Amazing that I have a bachelor’s and master’s in electrical engineering, did years of electrical lab work, and never was exposed to the basics of home wiring and home electricity.

Klez Virus. Wow this has been annoying. Rosemary’s mail address, unbeknownst to her, was used by the klez virus on someone else’s machine as the forged sending address on klez propagation mail. As a result Rosemary received a pile of bounced mail, as isps around the world detected the klez infected mail and bounced it wrongly back to her. Double whammy – virus gets spread, and innocent people get mistakenly harrassed as the misidentified sender. At this point rosemary’s email id is hopelessly compromised (overloaded with incoming bounce mail) so she is going to switch to a new one.

It would be nice if it was possible to identify without a doubt who really sent a piece of email. And actually this is possible, if we all got certs and signed our email for example. The cert infrastructure is hard to use tho and so this hasn’t happened. In the next 5 years something has to change though or we are going to suffer more and more of these kinds of attacks.

CD Collection. Finally finished ripping my entire cd collection (about 1000 discs) to my server. 96k, wma encoding, and I convert to mp3 for appliances as necessary.

Great to be done. Has been a background task for the last month. You can see what I am currently listening to on the left side of the page in the playlist section. I’ve been using windows media player for all my ripping (because it is less buggy than a lot of the tools i have tried and has less ad-ware than products from real) but the web page playlist feature motivated me to switch to winamp for playback.

I’d love to just get rid of all the cds now but I will have to rip these all again in 5 years or so when my hard disks are big enough to handle lossless uncompressed storage. So I’ll keep them around for a while.

Axworthy ghost status. Making good progress on this. I have a small motor – an appliance fan motor. May be too fast and too low torque but am going to try it. I’ve got my drive wheel – an old lawnmower wheel to mount on the motor. I’ve got my carriage wheels – wheelbarrow wheels. I’ve got my carriage line – 100 lb test fishing line. Doing a lot of parts prep and assembly this week, I hope to have a limping system this weekend. See my halloween blog for links to axworthy ghosts if you don’t know what i am talking about.

BlogAmp. Check out my playlist down a ways on the left – dynamically updating thanks to blogamp. Cool toy. I wish it was easy to auto-publish other items like this – my favorite ebay searches, my recent book purchases, whatever. Needs a thoughtful security/privacy model as I may not wish all of this to be easily published. But there is something interesting here.

A worthy security read. This paper will give you pause for thought. I’ve seen many a business plan for security startups – this should be required reading for all of them, as it makes a strong argument that the horse will be out of the barn before most of their security technology can be applied.

Memorial Day Weekend. We picked up some kayaks and a canoe this week and are having a blast tooling around the lake. Weather is marginal but as long as it is not pouring we are having some fun. We got our boats at REI’s big annual sale – man I am a sucker for REI.

OK so it’s not really boating unless someone ends up in the water. I drew the short straw this outing. As C exited the canoe at the end of the ride, the canoe destabilized and whoop! in I went. Lake Washington is cold in May but not unbearable. I think I’ll get out of the canoe first next time…

We need a way to store the boats on the dock during the summer. This seems to be the cadillac of storage systems – Talic – doesn’t look too weather safe tho.

The racks at SEITECH look a little more weather safe. We’re going to cruise the shore today and see what others do for storage.