HD Failure Monitoring. This tool will monitor your hard drives and warn you of potential failures via e-mail or “instant” messages. – “The program uses Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) built into all newer hard disks, and can predict problems with your hard drive(s).”

Halloween. (*&(#@!*$&(&$. There is always one more thing you need at Home Depot. In this case an assortment of machine screws and nuts.

Guitar Links. I love some of these – Godin Guitars. Sheet music and tabs at Sheet Music Direct - 100% Digital Sheet Music, Musicnotes.com, TabCrawler.Com, Guitar Tab at Guitar Tricks.

Gear at marsmusic.com: The Musicmaker’s Destination. And some toys at Edirol Corporation North America

Software to Try. Snapstream – PVR on my PC. Might be worth checking out – Snapstream Media: Record TV, Watch Anytime, Anywhere.

FEVER NIGHTMARE GENERATOR – bizarro drawing tool. For creating small Flash text manipulations – Mix-FX

Seattle Wireless. Grassroots community effort to build out cheap wireless access. Tips, People, News. Seattle Wireless

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.