Drive imaging. I’ve suffered thru several recent system failures and have had to reinstall Windows+Apps which has been no fun. Time to start imaging my hard drives. Norton ghost is the obvious choice and i am also trialing PowerQuest: Drive Image 2002. So far I don’t love either one of them. I want to back up to my NAS and they are more geared to CD backup.

Blogrolling. Cool I am contributor #1!

Startup and Spyware. A bunch of utilities that purport to tell you what goo is running in the background on your system, most from recent print pcmag.

I tried both AutoStartManager and StartUp Manager. Pretty bare bones – they tell you what processes are running, and startup manager lets you disable startup processes. But not a lot of detail on what the processes do. Or on traffic they generate.

Tauscan is another tool. Focused primarily on finding hidden trojan horse processes. Has an impressive db of potential trojans it looks for. It seemed to work OK, tho didn’t find any real problems with my system (good).

PestPatrol is the last I hope to try…

Toys. Need to try out Adobe Illustrator, haven’t looked at in years. Also recommended is Photoshop Elements for digital photo munging. And moodlogic.net looks like a great way to use my CD collection.

Startup Processes in Windows. I’m helping my dad figure out how to shut off various strange startup processes in windows. AN incredibly common problem and incredibly stupidly painful to fix. In his case some reminder program about MSN internet service is nattering at him all the time.

The easy steps are to go to the Startup group in the Programs menu and get rid of any gorp you don’t want. A legacy from win3.x are the LOAD= and RUN= lines in system.ini.

But there is still a bunch of stuff running. Hmm. Ok now we go registry whacking. Run Regedit. Navigate thru the tree control on the left to the key named HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run (at least that is the name on Win2k). Examine the rightmost screen dad. If you’re not sure, don’t touch! Call me.

Ok now navigate to the key named HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Same dealy.

Finally you may have to look a key named HKEY_USERS\[somelongnumber]\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Same dealy.

When you are done, reboot and see if that helps! Oh and here is at least one site that lists the name of strange tasks running in the background of windows and if you are supposed to touch them. There are others – try searching Google with the name of the strange executable, or technet.

blogrolling. as you can tell from the left side of my site i am a total convert to blogrolling. sent my voluntary payment to them this week, got a super nice response from jason, he is a great guy. dumped my load of feature requests on him – easy viewing of multi brolls in the left pain, more outline-like features, etc. again jason seems to be a great guy, good luck man.

Halloween Preps. After much deliberation I’ve settled on my projects for this year. I am a) going to beef up my lightning primarily by switching to blue photo floodlights as discussed on my halloween blog. B) I am going to try my hand at a small axworthy ghost project, drawing inspiration from some of the more extreme setups out there. I’ve tracked down a motor and am going to start laying out all the gear i need this weekend. c) i am going to build a small flying lantern setup. i’ve also gotten my cheap mirror ball motor for this and am going to start getting the rest of the gear this weekend.

There are some minor other things I want to do but these are the longer leadtime items. I’ll try to post pictures as I make progress.

Latest Toy. Philips 8cm cd mp3 player . Love the smaller form factor. And with 100 seconds of skip protection, works great while on the treadmill. I wish it did WMA files too.

Fascinating…The Guardian – Bees take the sting out of explosives

RealNames. Lots of press about Realnames going out of business – for instance at Scripting News. Most of it very anti-Microsoft. I think The Register has it right tho. Actually maybe the tide is turning – Joel has it right too.

Realnames is dying because a) it has very little utility for most end users. Search engines and autocomplete in the browser make it pretty easy to find things. b) it has little utility and lots of cost for site developers. It doesn’t make it that much easier to find my site (see a) and it costs me money. c) it has little utility for advertisers. They already have to put URLs and AOL keywords in their ads. Neither of these are going away. Why put in a 3rd that has less coverage than either of the prior two?

It is easy to point a finger at Microsoft and say they are to blame. But Microsoft did a deal with Realnames at a time when other large players did not – where was AOL? A merger of AOL keywords and Realnames might have made sense, by providing a common name across the internet and the AOL service.

Had the service been incredibly compelling I am sure lots of deals would have occured. But the bottom line is the service didn’t solve that many problems. I just did a quick check on google. Searching for “Ignition” – first several hits were relevant. Searching for “Ignition Venture” or “Ignition Seattle” – first hit was dead on our home page. When we set up our homepage I considered getting a Realname – but given the experience above, I couldn’t ever justify the cost. I think most people did the same math.

Design the Box. Good thought exercise for every startup – what exactly will the box for this product look like, what will it say? Joel on Software - Product Vision. Equally interesting – what does the press release announcing this product say? What will the user experience in the first 30 minutes?

Tolerance. Nice pointer from Liz to Tolerance.org. I’m disappointed to find I have some biases to work on…

Your Tax Dollars at Work. The Ohio State Legislature, after 200 years of statehood, is finally rectifying an obvious oversight – choosing a state amphibian. Thank goodness. It can join now the state beverage – tomato juice – and the state fossil – trilobite – and the many other fine symbols of Ohio.

Here in Washington we are waaaay behind – we have a state insect, fish, fossil, tree, but no amphibian. Are slugs amphibians? They’d get my vote.

Ugh. LawMeme: Legal Bricolage for a Technological Age - Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting (an AOL Time Warner company), was recently interviewed by [INSIDE] on the future of television (Content’s King). In the interview, Mr. Kellner said some very interesting things, including characterizing those who skip television commercials as thieves: [Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.

Netgear. As a break I installed the Netgear FS 105 100mbit switch, upgrading one of my minihubs. Wow was this painless. The autodetection of uplink port and cable type made this soooooo simple. Love it.

These guys totally get the “First 30 Minutes” principle. If the first 30 minutes of a product are great, you will have an enthusiastic and committed customer. If the first 30 minutes are rocky, well that is trouble.