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.

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.