A sad fact of modern life. When I pack for a trip these days, my packing planning and time is dominated by gadget packing.

Just carrying the gadgets isn’t that hard. MacBook, iPhone, Kindle, Canon 5d. Ok I have to plan lenses for the Canon a little, and actually there is a whole endless morass of camera decisions brought on by carrying a good dslr – lenses, filters, cases, tripod, etc. But let’s pretend this all away.

Power is the next challenge. Wall wart for MacBook. Wall and car chargers for iPhone because the iPhone wants to be charged often. Kindle charger if travelling for > 5 days or if not fully charged. Extra canon battery and/or charger. Tried ChargePod as a charging consolidation device for a while but hardware failed. Tried one of the aux battery packs for iPhone, it was not effective.

Ok, next, various connectors for playback and transfer. Earbuds, check. Currently using Shures and happy with them. iPhone USB cable (part of charging kit thankfully). Want to output Macbook video/pix or iPhone video/pix to tv/monitor? Bring the connectors. Need to get photos off canon onto MacBook during trip? CF reader. Oh and a USB flashdrive always helpful.

Long trip? Will need extra CF cards, as well as external USB drive with master photo storage.

Ok that is all the physical. Virtual packing now. Kindle is easy, holds all the books I can read on even the longest trip, and updateable over the air (in the US). Music? My Iphone can’t carry all my music, do I have right playlists and subset? Movies on iPhone? Same issue, do I have the ones I want loaded? Docs – I use google Docs, so easy to get access, as long as I can get wifi. Tv shows? Trying to get slingbox working right now to solve that.

Convergence has allowed me to dump some devices – vidcam (canon or iPhone are fine, and I don’t vid much), nintendo ds (iPhone casual games are fine). Those would have all their own attendant power/connector/media issues.

I use Eagle Creek pouches in various sizes to organize all this. Otherwise you have a mad tangle.

What would make all this better? Clearly better battery life, wireless charging would be great. Great cloud storage with local cache for all media would help. Device convergence is not something I care about, there are reasons why dslrs and ebooks and phones and pcs should be different devices. I will be interested to see what my kit looks like in 5 years.

Scandinavia week, I may be visiting the area this fall:

* “Modern-day Vikings”:amazon by Christina Johansson Robinowitz and Lisa Werner Carr. Subtitled as a practical guide to getting along with Swedes, this book is a brief guide to Swedish history, culture, and manners. A quick and interesting read. 4.5 stars on Amazon, not sure any book in this genre can really be a 4.5 star book, but a useful book. * “Denmark - Culture Smart!”:amazon by Mark Salmon. Not quite as good as the book above but still useful. * “City Of My Dreams”:amazon by Per Anders Fogelström. Purportedly a popular novel in Sweden, the tale of a young man coming to Stockholm and living his life during the very early days of the industrial revolution. A poor brutish but honorable existence, with moments of hope, joy, and kindness. A very human tale, 4.5 stars on AMazon. I liked it, much more readable and less overwritten than say Dickens.

Standardized network diagrams for biology – SBGN.Org. Cool, I have a hard time imagining electrical engineering without a standardized circuit diagram language.

Remember the Leg Lamp from A Christmas Story?

* USB Aroma Diffuser/Hub/Moodlight – good to see that the tech industry inventive spirit remains alive, with products like this the US economy will remain a juggernaut for years to come. * Paperclip Lamp. I bet it breaks if you adjust it too many times. * GSelect. A whole site of overdesigned stuff that I should probably avoid. * Infinite Attic. To store all the crap I shouldn’t have bought. Sadly I could really use this…

The BigTen Network has a nice page summarizing all the watch lists for this season. Which nicely highlights OSU’s challenge this year – compared to years past, OSU has way too few players on these lists. For OSU to achieve the top 5-10 finish predicted by a lot of pollsters, some relative unknowns are going to have to have breakout seasons. OSU certainly has the talent but will it develop and gel?

BTW, get your helmet schedule here

Make Your Own URL Shortening Service - url shorteners - Lifehacker. Must read this and implement.

• Is there no place in the US these clowns could go to study climate change? Dorks, pissing away our money. http://bit.ly/2qOrL #
• RT @elevenwarriors: Blame Florida http://bit.ly/180NLa #
• Hope Tressel was watching… http://bit.ly/nwztN #
• @dglasser Clearly stan, he is going to buy a silver mine. who doesn’t want a silver mine? in reply to dglasser #
• Old Nike missle base in early morning rain http://twitpic.com/di3uh #
• @bfeld faith and science needn’t be mutually exclusive. No more than say chocolate and music. They are just different in reply to bfeld #
• Ohio unfortunately well represented – Fastest Dying Cities – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011106498326993.html #
• Meeting with interior designers – seems to be a fractal exercise, every decision brings up 10 more issues #
• RT @jerrymichalski: Whole Foods deluged with angry comments after CEO attack on HC reform; now comments turned off http://digg.com/d310hIy #
• Terrelle Pryor’s awesomeness bends the fabric of space-time: http://bit.ly/u02bV #
• @calbucci for serious issues not sure this is right mechanism – for a $750k treatment, how would this make sense? in reply to calbucci #
• @bfeld very good flick but gritty and verite style can be uncomfortable. Full theatre last night but 4 people walked out, too intense. in reply to bfeld #

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Having spent way too much time with healthcare providers, insurance companies, etc, in the last 4 years, I certainly support change. Almost any change, change for change’s sake, is worth trying, because the system is not very satisfying right now. We should clearly try to do something. So I am inclined towards supporting the new proposals in Congress. I need to get smarter about the details.

In general, shifting power away from the monied interests – insurance companies, pharma companies, large healthcare organizations – and towards the individuals – patients and doctors – is the right thing to do. Do the proposals achieve this? I don’t know. Certainly some insurance companies are pissed off which is probably a good sign, tho other pharma and insurance companies are funding support ads which is concerning – if they are so excited about the proposals, it probably means money in their pockets, and that money is coming from someone.

I kind of hate the fact that all these large organizations – pharma, insurance cos, the various NGOs – are even participating in the discussion. My view is that only voters/citizens should participate, it should be illegal for all these other entities to fund ads and lobbying efforts.

Article in today’s WSJ about “Fasting Dying Cities” and Ohio is all too well represented (though Canton is growing, what is the story there??).

So let’s look at the big picture – college football competitiveness. It is not so much that Ohio and neighboring states are losing population – in fact they are staying pretty constant. So on the one hand, there is no reason to think that the talent pool will get any worse for the recruiting grounds that OSU tends to dominate.

However…the population in Texas, Florida, California continues to grow significantly and therein is a problem. Assuming that physical skills and coaching quality is distributed similarly in both sets of states, the top of the bell curve in the southern states will just continue to have even more great candidates while the midwest states will be flat.

Thankfully we are in a scholarship cap regime, so the leading schools in the southern states just can’t sweep all these kids up – OSU has 8-10 kids on the roster from Florida this year, a couple more from Georgia and Texas. And as population countrywide grows, while scholarship limits stay flat, you have to believe that talent will continue to spread out as it has done in basketball, creating greater parity throughout Division I in the long run.

Also, the southern states are not dominated by a single school the way Ohio is – Florida has UF, Miami, FSU, and all the up and comers like FIA, FAU, UCF, etc; Texas has UT, A&M, Texas Tech, Baylor, SMU; California has USC, UCLA, Cal, Stanford, SJSU, Fresno State, etc. And every neighboring state is trying to poach from these states – Oklahoma and OSU and LSU poaching into Texas, Arizonas and Oregons and Washingtons poaching into California, etc. This happens in Ohio too of course, Michigan and ND and PSU poach into Ohio, and increasingly Pitt and MSU and Cincinnati. Thankfully IU and Kentucky are kind of moribund.

So long term – I suspect OSU can hold its own; however, you have to assume that the lead institutions in the fastest growing, high population states will have a builtin advantage due to a greater talent pool around them – UF, UT, and USC. OSU will have to work hard to maintain at this level – continuing to dominate Ohio recruiting, picking up great talent from neighboring states, and having a healthy flow of kids from Florida, Texas, California, etc. The pipeline from Florida seems to be working, and there is some representation from Texas though we could do better there. California is thin, and boy that is a long way culturally and geographically for an 18 year old to travel.

Oriented Assembly of Metamaterials – Stebe et al. 325 5937: 159 – Science – good article.

“Such metamaterials may, for example, be used to create cloaking devices or light-based circuits based on manipulations of local optical electric fields rather than on the flow of electrons.”

“The challenge now is to move from hit-or-miss assemblies of academic interest to the creation of technologically relevant devices that combine particle and patterned assembly via large-scale processes.”

It is this latter challenge I find most interesting.

* Possibly the most ill-considered travel item ever – those TSA agents love a good joke. Ha ha ha, strip your clothes off sir. * Vex robotic kit. Never had robot love, but if i did… * Sticky tripod. No idea why but seems like I should have in my camera kit. * I don’t know why I don’t have an eye-fi yet. * Cooling bandanna. At less than $2 I should certainly get * Dramm fogg-it hose nozzle. Doesn’t the name sound like a spoonerized curse phrase? * Dynomighty wallet. If they had a buckeye one i’d be there * Digital rachet wrench. Seems like a horrible idea. * Traverse switchplates. Nice, I hate generic plastic switchplates.

* World’s busiest ports * Fractal Nature of Legal Systems. Human systems/societies/cultures are capable of pretty much unbounded complexity. It is not just legal systems. * Kid solves rubik’s cube while playing guitar hero. Ah, youth. * Why are cheap airlines so cheap. Love the “passengers per employee” stat.

This picture is downright scary, I think I’ve had this dream. From coolhunting

• Currently Browsing: http://4snvj.tk #
• RT @johnhcook Glenn Kelman takes on vicious anonymous commenters on TechFlash, and wonders why we can’t all get along. http://bit.ly/YPCuf #
• New blog post: Getting US Citizens Out Of Trouble http://bit.ly/oxXng #
• New blog post: Another blow to ND’s independent status http://bit.ly/b8Ejf #
• New blog post: Kudos to Sea Ray and Lake Union Sea Ray http://bit.ly/UsXBP #
• @rickeames you can just see unreads in googlereader. Unread or all selection in upper left (from memory) in reply to rickeames #
• Not sure how I missed “Most Retarded Horseshit Written In Defense of Goldman Sachs” but u shouldn’t http://bit.ly/Vi8ps (via @niubi) #
• Phrase I’d never imagined writing – I am driving to Cle Elum for a dog’s birthday party #
• Early trails this am http://twitpic.com/d9w6t #

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Rich discusses the apps he likes. Some good ideas here, and I’ve made a few changes as well since I last talked about apps. Here is what I am using right now:

* Bottom Row: Mail, Messages, Calendar, Safari. Mail, Messages, Safari get heavy heavy use. Calendar less so but still need it at hand all the time. * First Page: ** Weather, Stocks, Maps, Camera, Calculator, Settings, Clock, Phone from Apple. Stocks sees the least use, I wonder if I should kick it down a page. Or maybe I should replace it with a better portfolio report app. Calculator doesn’t see much use in summer here but will earn its spot this fall. Settings is only there for me to turn airplane mode on/off and wifi on/off – is there something simpler to do this? ** Twitterfon and Facebook. Recently replaced Tweetie with Twitterfon, just looks a little fresher. Tweetdeck seems like overkill on the iPhone. ** Tripit. Love Tripit. May even kick up to the paid pro version. ** 2 Across for my NYT crossword fix. ** Wordpress for blogging. ** Appigo Todo for todo lists, integrated with RTM on the backend. ** Shazam for identifying music. I am doing this less and less tho (still listening to music a ton), so it may get pushed off. ** ESPN Scorecenter. This one has not earned its spot yet but I am thinking it will during NCAA Football season and I have it configured and ready to go. If it gets score updates as quickly as the website it will be a winner. * 2nd page or later apps that still see some use: ** Amazon.com of course. Though it doesn’t seem as easy to find kindle items in the app as it is on the website ** Flight Update for checking on inbound family members. ** Kayak. ** MiGhtyDocs for accessing google docs. ** Urbanspoon. ** Air Sharing and Air Contacts. Not used that often but lifesavers every once in a while. ** WeFiFoFum. Not essential but a nicer way to see wifi nets around you. ** Smugshot for dealing with smugmug ** Starmap because every once in while I haul the telescope out, mostly to look at planets * Stuff I am trialing: ** Pogoplug. Don’t know yet if It will stick ** CardStar. Trying based on Rich’s reco * And finally, casual games: ** DoodleJump. Stupidly entertaining ** ParaPanic. Ditto ** Robot Master. Annoying, how do people get those high scores?