Like many people I have a mess of extra cables – displays, ethernet, usb, sound/speaker of many flavors, firewire, etc etc etc. I used to just keep them in a tangled mess in a drawer.

But I had an unused shoe rack like this one – Chrome Over-the-Door Shoe Rack – it is pretty great for storing cables. Lots of ways to hook them over the shoe holders, easy to keep them organized by type, etc.

LiTraCon™ via toolmonger. Pretty awesome.

* Completely Uninstalling Windows Applications – sadly necessary * svchost processes – this is very helpful. * Google Docs Uploader – I am shifting all my doc storage up to google docs, this is helpful

* Welcome to NALGENE Outdoor! – all things nalgene * Brett on water treatment * Brett also on how to pack ultralight

And just in case I need motivation to get outdoors – daily exercise dramatically lowers men’s death rates

* “The Brothers Karamazov”:amazon by Dostoevsky. Trying to understand Russian culture but this book didn’t do it for me, gave up after 15% or so. Mindless trudging thru minutiae just wore me out. * “The Greatest Battle”:amazon by Andrew Nagorski. Recounting of the WWII battle for Moscow, with a lot of emphasis on the leadership and missteps of Stalin and Hitler. Millions of troops involved, casualties heading towards 2 million, 25 miles outside of Moscow. The scale and import of this battle are hard to comprehend. The tragedy of Russian life and yet endurance of the Russian people comes out strongly.

Both read on the Kindle by the way. Still very happy with this device.

A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Not too happy with my Drobo – I did finally get a support call with Drobo and they got it working. I had to go twiddle a BIOS setting having to do with legacy USB support. The Drobo folks claim this is the BIOS manufacturer’s fault and assert that other mass storage USB devices will fail as well. However I have had no problems with a variety of generic USB housings and with a LaCie box so I don’t think the Drobo folks have this really figured out yet. Additionally the Drobo software decided to grab drive M for their use which was bad as I already had a network drive mapped to M. So that was chunky and painful.

The box seems to work fine now tho.

Graphene breaks speed record - nanotechweb.org and Scientists make ‘Perfect” nanowires. Intriguing. Wonder what could be done with nanoengineering materials and electricity transmission.

* Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts – hmm this has been an impediment to spawning more accounts * Paypal toolbar gens one-off credit card numbers – always liked the one-off credit card idea; at one point some ecommerce sites didn’t deal well with * Generate blogrolls from google reader – need to reinstate my blogroll someday * See if your windows box has stealth connections to the net – i’m clean * Use Colr.org to plan out a color scheme – love color scheme tools * AnyTV player -- tried this one, actually seems to kind of work * Visual exploration of medical terms – didn’t learn anything new but maybe useful * Photomatix for HDR photography

Ask The Readers: How Do You Recession-Proof Your Career? – some ideas from others.

In my first real job, a wise mentor who had lived through recessions and layoffs gave me this advice:

* Make sure you are working on a product that your company cares about. “Cares about” is generally equivalent to “important to the company’s overall profitability”. If the company doesn’t care that much what happens to your product/business, well, that is not good. * You can either make things or sell things. These are the two functions that are relatively impervious to layoffs. If you are not directly involved in the making or the selling of your company’s product/service, well, also not good.

Abu Dhabi to build world’s first zero-carbon city

GeekStuff4U.com - Skull Speakers – Nice!

Midi Madness – some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.