My book reading has slowed to a crawl the second half of this year. Work, Family, Halloween, BioShock, all conspired to limit my time.

* “Tree of Smoke”:amazon by Denis Johnson. All kinds of acolades but I gave up, it was just boring. No hook, nothing intriguing about any of the characters. Nothing compelling about the setting or milieu. I gave it 100 pages. I’ll never know what happens to the characters and I really don’t care. * “The Rise of Silas Lapham”:amazon by William Dean Howells. An interesting title as the story generally is about the economic and societal fall of Silas Lapham. At a deeper level it is a morality play about the temptations faced by Lapham, and how he tries to do the right thing despite the costs. At the end of the day he is at peace albeit greatly reduced in lifestyle. Shouldn’t we all aspire to this? * “Spin”:amazon by Robert Charles Wilson. Very entertaining tale centered around 3 childhood friends and their adult lives as the earth goes through wrenching changes imposed by unknown outside agencies. Some hard science but a lot of character drama as well. * “Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam”:amazon by John Nagl. Great analysis comparing British army culture and success vs US army culture and success. The core point – the British army is a leveraged tool of broader political goals, whereas the US army is designed for all or nothing wars when politics have failed. I also loved the succinct priorities established by Templer in Malaya when he took over the British military mission:

# get the priorities right # get the instructions right # get the organization right # get the right people into the org # get the right spirit into the people # leave them to get in to it.

Probably crazy but we are trying to coerce an LG Viewty cellphone to work on ATTWireless – good tips here on how to get internet configured – Re: LG KU990 (Viewty) - Setting up Internet? - LG - Wireless Forums from AT&T

Diary of a Crossword Fiend: Holiday shopping guide for crossword nuts – awesome list here.

Been tough to keep up with my coursework at UW this year – they just don’t have a deep distance learning curriculum, particularly in materials science, my interest area. Scanning the web for new options:

* Master of Science in Materials Science and Engineering – Florida seems to have a prominent program but sigh, the gators. * Auburn as well * Purdue * Texas A&M

Of course if I want to go self-paced and just learn material without worrying about a degree there is always MIT Open Courseware though at a graduate level the materials are often very thin – someones lecture notes.

PC 99: Information and Much More from Answers.com – i always forget this

* delkin 16gb udma cf card – 16G!! After blowing through a 4G card in a single basketball half (RAW and high-speed continuous shooting will do that), I can see the value of 16G. * Tourist Remover – not sure that this would really work that well for me but a cool idea * Phil points towards some content-aware resizers – another awesome idea in photo manipulation * Not really a product to buy but a project plan for wildlife photog * Bob on tripods

This game is so freaking far away that I have a hard time getting up for it. Plus the hangover from last year. But here is some smack talk from the LSU crowd, something to get the blood boiling – Eleven Warriors ? Blog Archive ? Missed Coffee And Need Something To Get You Going?

The last time I tried to get a cablecard installed was a disaster – A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Comcast Cablecard Install. Things have gotten a lot better. I recently installed two cablecards from Comcast in two different Tivo3s and while it was crazy arcane, it could all be done over the phone and it worked. You have to record all kinds of goofy numbers and tell them to a Comcast rep over the phone, and then wait while they do some mysterious network authentication task, but then things work. Finally got rid of that disaster Microsoft TV box.

Apparently I am not the only person rediscovering the cablecard. And as noted, the cool thing about current cablecards is the multistream capability so that I can record two channels at once. You can’t get Comcast PPV/Ondemand content, but you can get Amazon Unbox.

iMovie ’08 Camcorder Support – getting a cam, here’s the list of what is actually tested with latest apple software

I hate it when I inconvenience someone by blowing a meeting. It just vanished from my calendar.

It probably doesn’t help that my calendar is on my iPhone, synced through iTunes to iCal, where items are picked up by Entourage and synced with Exchange, from which Outlook syncs with them, or the Blackberry Enterprise Server picks them up and syncs them with my Blackberry (which I am trying to retire in favor of the iPhone). With all the syncing and transcoding going on, I’m surprised all my meetings aren’t lost, or cloned 57 times (actually this does happen occasionally), shifted to an Asian timezone, and converted to swatch internet time. It is pretty much a miracle any of my schedule is right.

Bee strategy helps servers run more sweetly

The JimH Crossword Blog: Introducing xwordinfo.com – fun crossword stats – nice job Jim

Wow. Haven’t installed XP in quite a while. I installed the retail XP from a CD.

Then had to find my motherboard drivers on a different PC, burn them to a CD, since XP didn’t have the drivers on the retail disk. And the motherboard network chipset wouldn’t work until I got the new motherboard drivers.

Then I went to Windows Update. First I had to download and install a new Windows Update component. Then 16 security/critical patches. Then and only then was I allowed to download Service Pack 2, which takes a long time.

And after that reboot, another 85! patches waiting for me. And then I had to download sound card drivers, and nvidia drivers.

So … if you do this, be prepared for a lot of time spent babysitting downloads and installs.

Fat Spaniel Technologies : Management – met these guys today, great guys.