December 2002 Archives

Connie put me in charge the night before, so I was more than a little nervous. Finally decided to do Southwest as a theme because I just couldn't get pumped about Greek. We use the Pasqual cookbook. It's a terrific restaurant in Santa Fe. We had an incredible menu thanks to the efforts of Phil, me, 'Rents, Jennie and Bob. Can you believe it, we were the main cooks. Here is what we had...

Pew Internet & American Life Project. An amazing set of facts about how the Internet is the key to finding information for most users. It is far beyond the geekstream and into the mainstream. A nice study. Thanks to Boingboing for finding it.

Customer Survey Results. I'm going up into the snow quite a bit this season. Other than borrowing Jennie's Subaru, I really should get a good set of winter tires. This looks like the best review board. It says, Pirelli Winter 210 Snowsport, Bridgestone LM-22 or the Dunlop Winter Sport M2 are the highest rated by users.

OfB.biz: Open for Business - OfB Open Choice Awards 2002. We've seen so many Linux based deals, I finally decided we had to have at least one machine running and using it. Just converted an old HP machine at work to use Red Hat Linux 8.0. Have to say it was an amazingly easy experience. Now I'm loading up on the best Linux software. Here's a list of award winning programs

?

The major hole that I can see is an Outlook replacement. Either have to run WINE which runs an emulator of Windows or have to us Ximian with an Exchange connector. This last thing requires an upgrade to Exchange 2000 unfortunately.

Chris Carmichael Training Camps. I'm going to have to go to one of his camps this year. The March one is closed unfortunately. Maybe the September one.

Lance Armstrong: Member Journals: CTS Cafe: Carmichael Training Systems Also, here's a great place to see Lance's training diary. It's sort of like a blog. Fun reading.

Joi Ito's Web: mail2entry script for MT moblog. Thank you Joi, Thank you Joi. You've just saved me days of work. I was just about to get started on the same project and you've done it for me. I'm going to be moving a bunch of folks over to MovableType and this was the one feature that b2 cafelog had over MT. Now you've fixed it!

Python Compared. A fascinating study list of comparisons fo different languages and how efficient they are.

Perhaps the best study done was by Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century

North Korea. Hmm. This reads like a Tom Clancy novel and not a good scenario. North Korea could make a nuke in six months. South Korea is led by a peacenik who has never been outside of Korea. South Koreans distrust the U.S. and think the North Koreas will be enthralled by hugs and kisses. Uh oh. Where are Jack Ryan and Mr. Clark now.

Geek Blog: Two Towers review. I just loved the movie and I've read the book. Truth is that I can appreciate both. Someone in the long comment thread says that books are books and movies are movies. And the two don't translate well between them. I've read a couple of authors and screenplay writers who say the same thing.

The sheer spectacle of it all was what got me. The scenery and the incredible battles. The emotion of it all and Gollom too for that matter

Anyway, I've ordered the trilogy. Lost it somewhere in many moves and have the extended directors cut of the fellowship. So rock on, I'm hooked!

TCS: Tech - Year of the Blog. A good summary of what happened this year with blogs. It is amazing how quickly the phenomena has made it out of the high level geeks to only the partial geeks like me!

...bloggers areasking for money. Few will make a living from their blogs - but then, few free-lance writers make a living solely from writing anyway. Other, non-beggging, revenue models are also in play. Nick Denton' s gadget-blog Gizmodo.com, is reportedly already in the black (more than most web media ventures can claim) and Henry Copeland's BlogAds venture seeks to aggregate bloggers to achieve success the old-fashioned way, through advertising. John Hiler's CityBlogs and Nick Denton's Gawker.com look like they might pose threats to the entertainment-oriented alternative-weekly market niche. And, of course, Big Media outfits have joined the blog world either by bringing in bloggers (as Slate has done with Mickey Kaus) or by creating house blogs, as MSNBC has done with Eric Alterman. So it's fair to say that blogging has, to some degree, gone commercial.

Nonetheless, the beauty of weblogs is that they're cheap. This is why "thin media" ventures like Gizmodo can turn a profit: it's not hard to turn a profit when the overhead is minuscule. As Paul Boutin reported, "Media has never before been this lean." That's also why the number of weblogs - even without any revenues - has exploded beyond any counting. A.J. Liebling famously said that freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one. Nowadays, that's anyone who wants to. There's even a blogger from Baghdad, and a homeless guy blogger from Nashville. You can't get any more open than that.

What's next? I think that falling prices for storage, bandwidth, and digital cameras will result in weblogs going multimedia over the next year. Jeff Jarvis has already experimented with video-blogging on his site: two-minute video clips with professional-looking titles and backgrounds generated by computer. Mobileweblogging, taking advantage of the ability to post pictures and text via cellphones, may offer anyone the opportunity to be a reporter. The next time there's a major disaster or terrorist attack from an area where there are a lot of cellphone-equipped individuals, the first photos to reach the outside world will almost certainly do so via weblogs.

Interalia.org: I hate home. Sorry that Kevin hates home. I've felt the same way. Can only say that sometimes it gets better (and sometimes it doesn't). Amazing how people can get on each others nerves, but that's the holidays. For me, I'm just happy that the holidays are great fun for all of us now!

Top 10 Google Myths Revealed. good reading on how google works. makes me feel slightly better ludwig is a 4 while i'm a 3. and pure networks is a 4.

Main thing I learned is that i should post a job listing on hotjobs.com or something to get a high value site to point to me.

Joi's Moblog. Pretty cool. Joi Ito wanders around all day taking pictures. I love it.

Joi Ito's Web: Steve Mann on glogs. Joi Ito points out Steve Mann's writings on so called glogs. Given digital cameras, I think he means more like mobile photo blogs moplogs???

There really isn't a good way to point through an article on MovableType, so this is the best way I've found.

Here are some movie related sites that I use:

• dvd authority v4.0 -=> . Just had a chance to see Lord of the Rings: Two Towers again. Better the second time, I'd say. Also been looking at getting the collectors edition of volume 1. This site seems to have the coolest reviews. Now that widescreenreview.com charges, I've been looking for other places to find information on DVDs.
• Movies.com. A good list of upcoming movies that I like to look at. Notables are Terminator 3 and Matrix 2. There is a god!

Joi Ito's Web: Yahoo getting ready to kick Google off portal?. It's amazing to me to see how Google has managed to overtake Yahoo in the search business. Goes to show that technology can beat raw human power. What has surprised me is that Yahoo has been so slow to react. I've noticed for the last year how much better it is. Of course, MSN waits to rear its head in the search wars

Goes to show there is so much fundamental technology left to do with the mass of data that is the Internet

Weblog central. Amazing MSNBC actually does a update set on interesting weblogs. Of course, it is not itself a blog, but what the heck. Interesting to see what they pick out.

Ed over at Hynomics has a great idea. He has a florist who sends his wife flowers every month. I'm going to start the same tradition with Connie. Here are two florists in Seattle that I really like:

• Flowers on 15th: Florist and Landscaping Services on Capitol Hill, Seattle. These folks do the arrangements over at St. Clouds and I just love them. They replace Nature's Florist which went out of business unfortunately.
• Fena Florists in Kirkland.
I used these folks quite a bit when I have Eastside deliveries. They are very good at finding Microsoft buildings I've noticed.

Kid Friendly Hotels in NYC. We're off to New York and we wanted to find some kid friendly hotels there. A quick search with Expedia revealed many nice deals, but it wasn't clear what the good kid places were. Frommers and About.com helped with:

The Best Hotel Bets for Families

Most Family Friendly: The Doubletree Guest Suites, 1568 Broadway (tel. 800/222-8733 or 212/719-1600; www.nyc.doubletreehotels.com), not only provides standard two-room accommodations sleeping four or six, but also kitchenettes, baby equipment, childproof rooms, and a super toddler playroom. The hotel is busy developing a children's activities program as well, and you can just tell when you walk in that the staff is happy to see children. The Metropolitan Hotel, 569 Lexington Ave. (tel. 800/836-6471 or 212/752-7000; www.metropolitanhotelnyc.com), and Le Parker Meridien, 118 W. 57th St. (tel. 800/543-4300 or 212/245-5000; www.parkermeridien.com), are two more friendly Midtown hotels, both with essential child equipment on hand and welcoming packets for young guests.

Best Suite Deals: The Doubletree Guest Suites, 1568 Broadway (tel. 800/222-8733 or 212/719-1600; www.nyc.doubletreehotels.com), is a sensible family option, sleeping the whole crew in one unit for a relatively easy price. If you need a lot of space, any of the Manhattan East Suite hotels (tel. 800/ME-SUITE; www.mesuite.com)--the Surrey Hotel, 20 E. 76th St. (tel. 212/288-3700)); the Lyden Gardens Suite Hotel, 215 E. 64th St. (tel. 212/320-8022); the Beekman Tower Hotel, 3 Mitchell Place (First Ave. at 49th St.; tel. 212/355-7300); and six other Midtown properties--deliver a small apartment with a full kitchen for a reasonable amount of cash. In Midtown, the Roger Smith Hotel, 501 Lexington Ave. (tel. 800/445-0277 or 212/755-1400; Rogersmith.com), has some homey country-decor suites with lots of room for a fair price. The Embassy Suites Hotel, 102 North End Ave. (tel. 800/EMBASSY or 212/945-0100; www.embassynewyork.com), offers some very favorable rates on weekends for its roomy, sleek suites.

Seattle Cinerama Technical Innovations. Thank you Paul Allen for the most incredible movie theater I've ever been to. Paul renovated the Cinerama in downtown Seattle and if you are ever in town. You just have to visit. If I had time I'd go to every movie there just to see and hear it. Here's why (from their website):

Digital Cinema

Cinerama is one of the first theaters in the world to be completely wired for digital cinema, a remarkable new technology that utilizes powerful video servers and broadband fiber optic connections to feed digitized motion pictures directly to movie projectors. The latest Star Wars used this technology. OK movie, incredible picture

Sound System

Cinerama™'s state-of-the-art digital sound and acoustics system, designed by renowned sound consultant Neil Grant, takes strategically positioned EAW-brand speakers and amplifiers and pairs them with a series of computer-designed and -positioned sound baffles to keep sound rich and clear. Cinerama patrons are completely enveloped in a surround-sound experience, regardless of where they sit in the theater.

Projection Equipment

Seattle's Cinerama is equipped to show both 35mm and 70mm films. Project managers embarked on a world-wide search to find a salvageable Norelco AAII projector, originally manufactured in the 1950s. Widely regarded as the best 70mm projector ever made, the Norelco provides an extraordinarily bright and stable image. Seattle’s Cinerama also features three Cinerama projectors, making the landmark theater one of only two movie houses in the world currently capable of presenting true Cinerama extravaganzas as they were intended to be seen.

For more details see Cineram Technology explained

the sea of waking dreams: A Sarah McLachlan Website. Spent the day hacking away at a UIEvolution strategy piece. Been a long time since I've just hacked slides and thought about things. Thank goodness for multimedia in Windows. Been listening to some old songs, cranked up as there is basically no one in the office. Sarah McLachlan is one

Patty Griffin. She's another favorite. Two of the Dixie Chicks song on their latest album Home and also one of their hits in the previous work were done by Patty.

Dixie Chicks. Been listening a lot to their latest Home album. Particularly Landslide and Travelin' Soldier.

What a pain it is to have various incompatible versions of Windows around. Although there are an incredible number of compatibility hacks, the fact remains that even in my house, I have at least five programs and a scanner that won't boot on Windows XP. So, I'm off to look for multiple Windows on a one machine software. here is hwat I'm trying:

• Connectix software houses multiple Windows on one machine. This looks a lot like VMWare and has a similar $200 price point
• VMWare. This is what Pure networks recommends. A bit pricey for me at $300 or so.
• Multiple Windows freeware. Now that is more like it in price.

Fat Chuck's - Corrupt CDs News. I hit my first copy protected CD today. It's SHeDAISY's Brand New Year and can't playback on lots of my PC at work, but interestingly does seems to rip OK on a Lite-on CD-RW, so it is not clear where the compatibility is.

It is amazing that the record industry is fighting this kind of battle with their users. Where is the love the customer philosophy anyway. In any case, as usual, the Internet is filled with information about it and I'm sure I'll find the hack to listen to this soon.

Here are the tools that I've found which let you actually listen to CDs on your computer:

• Clone CD. Let's you make exact copies. It has a 21 day evaluation edition and then you buy it. Seemed to work perfectly
• cdparanoia. An open source project that reads CDs and corrects errors. These copy protection schemes work by introducing errors which make it hard for CD players to work. For instance, this copy protected SHeDAISY has a bad bonus track that looks to our car CD player like a bad track 14, but causes at least some of my PCs to reject the whole thing

John Ludwig has a good post that points out the RIAA statistics are just so much gobblegook. It is not clear that they are crashing. But, it is pretty intuitively clear that they are losing some important sectors. The young and the geeked.

tantek/log/2002/12. Tantek notes the new Froogle search site which is Google applied specifically to home shopping. Personally, I've found Pricegrabber followed by Half and eBay search to be the most useful way now.

[brad choate dot com] The Two Towers and lowMag.net's loves it too. I haven't seen such an incredible movie in a long time. We went with the other Geek Fishermen and I can only report that is was an amazing experience.

Not just Gollum mind you, but the scenary, the battlescenes. It was just amazing to me how well put together it was. Now, I know that if engage my brain, there were probably many terrible things about it, but I've never been so mesmerized. Come to think of it, maybe when I first watched Star Wars for the first time. I literally didn't want it to end. This is one movie was super long and I didn't mind. I just wanted it to keep going

CNNSI.com - 2002 Sportsman of the Year - Lance Armstrong. I'm sure he is heroes to millions of people, so I'll just have to add my name to the list. Just finished reading the Sports Illustrated article on him that went with the Sportsman of the Year award. Who could not admire his dedication. Get the December 16th issue of Sports Illustrated for the whole piece, but here are a few excerpts:

Armstrong is on his bike on a two-lane stretch...east of his hometown, Austin, Texas. But,then, Armstrong is always on his bike. It's not about the bike? It's all about the bike. Heck, just to tell him he's this year's Sportsman of the Year, we had to reach on his bike...

US: Hey Lance, congratulations, You're the Sportsman of the Year.
HIM: Hold on. Gotta pass this semi. [Pause] O.K., now, what?

Photo.Net. Wow, this is an incredible site with really great information. For instance, Camera Equipment Forum - Advice for beginners threads and Building an SLR system. I can't stand the fact that picture quality on point and shoot cameras is so poor. Here are two good guides to getting into photography with 35mm SLR cameras. Also see Consumer Search which is a review of reviewers. A neat meta review guide.

A little history of the Tong's

For years we had an Olympus Stylus 35mm point and shoot and I had never realized how blurry the pictures were until someone showed my photos from an old Nikon 35mm SLR. Wow, amazing.

Then, I got a digital point and shoot, the Canon ELPH S-100 minature one. It was fine, but there is so much edge enhancement built into it, the pictures when printed looked really bad as well as the fact that it takes one second for the photo to actually get taken, so I always miss the candids. So that went off to my Dad. We then got a Yashica T4 Super 35mm fixed focus with a terrific lense and I went to Adorama to get some really great 35mm film from Fuji called NPH and like got better. The Yashica is now discontinued, but apparently, the trusty dusty Olympus Stylus 80mm fixed lense is the new standard one to get even though we had bad experience with the quality of their zooms.

Recently, some folks sent their 35mm shots from a cross-country run to us and it reminded me how bad a 35mm point and shoot was. The Yashica is way better than the old Olympus, but nothing compared to that. Of course I want to go all digital, but the technology revolution is just moving too fast. I'm waiting for the 16 megapixel models that are coming out now!

35 mm Cameras

The solution presented itself in a Popular Photography, so now I'm off looking for a used 35mm SLR. There are some incredible choices right now. Essentially, the two major players, Nikon (strong in the US) and Canon (strong in Europe) have identical products at identical price points of roughly $200, $400 and $900.

So, I'm ebay camping out looking at the them all, but based on great advice from photo.net where they summarize by saying get Nikon for the lense, Minolta for the body and Canon for the best compromise. Given the two share leaders are Canon and Nikon, I'll probably do a Nikon for right now by shopping at these Nikon oriented URLs:

• KEH which is reputable, but perhaps has higher prices.
• Adorama. Like KEH, may have higher prices.
• eBay. Rock bottom but caveat emptor
• Pricegrabber. A good browsing of major resellers just watch the low rated ones, they can be very bad.

Here are the camera's I'm looking at that are all five star rated in the buying guide issue of Popular Photography:

• Nikon N80. Great review in Popular Photography at $400 street roughly or a used one for about $50 less.
• Nikon F100. The is the premium one for about $900 street for the body. Wow, that is expensive, but a nice one. Probably can't justify it.
• Nikon N90s with MD26 databack or Nikon N90-s. This is now discontinued but just went for $250 on eBay so is a good value leader where I can put the money into lenses. It's the sensible but not less high technology choice.
• Canon EOS Elan 7e. This is the equivalent of the N80.
• Canon EOS 3. This is the equivalent of the F100 in model lineup.

Lenses

Now, I'm off to look at lenses as advised by looking for a good lens. Some good advice on lenses says basically stay with simple non-zoom lenses. Means, I either to get:

• A fixed focus 35mm or 50mm to start. The f/1.8 versions are very inexpensive at less than $100 and for double that, you get f/1.4 which shoots in half the available light. Good to look at a high quality used one here.
• Telephoto and wide angle fixed lenses.
• a basic 35-70 f/2.8D for about $300 as noted in the piece or a new 28-80/2.8. Seems like you want just a small zoom as I recall reading somewhere. The basic thing here is that this is advanced stuff and is very expensive.
• Or a 28-105mm/3.5 AF-D as a longer lense.

Labs

If you can't find a good local lab, consider using mailers. Adorama Pro Lab offers dip-and-dunk processing for both E6 and C41. A mailer for 36-exposure slide film is $6 (order), for 4x6 proof prints from 36-exposure negative film, the cost is $12 (order). A&I is one of the nation's best big labs and they offer mailers: www.aandi.com. I love the convenience of mail order so will give both Adorama and A&I a try. Not that Adorama got some terrible reviews in photo.net. Also that B&H also reselles A&I mailers, but you have to pay their very expensive shipping so A*I direct makes more sense.

Film

Photo.net. Most good sites are saying ISO 400 film is high enough quality and lets you shoot in less light. Right now, we use the Superia 400, but photo.net says that he doesn't like it, so I'll probably use up the rest of the Superia 400 then get a bunch more of the Fuji NPH, Kodak Royal Gold 400 or Kodak Portura 400 for the film and see how it goes. We've compared Superia and NPH now with A&I processing and they are right, Superia is very enhanced, NPH seems very neutral. We like it.

2001 Films Roundup, ISO 800 film in 2/02 and ISO 1600 Films in 11/02. Seems that 800 film is really coming on. The NPH 400 is a good safe one, but others to try at ISO 800 would be the Fujicolor Portrait NPZ 800 Professional with really great sharpness but not as neutral as the Superia X-TRA 800. Also the Kodak Centuria 800 got good marks for accurate color and sharpness.

Santa Cruz BlurBeen lusting for a mountain bike. This is the current one I've been eyeing. Also studying the Specialized Epic and maybe the new Klein Quantum based on the Turner Monolink.

Reviews

• 2003 Santa Cruz Blur Reviews. The folks on mtbr continue to rave.
• 2002 Full Suspension Santa Cruz Blur Product Reviews
• Santa Cruz Blur 2003 R
• Mountain Bike Magazine Nov 2002 Review.

download : vim online. I've been reliving my past and one of my favorites editors was vi on Unix. Thank goodness they now have it on the PC. I'm literally remember keystrokes I haven't typed in 15 years.

Information Letter 14. This memo by John Walker was one of my touchstones more than a decade ago. Written in 1991, it talks about the quaint Eighties. It's amazing to me how much changes with the Internet and how in many ways nothing changed.

I rate this a must read for everyone. Actually, his whole book is very interesting documentation about the creation of Autodesk and like all true stories, it's not pretty to see how things really worked in a sausage factory

Categorization. An interesting piece on categorization. I'm a little obsessed with this too as I figure out how to turn the rest of my web site into a giant blog. He's a bit like John Ludwig in believing in dynamic categorization or a big content search

Stupid Network. This is one of those classic articles written by Dave Isenberg five years ago about how the basic telco assumptions aren't valid anymore.

I'll be a little contrarian in a day when essentially every startup carrier is in bankruptcy and say that the trend is still in the direction the he talks about. A great piece

It's amazing that there hasn't been more innovation in email. Part of the problem is that there isn't an easy to code, modular platform to innovate on. Here are some of the projects I've found with food for thought.

• POPFile - Automatic Email Classification. It's interesting that this is the most active project current on Sourceforge. Shows the amount of interest in improved email. It classifies mail and has to suck it in at the POP3 level. That's not a very rich API to say the least. Imagine that there was actually a rich platform for doing this kind of work. You could unleash a lot of developer talent. I had a chance to try it and it is a great idea, but the integration is really pretty bad given the current state of technology. You set up a POP3 intercepter on the local machine and then have to change every single POP3 email account entry to use it. Symantec has to do the same thing and they don't work together. I love the program BTW and have tied all my POP3 accounts to it using Outlook POP3 support. I've been using for a week and it is fantastic. This Bayesian stuff works really well.
• Squirrel Mail. This is an open source POP3 mail reader. It is amazing the number of add-ins that this has spawned. I've looked at the code and it is nice and modular with the open source ethos. Written for server only though, it's got all the disadvantages of a web/HTML only interface. There needs to be a client harness to build things like this.
• Pine. An old project from down the street in Seattle. I've used it and its more like a traditional Unix closed product.
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• Chandler. This is Mitch's newest project. It is going to have a very nice underlying data syste it sounds like and has the beginnings of a platform like feel.

Gallery is now working and up on Tong Family. It requires a logon though, so you need to send me email if you want to look at photos of the kids, etc.

Gallery :: your photos on your website. As usual, there are tweaks galore. One that I need to install right away is how the default layout works with the captions. It is really designed for short captions, but in a photo blog like application, you really want them to be longer. This is the fix.

There are a bunch of other tweaks to be made, but it looks like there really isn't a good combination of blogging plus a gallery, it is like a frame within a frame integration. Really a much deeper one is needed where you can blog off of an album. I'll need to look to see where that is

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SUPERNOVA 2002 - by pulver.com. Hey the cool think is that the conference was actually both blogged and group blogged, so read it and weep.

See Pulvar for more general information since the blog seems to be a temporary site with no DNS address, just a TCP/IP address

Joi Ito's Web: World Blogging Forum and the Tao of Conferences. At last some interesting conferences to visit. I have to admit, I've done so many conferences, I'm terrified of them. I'm sorry I missed the event down in San Francisco. Nice to have a list of ones that you liked.

Sign me up for the next Supernova! It's great to hear Dave thinks there be half a dozne blog conferences next year. As long as they stay at 100 people!

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things. This is a neat geek site for interesting gadgets and a multiuser site. Here's a note from Clay Shirky about VoIP. I have to give it a try!

I have been testing Vonage's VoIP service, and it comes close to the critical mix of simple, useful, and cheap. The key difference between Vonage and previous "You computer is your phone!" models is that now your phone can be your phone, thanks to Cisco's Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that takes a phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back and does pretty much exactly what you would expect a box that takes phone cable in the front and ethernet in the back would do.

The Outlook Killer?. I think Ludwig blogged this before I switched to MovableType, but I saw this article again. I think he is right aobut the problems. It shouldn't take all that much money to make it work and Chandler looks interesting.

This next take on Outlook could of course benefit from the right kind of client independent talking to a server asynchronously and with non-blocking calls tremendously. An interesting area to think about, although it is not clear how to monetize it. Seems like a good open client would be very interesting to folks to add things to

10 Things That Bug Kapor About Outlook. with Rich's take

1. It's too damn complicated.
2. The interface is counterintuitive.Except that it finally has good calendaring
3. Remote performance is lousy.
4. It requires an Exchange server.
5. Despite all its advanced features, you still can't do anything.For instance, try to make a Christmas list out of contacts. It is impossible for me
6. It's overkill for small to medium-size companies.And most users
7. It's not multi- or cross-platform.
8. The send and receive function is unpredictable.
9. It lacks useful email organization features.Interesting to see how hard it is to add a junk mail filter to it for instance
10. It's not open source. And there is no way for a novice like me to extend it

Returning my Sidekick. It is amazing to me how many times people just want to love their device like the new Danger, but the network just gets in the way. Sounds like Matt needs to look up C|net where they mainly talk about the network it is running on, so it is not just T-mobile

Fundamentally all these devices seem to be designed with the assumption that there is an always-on network. It is amazing to me that only Blackberry gets this right and then only for mail. Somewhere there needs to be a disconnected client model where the server talks to a store on the client and the client can run disconnected. We talked about this three years ago when we started Ignition and it just has never happened. Maybe 2003?

PPTP disabled by default. Turns out that when I upgraded the firmware to my Linksys router last month, they added a new parameter buried somewhere deep that was disable PPTP so all my VPN access would hang. This was enabled by default. Amazing what some folks do. Probably in the name of security, but talk about a silent update. You have to get into there to turn it off. Be warned. The vpn has been working flawlessly since I figured this out.

uPNP bugs. The other thing, to know is that if you have XP in your network, then the latest firmware for Linksys turns on uPNP by default. So, suddenly a new icon appears in Windows XP that is called "Internet Gateway." Being a dope, I thought that this was on my XP machine and disabled it since there is no indication that it is on the network somewhere in the user interface. This shutsoff the router box. Even if you know this, I've noticed that XP will occasionally hang the router. So I have disabled it. Words of warning.

Doug's Dynamic Drivel. It is nice to see that Fred Langa at least remembers what Windows in the early days was like. I'm sure it will be lost in obscurity, but the work of those folks was amazing.

I had the chance to watch folks like Brad Silverberg, David Cole, John Ludwig pretty much singlehandedly pull Windows out of obsolesence and into the mainstream

Of course, I also got to watch folks like Jim Allchin and Dave Cutler yank an enterprise server system into existence. What a day it was

We are trying to figure out where all the snow has gone this year. It sure ain't easy to find. A bunch of friends had just an awful time at Whistler over the Thanksgiving and Washington conditions are terrible. But, here are some of the options we are looking at:

• RSN. This is just a great summary site with conditions and everything. Of course, they won't tell you that 16 inches of snow at Deer Valley are just terrible, but I think we can all guess that :-)
• Sun Peaks. A bunch of our friends were going to go to this place because the snow is better. Only issue is that there isn't that much snow up there. About 29 inches right now and it is mainly a skiing oriented place vs. Whistler. The best place for kids to stay appears to be according to Delta Sun Peaks Resort thanks to its pool and hot tubs. Does require 3 night stay during the winter break though. See Sun Peaks Reservations for more details.
• Whistler Blackcomb. Where everyone goes. Has the most amenitites, but according to Jeff, not the super best snow. On the other hand, there is 48 inches on the ground there right now. They had 12 inches just overnight!, but of course it is incredibly expensive. C$500-700/night. Wow!

Well the Christmas season has come and I'm still jamming to get all my presents out. Here's where I've been. Sadly, compared to the last three all Internet christmases for me, there was narry a deal to be found and most of the .com's and startups have dried up. Just look at Pricegrabber to see what I mean:

1. Barnes & Noble. I love Amazon, but this year, Connie's Reader's Advantage card and also the free shipping for two items got me over to bn.com. The pricing between Amazon and Barnes & Noble is essentially identical these days. I love their best and recommended sections, although they really don't the reviewer strength of Amazon.
2. Crate and Barrel. These bricks and mortar sites are really making a come back now that the Internet craze is over. Sigh, seems like not too many of the .coms are going to make it. A great place to get a gift for Linda.
3. Red Trumpet. I did find these guys at Bluefly. Jon Anderson recommended this for the pricing. So I'll give them a try. I recall they are basically a cut rate outlet type of store.
4. Amazon. Mainly shopping in their apparel store. It is a little confusing given that they are merging so many distinct underlying stores together. However, they are offering $30 off for a $50 purchase so what the heck. I'm there giving them a try. Actually ordered from Jos. A. Banks, so we'll see how it all works. They claim it will get there by Christmas.
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5. Photoworks. Steve Hooper turned me on to all the different photo things you can get. He uses Shutterfly, but you can get them also from Photoworks which is what Connie uses. I ordered a 16x24 puzzle with a photo of the kids on it. Will be interesting to see how it comes out.

IAwiki: ReferrerLinking. Iawiki.net seems to be a good place to find links and informaiton about doing various cool tricks like Referrer linking. Here's a good page on how to do it and the various techniques that you can use.

Tongfamily weblog. I finally got the new look up for tongfamily.com on a new hoster. This now uses