A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Some of my partners claim to be bicyclists but until they have one of these setups, I’m not buying it

Verbinski to direct BioShock film — I will run to see this. How many films are about Ayn-Rand-ish Objectivist paradises gone horribly wrong? On the bottom of the ocean? If you haven’t played the game, you should.

Rich on buying guides. Useful. Me, I tend to ask Rich or Bob or Jim or Kurt or other enthusiasts I know, rather than relying on guides.

Egad 2. I am sure I’ve never had our countertops tested.

NIC exploits via Hack the Planet — “I’ve seen one example use this to establish a zero-footprint rootkit i.e. one which leaves no trace on disk.” — egad.

Basic 1 minute primer on correcting white balance — all phrased in photoshop-ese but works the same in any other tool. Most of my photos this spring are outdoors but still useful.

Bumped into Nick in the pits, driving a car owned by Cantrell Motorsports of Kirkland with a Windows Live sponsorship. Nick was super gracious, let us get a picture in the car, and even offered to take on J as a garage worker tomorrow — a clear step up from flag duty! Someone once said “90% of life is just showing up” and boy is that true.

OK this has been a little rocky. First, some of the teams have their own private nets set up in the pits and you can glom onto those sometimes.

Otherwise, the Clubhouse has WIFI – free if you are a clubhouse member, $15 a day otherwise!! Nothing is free here at Miller. Once you are past that hurdle, you have to get on. In theory they let any device on and force you to a webpage where you enter a provided password and ID. Worked ok on my iphone. However, simply will not work on my MacBook — I can never get an address from DHCP.

So…I logged on with the iPhone, cloned the settings over on my Mac with a static address setup, switched off WIFI on the iPhone, and turned on WIFI on the MacBook. Tada!

I am betting not many people use the WIFI connection…

UPDATE: works better with Firefox3 RC1. I have to wade thru a bunch of insane invalid cert dialogs but i can get to the web login page on the mac. doesn’t work in safari tho.

My god what a facility — brand spanking new, huge, a variety of viewing from plain bleachers to delux clubhouse. Great views from all kinds of places. And the pit activity today is fascinating with 3-4 classes of cars all mixing it up. Worth the trip.

Toolmonger » Blog Archive » Powder-Actuated Tools — a gunpowder-based power tool. awesome.

Hitler Remixes Are Big — on YouTube | The Underwire from Wired.com — these are awesome, i loved the patriots one and the xbox one.

OK Yahoo could have been a Microsoft division, all of Microsoft’s internet ambitions would have been handed over to them, they would have been able to run semi-autonomously.

Or they can be ripped apart by private equity guys like Icahn — massive layoffs, milking their current traffic levels for cash flow, spinning off parts.

This is preferable? Did Yahoo management not foresee this??

OK if you are going to give money to disaster relief this week, might as well make sure you participate in the College Charity Bowl. OSU currently lagging but I have just done my part to fix that so stay tuned.

Northshore Lacrosse Club, player stats. Go Overlake!

I had an HP4550 printer for years that I picked up at a liquidation event. It has been a workhorse but it died in the last 6 months, some ugly hardware problem. The cost to fix would have been 4x the cost of new printer so I just decided to junk it. The problem is, it is huge and weighs like 100 lbs and the recycling guys would have laughed at it. So I spent sunday taking it apart — taking every screw out, every piece apart. My gosh I now understand why this thing was so freaking expensive, hundreds and hundreds of screws and parts. It is now a giant pile of scrap metal and plastic that I can fit in the recycling bin and get rid of. I have new appreciation for the recyclers of the world.

MAKE: Blog: Craftsman 1470 piece tool set - only $8,600 — early father’s day wish list. ha ha.

SportingNews.com - Your expert source for NCAA Football stats, scores, standings, and blogs from NCAA Football columnists

Rather than some sort of conspiracy, the APR and its sanctioned, slow strangulation of smaller schools unable to pay for massive academic support centers is the result of something even more unstoppable and faceless: bad policy.

Exactly. The big schools have the dollars to pay for staff and facilities to manage APR. Small schools do not. That is why 35 out of 37 schools punished this year come from non-BCS conferences. Just another face of the ridiculousness of the current “student-athlete” pretense.

Welcome to LaxPower — a colleague at Ohio State pointed me towards this, great computer rankings of every program in every state.

Getting geared up for this game already. A classic for so many reasons.

First of all, a great personal history with the Buckeyes — been at their games since I was a kid, we are alums, my father played for Woody, my grandfather was an alum.

Amd the schools have a great history, particularly in the Rose Bowl. My dad was on the team for the ‘55 win and national championship; I remember the great ‘69 and ‘74 wins, and still suffer from the ‘73, ‘75, ‘80, and ‘85 losses. I hated John McKay and his teams.

In this century, Jim Tressel and Pete Carroll have arguably been the best coaches with the best programs, albeit stylistically very differently — Tressel is buttoned-up, a solid midwestern values kind of guy. Pete is a flashy new media loosey-goosey kind of guy, and I have hated him.

So a great early season matchup this year, and particularly so, because a family member will now be attending USC! So I am going to have to cheer for the Trojans in every game except the OSU matchup — that is going to take some getting used to.

Perceptive Automation Releases Indigo 3.0, Mac OS X Home Control Server | eHomeUpgrade — I’m going to need an X10/zwave control program for the mac for future halloweens, perhaps this one.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Buckeyes top Dawgs - NCAA Football - CBSSports.com — OK ridiculously early but I can’t argue.

• Google Docs: Style Your Google Docs with CSS, wow, reminiscent of old word stylesheets
• Monitoring airport client performance — thanks rich
• WHatpage for rotating through start pages
• A bunch of blogging tools and hints

AT&T Disables Free iPhone Wi-Fi (For Now) - Mac Forums — this is my experience too, the wondrous free wifi service is now gone at my local sbuxii. bummer.

Sigh been trying to make this work and it looks like it never will — Networking a mac and a xp computer with a kodak 5500 printer - FixYa — apparently a lot of printers don’t support the necessary features for network use from a Mac. So I am going to have to buy another freaking printer — official Mac driver support here — you have to make sure you get one with a “modern” driver.

PS Thanks to the Pure Networks guys for helping me figure this out.

More airplane reads, I have been doing a lot of air travel:

• The Ghost War by Alex Berenson. Good cloak and dagger tale, china and the us brought to the brink by a rogue megalomaniac general. No new ground here but well written with a nicely flawed hero.
• Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far distant future, nano-enhanced humans fighting off bad guys who are infecting human society with the nano equivalent of a virus. Fun romp, nicely imagined. Stross is reliably entertaining
• The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. A young woman returns to her hometown in a moment of personal crisis and delves into her own surprising past, uncovering a lot of dark family secrets. Oh and there is a sea monster too. And a ghost. Tho the titled monsters are generally the human and personal kind.
• Thirteen by Richard Morgan. Wow, way better than I anticipated. Crazy mix of biotech, world domination schemes, secret agents, super humans, social criticism, with some extreme objectivism thrown in.