Milk Desk — i love well designed office furniture. I have a custom desk now that I am unhappy with because, despite massive passthrus, it just can’t handle the cabling and desk space demands of all the accesories needed. I am designing my own desk right now, some cool ideas in this one.

* Taking online real estate to the next level — someone should hire Olivier to spec out their real estate web service. Great ideas.
* Animated Atlas — growth of the US — I’m a sucker for maps.
* The Spartan Life. Just strange.
* These For tags are interesting — AVC, fanblogs implements

Here’s what I want:

* Samsung MP3 player — for podcasting
* a good pedometer+altimeter for my reentry into hiking. plenty of good pedometers and altimeters but are there any combos — preferably belt worn, not wrist?

* Google just keeps cranking — Google launches search history. Google allows multiple Site: specifiers — an undervalued capability. RSS reader now in gmail. Desktop search plugins. Hey google, give me a simple document app (notes and simple spreadsheets and simple presentations) and I can quit using office…
* Wikicities – doesn’t look like it is taking off, but applying the wikipedia model to restaurant/travel reviews seems like a natural
* Ourmedia.org. Something is interesting here…
* Rich found flytecomm – realtime flight tracking. cool.

The web is an amazing thing. Saved us from a cooking disaster this weekend.

We hauled our rice cooker out of the small appliance graveyard in our house — wedged in between the juicer and bread machine, just in front of the waffle iron, on top of the paninni grill. Sadly tho, we had no manual for it. The cooker is like 10 years old, I figured we were hosed.

But hats off to Panasonic for putting all their product manuals on the web, even old ones.

It is all coming crashing down around me right at the moment. I don’t feel like I have gadgets and gear, I just have problems.

On my person/in my bag: my blackberry keys are sticking and i have to replace it, my casio digital camera won’t hold a charge.

In my car: the kenwood phatdisk hard disk is corrupt, my nav system is out for repairs.

At work: the vpn has become slow as mud, our firewall is crashing daily, my server box has only 256Meg of ram and is thrashing, i can’t quite configure properly my hosting service for 3 new domains.

At home: firefox 1.02 crashes repeatedly on my main machine. Firefox won’t run at all in user mode on the family room machine. I have hard disk corruption on my game machine. The hard disk in the PC I use to control all my halloween sounds is whining suspiciously. my 10 year old phone system is creaking as i attempt to slam voip into it.

A whole host of things are working ok — my ipod, my tivo, my comcast hd, the two other pcs and the mac mini at home. But the problems are all a little overwhelming at the moment. I may need to massively simplify. I can’t keep spending 3 hours a day fixing things…

In a boring meeting the other day, I was reflecting on how many ways people can get ahold of me. I did a little inventory.

Voice: You can call me at:

* 425 709 0772. Ignition central number. Accepts Voicemail
* 425 460 0841. Ignition direct number. Accepts Voicemail
* 425 922 7055. Cell phone. Accepts Voicemail.
* 425 641 4973. Home listed. Accepts Voicemail.
* 425 xxx xxxx. Home unlisted. Accepts Voicemail.
* 425 xxx xxxx. Onstar in Chevy Avalanche.
* 425 xxx xxxx. Vonage. Accepts Voicemail.

Fax: You dinosaur you, you can send me a fax at:

* 425 709 0798. Ignition
* 425 xxx xxxx. Vonage.

IM: The younger set can reach me at:

* Jhludwig on AIM
* Jhludwig AT hotmail.com on MSN (deprecated)

Email: My most used medium.

* ignitionpartners.com: john, jhludwig, johnlu. Actually a few more are also supported that I’ve set up over the years for various purposes.
* fanblogs.com: John. For college football stuff
* hotmail.com: jhludwig
* gmail.com: john.ludwig
* exmsft.com: johnlu (need to verify this still works)
* attwireless.blackberry.net: jhludwig (direct to blackberry)
* a few other domains i have registered which forward mail to me.
* i never bothered to set up my comcast isp account, i guess that could work to, but don’t use it, since i never check it.

Text: again for the younger generation

* SMS me at the cell phone above
* Or from a blackberry, send to Bberry pin 20053854

Blog:

* Send a trackback to an entry on theludwigs.com
* Trackback or comments on fanblogs

Forums:

* Posts on MethodsofMadness halloween forum
* Posts on some school forums

Redirects

* Ebay I believe will redirect messages to my account
* All the social networking sites — linkedin, judysbook, friendster, orkut, etc — will send posts/messages to me

Physical mail:

* to ignition
* to home

And well you can just Google “john ludwig” and probably figure out a way to get ahold of me. especially now that this is posted.

The amazing thing is — I will actually get all these. I monitor all these inputs on a semiregular basis. Some of them constantly, some more intermittently, but I get them all.

Contrast this situation with the beginning of my working life. I had 1 work phone, 1 work fax, 1 home phone at that time. No email, no sms, no cellphone, etc.

Will this explosion continue? How will people stay on top of it all? The big problem is really controlling use and access. Today I conrol access by deciding to whom and how I reveal these addresses. And then as the addresses leak out, I filter them for unwanted contacts. This seems pretty bass-ackwards. I’d like to be able to publish all of them freely, and then decide based on access lists and rules who is allowed to use which of them.

* Love the new customizable Google news — my customized page is here (so that I can use it on all my machines). This page is good enough for me to add to my set of startup pages in Firefox.
* got my free annual credit report. Nothing shocking here, thank goodness.
* Great list of CMSs up on Wikipedia — thanks gadgetopia
* Streamload has a range of online storage plans — some of them very cheap — I wonder if I should start backing up everything up there.
* The entire SXSW music program as a torrent.