Cables To Go: 1ft OUTLET SAVER POWER EXTENSION CORD
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I’m sick of the little power bubols from my network hardware and peripherals taking up 2-3 places on my powerstrips. I started to make my own at some point, but got distracted. [found via Nelson Minar’s Weblog]

Sure, choosing MikeRoweSoft.com for your domain name is cute if your name is Mike Rowe, and sure, you get a lot of free publicity when Microsoft comes after you for infringing on its trademark, but is it really a good domain name for a business?

I mean, the whole reason its cute, is that its a homonym for the name of a very prominant company in roughly the same industry and the problem with homonyms is that they can be confusing. So, if Mike Rowe verbally communicates his website address to someone they are pretty likely to think he said “microsoft.com,” at which time they will probably decide he is being a smart ass, and isn’t interested in their business. Or, perhaps they know that his name is “Mike Rowe,” only they think it might be spelled “Roe.”

Its just not a good name for a business website.

I just wrote a longish post on how the Apple iTunes music store sucks, and blogger seems to have dropped it in the bit bucket, so here are a few points without a lot of elaboration.

1. Spotty selection. I mean really spotty. Looked up the Clash, or 14 albums, only 2 were available in their entirety. Looked at London Calling, an album originally released as a two album set at a nice price; an album listed at #8 on Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums of all time. Only two songs were available.

2. No way to browse or search by Label. Labels used to matter, think Motown, Atlantic, or more recently (but not too recently) IRS, fuckin’ SST, Two Tone. It is in Apple’s interest that labels matter again, that new labels emerge, based around an on-line distribution model like iTMS, that gives Apple a decent cut. Instead, Apple give’s labels the scantest visibility.

3. No wishlist. Until you sign up for the service, you can’t set aside songs you might want to buy, and yet people might be reluctant to go to the trouble of signing up for the service unless they have enough songs they want to buy to make it worth while. Apple should make it easy for them. Apple should also make it easy for teens (and everyone else) to publish a list of tracks they want and enable their friends to buy it for them. This giving of small gifts holds groups togeather, especially groups of geographically disprersed teens who keep in touch through blogs, chat rooms and instant messages (ie the vanguards of digital consumptions). Apple should become entwined in their culturee. Instead, they have the cool, but very paternal “allowance” concept.

More to come, I’m sure.

GPGPU:
This is cool! About 7 years ago after seeing what the original 3dFx Voodoo card could do, I was inspired to think about what would be possible in gaming as GPUs offloaded more and more work from the main processor. I was focused more on what to do with those free cycles on the CPU, but more recently have been wondering how GPUs could be harnessed for something other than direct to screen output, like various forms of image processing, compression, etc. GPGPU.org is focused on this topic, with a pointer to an article I intend to read.

“This article by Michael Macedonia in IEEE Computer magazine discusses current trends in general purpose computation on GPUs. Excerpt: ‘The Siggraph/Eurographics Graphics Hardware 2003 workshop, held in San Diego, will likely be remembered as a turning point in modern computing. In one of those rare moments when a new paradigm visibly begins changing general-purpose computing’s course, what has traditionally been a graphics-centric workshop shifted its attention to the nongraphics applications of the graphics processing unit.'”

My computer suffered a major trauma yesterday. For some reason, the NTFS filesystem on my main drive became corrupted. After a chkdisk I learned that lots of important files for booting up the computer where no longer where they needed to be. Replacing some of them brought further enlightenment, even more had gone missing.

I installed a new copy of Win2k along side the old one to try and recover from backup. I will warn you right now Win2k (and probably XP) will nuke your user profiles and your application directories if you do a side-by-side install. The setup gives you some warning that installing a new OS on a partition will have this effect, but implied that picking a new directory for the system root would avoid said fate.

At least I had a recent backup. I would just have to kiss a day’s worth of work re-organizing and supplimenting my digital music collection goodbye. The backup sort of worked, but in the process of trying to restore the old OS I seem to have hosed both the old and new OSs.

So, at 1:30am, I started another OS install, this time cafefully renaming the “Documents and Settings” and “Program Files” folders for safe keeping.

There is a big of happy luck to all this. Most of my days work, stuff that hadn’t been backed up, was in the directory of files recovered from the filesystem corruption, safely out of harms way when the Win2k setup helpfully deleted my files.

Now I’m just out a bunch of time, though slightly less than if I had to reconstruct all my work, and my disk is the most horribly fragmented I’ve ever seen it. The MFT, rather than existing in two or three large chunks, is sprayed across the partition in a fine mist.

I’m know I’m late to the party posting on this now, but its been sticking in my craw ever since Thanksgiving dinner and I have to get it out.

George Bush’s trip to Iraq for thanksgiving dinner with US troops sickens me on so many levels.

1. Foolish Risk. Sure, they went to a lot of trouble keeping the trip secret, even keeping secrets from secret service agents according to one front pagelead I read(Because, appearantly, our Secret Service can’t be expected to protect our President? Yay!). But once that big-ass plane with the seal of the President of the United States of America on the side touched down, you can be pretty sure his cover was blown. Why wouldn’t the few hours he spent on the ground be enough time to set up to strike the plane on take-off? Nothing happened, but it seems like a big risk to take.

2. Cynical. Did you know that Hillary Clinton was also in Iraq at about the same time? I didn’t until just recently, which would seem to be part of the point of the Bush trip. Not only does George Bush take an unnecessary risk to score a photo-op, but appearantly its a stunt designed to head off a critic. What stupid stunt will he pull next?

3. Lame. If he were just about anyone else, I would think its at least a good thing that Bush see something of the mess he’s created, but Bush has built a reputation for surrounding himself with people who hold rose colored glasses to his face whenever he bothers opening his beady little eyes, and besides that, what is he going to see in a few hour visit, mostly spent stuffing his face and posing for the cameras?