I've got a receiver / amplifier that I bought like 15 years ago from a friend. Transistor-based, and only 120 watts per channel, but still it's got amazing sound. All discrete components. Cleaner than just about anything I've heard. Will drive down to a 4 ohm load very nicely. Or at least it _was_ nice... until about six months ago when an exposed speaker wire briefly made contact wth the FM antenna. Ouch. At the time I had some little 8 ohm bookshelf speakers cranked to around 90 decibels, kicking ......

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I heard about the first Maker Faire, which was spring of last year, after it happened. And from all the great stuff I heard it made me determined to go with my oldest son out to the second Maker Faire. He's into gadgets, and I figured it would be great for him to see all that ingenuity on display. That was back in May of this year out in Silicon Valley. It was tremendous. Well worth going. Contraptions of all sorts were out on display. Ended up that I found cheap $70 round trip seats on a Southwest ......

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My old Porsche 944 has been on the fritz lately, so I've been ridesharing with a friend. Normally we leave the office around 6pm, and the commute takes around half an hour. Leaving any earlier is such a waste as it takes twice as long, the majority of the time spent parked on an interstate breathing in fumes. With two of us we can take advantage of the HOV lane, but still at that hour it is so utterly ineffective. And I'm not interested in lending any additional support to big oil with countless ......

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We had an amazing time out at camp last weekend. I was pretty exhausted afterwards, but I'm finally caught up with sleep, and pretty well on top of everything else going on in my life. So now I have a moment to take a look at some of the results. All in all we had 380 people attend on Saturday, and 95 on Sunday. Thanks to all who came out to be a part of it. And thanks especially to the 56 dedicated presenters who prepared 90 excellent sessions of content! We had quite a variety of different technologies ......

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I've seen octal and character substitution tricks in URLs before, but I didn't know you could use hexadecimal for the IP in a URL. Sure enough, this: http://0xd390cc87/ is exactly equivalent to this: http://211.144.204.135/ (D3 = 211, 90 = 144, CC = 204, and 87 = 135) Just found out now in a piece of stupid flippin' phishing email that was sent to me. Danged Shanghai-based swindlers ......

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A message out to the Silverlight crew -- Thank you for putting some real backing behind the Linux version in today's press release announcing Silverlight 1.0! This is *fantastic*! Also thanks go out to Miguel and his crew for their tireless efforts to get Moonlight up and running. This is so great to hear that Silverlight will truly be supported as a cross-platform solution. (And pardon me, Microsoft, for saying that this is somewhat out of character for you, and in a very good way!) I expect there's ......

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