Leo just IM’ed me about this new RV. He saw it on Top Gear, and the reason he was telling me about it is they incorporate my idea of a faucet that has an LED inside that changes color based on the temperature – red for hot, blue for cold and some shade of purple [...]

Thanks to Kevin who just introduced me to The FuMP – The Funny Music Project.  Basically it is a collection of daily funny songs, each released under creative commons.  I listed to a couple of songs and found this one particularly funny: Robert Lund – Nuttin’ But Spam My reasoning for finding this particularly funny [...]

Think having your underwear rifled through is pretty rough when you are traveling? Well, try crossing an international boarder with a laptop. Boarder patrol claims they can boot up your laptop and search it. Even if you comply and they don’t find anything, they can still detain your laptop for further searching. What are you [...]

I am throwing my first large scale LAN party.  Since this Saturday, March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day I am calling it Luck O’ the Irish LAN.  We actually had reserved the room for another purpose, but that didn’t work out, so a last minute change of agenda led to this LAN.  I expect it [...]

Windows Vista Hinders Creative Users’ Efficiency Even More than Windows XP Did From Slashdot. Rather interesting. Basically they say that the mouse precision and menu lag are worse in Vista then they were in XP, which has a negative impact on productivity. From my usage of Vista I can concur. I even turned off the [...]

In Joel on Software‘s post on Choices = Headaches Joel refers to Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice. Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly [...]

Matt and I tend to have some interesting discussions via Instant Messenger.  Here is one I thought would be nice to share as we discuss Open Source and IBM’s move with Gluecode against JBoss.  Enjoy! The Matt Man: Jim, what do you think?: http://www.forbes.com/home/intelligentinfrastructure/2005/06/15/jboss-ibm-linux_cz_dl_0615jboss.html Jim McKeeth: Interesting. Jim McKeeth: A taste of things to come [...]

For the longest time I have used GAIM (pronounced game) for all my instant messaging. It is an open source, multiprotocol client with lots of extra features. Originally it was for Linux only, but they ported it to Windows finally. Before that I used Trillian, which is also multiprotocol, but I like GAIM better. The [...]

Living in Idaho whenever I travel people ask me about Idaho potatoes.  They are famous, and they are good, but I honestly don’t know any potato farmers.  If you look in the news in Idaho you see more industry news about high tech companies like Micron then you do about potatoes.  Now State Senator Hal [...]