That's right - I'm a big Billy Joel fan.  Billy Joel's River of Dreams tour was the first concert Alicea and I ever went to.  We'd been dating for about 6 months (?) and it was early 1994 (March?) at the Charlotte Coliseum.  Fun time.

So how is this relevent?  It's because I'm "moving out."  I'm leaving MSN Spaces because, well, it's just not very flexible for me.  I can't customize the UI the way I want to.  I can't post via API-enabled tools.  I have to sign in to a Passport account to do anything (even leave a comment).  The URL is tough for people to remember (because I can't customize it).  Where am I headed?  http://nathan.thenovaks.net.  I found out that I can use Blogger to publish/manage a site on my own server.  ROCK ON!  It even creates an Atom feed published on my server (http://nathan.thenovaks.net/atom.xml).

So ... while MSN Spaces got me started, I've outgrown the service.  No, I don't post a lot, but I like being able to customize the web page to make it look however I want it to.  Plus the API. 

Thanks MSN for getting me started on the road to blogging.  I'll never forget you. 

Ever wonder how music engineers put together mixes using a computer?  Well, check out this Flash movie I found online that shows you how it's done.

http://www.cothrun.com/gallery/albums/Misc/windows_mix.swf

And I thought they used Pro Tools!

Our close friends Barton and Cheryl welcomed Rachel Diane to their family this morning right before 7a.  Congrats!  Alicea likes to make "sock-flower bouquets" for folks when they have a newborn.  This time she's really outdone herself.  Check it out!

Click on the picture for a couple more images from our SmugMug gallery.

"Grain was an herb, when you got down to it, and so is malt, she told herself.  As for the peat that was involved somewhere in the manufacturing process of a descent single malt, well, you couldn't get any more back-to-Mother-Earth than that unless you got down on all fours and sucked topsoil." -- Edwina Godz

From E.Godz by Robert Asprin and Esther Friesner, one of my wife's silly "fantasy meets modern technolgy" novels

The world of math summed up so succinctly.

I hope this doesn't offend my 2 readers.  :-)

This explains why I can continue playing a song in a live gig even when my in-ear monitors keep cutting out randomly!  :-)  Who knew I had an iPod in my head.  Can I swap it out for a Portable Media Center device?  How about a TabletPC?

Quote

NPR : The iPod of the Brain
Researchers at Dartmouth College find the "iPod of the brain." They've learned that the brain's auditory cortex, the part that handles information from our ears, holds on to musical memories. So even when that perky pop song isn't on the radio, you still hear it in your head.

Quote

Microsoft Defends Patch Previews

The "timely distribution of software updates" is the Air Force's inclusion into SUVP, a closed program available to select companies. The program, launched in January after a year of beta tests, acts as a quality assurance test bed for software patches before they are distributed worldwide through Microsoft's security updates on the second Tuesday of every month.

Members of the program test quality issues like patch compatibility, reliability and network performance on test servers within the organization.

"It's kind of like a blind taste test, they're not told, 'this is fixing a vulnerability in this product,' or any of that," the spokesperson said. "They're just given the updates. What you see from us on the second Tuesday of the month, there are a lot of different testing scenarios that go into it and this is just one of those."

Okay - that makes a LOT more sense.  Now why couldn't they have released full details in the first place?  Robert Scoble, why don't you just take over all of MS' communications?  :-)

Microsoft to offer patches to U.S. Gov. first

Microsoft Corp. is to give the U.S. government priority in fixing security holes in Windows and other software, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Under a plan to take effect later this year, Microsoft will give the U.S. Air Force versions of software "patches" to fix serious security vulnerabilities up to a month before they are available to others, the paper said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will give advance notice of problems to other government agencies and distribute patches to them, the Journal said, citing officials at Microsoft and the White House's Office of Management and Budget.

News source: Reuters

Read full story...

Right – so we’re going to see patches released to the public even more slowly because of this special agreement?  Or are these patches supposed to be “secret”, yielding leaks to the public or an indication to hackers of what to target before patches become widely available.  Symantec did the same thing with virus definitions for a very short period of time, until Blaster came out (I think it was Blaster) and they got nailed for not warning the world of the ill affects of Blaster.  As nice an idea as this sounds for the US Government, it’s CRAP!  They can’t apply patches that are years old … forget giving them access to patches early.

Okay - I must appologize for not writing for so long.  As my wife wrote in her blog...

Bless me Father, for I have been busy.  It has been almost two months since my last post.  <you are forgiven my [son], life's a bitch and we all have stuff to do.>  Ok - so - on to other things!

Alicea and I just got back from Whistler, BC.  It was a great week away from life.  Although I have to admit that we did bring my laptop (PCMCIA GPS card and MS Streets and Trips got us to and from) and my BlackBerry - needless to say I checked mail a bunch.  Every time she caught me she gave me a dirty look and said "this is not an away team mission - stop it!  Yeah, I'm addicted.  But admitting that problem is the first step, right?

While we were there we did pretty much nothing.  Since Alicea's pregnant and I'm pretty much a cripple (left knee rebuilt twice so far) we didn't do any snow sports.  Good thing too, since this area of the continent has had a horribly warm and dry winter.  Snowpack here in Washington State is about 3% of normal.  It's a little better in BC, but not much.  We did do a helicopter tour of the area and even landed on top of a mountain!  TOO COOL!

Check out the pic of us at the top of 8500' Rainbow Mountain in BC.

I'm going to try to post more pics on our regular web site soon.  Then again, one of these days I should actually update our regular website.  I haven't done that in about 3 years.  Sorry.

Mobile PC - Features - The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time

YEAH!!!  This is a great list!  So what did you have?  Here's what I've had (or my parents when I was little) from this list:

98. Pez dispenser
89. Rubik's Cube
88. Black & Decker Dustbuster
77. Hasbro Lite-Brite (okay, so a friend a few doors up the street had it)
75. Laser pointer (though not until the 90's ... a favorite for cats everywhere)
72. Master lock padlock (who hasn't had one of these?)
67. Leatherman
65. Mattel Football II (technically I had soccer, but close enough - same technology)
63. Maglite flashlight (my grandpa had this original one)
61. Motorola Bravo numeric pager (not in '86, but I had one in the 90's)
57. Magic 8-Ball
48. Sony Digital Mavica MVC-HD5 camera (employer had one)
46. TI Speak & Spell (friend had one)
45. Silva Compass (used all the time in Boy Scouts)
41. RIM Interactive Pager (ahh, the good old days)
40. compressed air for cleaning computers
38. CompactFlash memory cards
35. Screwpull Corkscrew ... this thing ROCKS!!!
32. WiFi
31. USB memory sticks
25. Nintendo Game Boy (another friend)
24. Ballpoint pen (who hasn't used one?)
23. Telephone (ditto)
20. Swiss Army Knife
17. DVD player
14. CD player
13. Sony TR-63 Transistor Radio (my dad had a green one)
9. Atari 2600 (it was the faux-wood finish that really did it for me)
4. Motorola Startac cell phone
3. Sony Walkman

How did you do?

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq (news - web sites) that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention.

Yahoo! News - White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs

Yeah, this is really nice.  Let's send our kids off to war and then screw them when they get home.  So much for this President being on the side of our armed forces.  It brings me pause when I consider all the "support our troops" decals out there.  I support them, but I don't support our administration's use of them.  Too bad most people don't see it that way.  If you didn't hear the comentary on this yesterday afternoon on All Things Considered, check it out.

If you haven't heard elsewhere yet, check out the new Google Maps.  Pretty sweet looking maps and directions.  They've done some nice work on the UI - you can even drag the map around the screen with your mouse (left-click hold) to pan the view.  MS should take some pointers from this for the next version of Streets and Trips / Map Point.

If you missed the flack a week or so back about some doodled notes found after a seminar in Eurpoe, basically some reporter found a bunch of doodles on stage after everyone was gone.  The guy thought they were from Tony Blair (UK PM) and had them analyzed to see how crazy he is.  Pretty funny stuff - can't seem to find a picture online though. Here's the reast of the story.

"Then Gates showed a parodied version of his notes, with spoof scribbles such as, 'So hungry -- need cheeseburger,' 'I miss Clippy,' referring to the former Office help assistant, and 'Why does Bill Clinton get to sit next to Angelina Jolie?' -- referring to two other Davos attendees."

The Insider: Gates draws on doodles mix-up to liven up speech

I'm going to have to agree with the fine folks at Engadget here, this new device (if it ships with the specs they're talking about) just might be the long lost smartphone of our dreams.  The only thing holding me back from jumping to this device would be the back-end infrastructure (or lack there of) of Exchange ActiveSync.  Don't get me wrong, it works.  But it's bandwidth (and therefore battery) intensive, slow, and unreliable compared to RIM's BlackBerry server platform.  Does seem like a sweet piece of hardware though.  If RIM launches their much talked-about application platform to put BlackBerry bits on other devices then this one is my new best friend.  :)  BlackBerry killer?  Perhaps, but doubtful.  Hopefully it will push RIM in the right direction of more "gadgets" on their hardware platforms though.

HP’s hw6500: size, details, more pics! - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Quote - AT&T might still relaunch AT&T Wireless - Engadget - www.engadget.com

There are a lot of unanswered questions related to SBC’s proposed purchase of AT&T, but the one we’ve been wondering about is how all this might affect AT&T’s plan to create a new wireless service under the AT&T Wireless brand name (they retained rights to the name after AT&T Wireless was gobbled up by Cingular). They had been planning to lease network capacity from Sprint for the relaunched AT&T Wireless, but since SBC owns 60% of Cingular it seems a little unlikely that that is going to happen. We’d have guessed that the plan will be quietly shelved, but apparently there is a good chance that they will proceed, just using Cingular’s network instead of Sprint’s. So basically the brand name formerly used by AT&T Wireless, which was bought by Cingular, might be revived by former parent company AT&T, which is probably going to merge with Cingular’s parent company, SBC. This won’t be confusing at all …

Neowin.net - Where unprofessional journalism looks better - IBM: Lotus Notes & Domino 7 This Summer

Eweek are reporting that IBM on Monday annouced new Lotus Notes and Domino products from its annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando.

Lotus Notes and Domino 7 are both due to ship this coming summer. The launch will mark 16 years of Lotus Notes. The new version is expected to be a huge upgrade. Both Notes and Domino will feature tighter intergration with IBM's Workplace. Domino 7 will support IBM's DB2 database although the original Notes Storage Facility will still remain a better option performance-wise.

In terms of performance and cost for enterprise customers, Notes and Domino 7 combined are expected to support up to 80 percent users and taking 25 percent less processing power. IBM officials claim the greatest performance gains are when customers are using Linux on an Intel server.

Lotus Notes and Domino 7 are both currently in public beta.

Hmmm … Notes is going to use DB2 as a back end.  Yet MS has decided that it’s best to keep Exchange on a flat-file JET database?  Now you have to realize that I'm a big fan of Exchange and hated the 3+ years I live on Notes for email and collaboration.  That being said MS IS WRONG to not migrate Exchange to SQL.  It can’t be THAT hard to port Exchange’s data tables from one database to another.  Yes, it’s a lot of work, but they’ve had a couple years since Exchange 2003 was done and they’re not releasing the next version for another couple years.  Seems like plenty of time to incorporate some ODBC calls to me!  Truly a shame MS has no vision or grasp of reality that this really is a BIG deal in the enterprise.

YEAH!  A modular chassis with every darn port you could ever think of.  SWEET!  My only problem with this is that there's only ONE power input ... and it's not GROUNDED!  Oye.

Onkyo’s NR1000 “future proof” home theater receiver - Engadget - www.engadget.com

My vote?  Death ray.  Come on people ... I live in SEATTLE!  It's not that bad.  There's this whole thing called Summer when there's never a cloud around.  Perhaps if you don't like the cold and snow and clouds you should, oh I don't know, MOVE OUT OF THE ALPS!

Solar mirrors to cheer up Austrian villagers - Engadget - www.engadget.com

"So, slow death from lead poisoning, or the gradual collapse of the global communications infrastructure. Isn’t it fun when technology gives us such great options?"

“Tin whisker” crisis threatens global electronic systems - Engadget - www.engadget.com

What's it?  Our baby!  Felt some movement last night.  Alicea's been feeling "stretching and probing" for a week or two, but last night was the first time I actually felt something move.  Truly amazing ... brought a tear to my eye.  It's finally starting to set in: I'm gonna be a DAD!

We have our ~20 week ultrasound on Wednesday of this week (26th) and we'll find out what it is (hopefully) then.  We're thinking human, but you can never be too sure.  :)  Stay tuned!