"[User] wants to know if there's something like one of those birds with the fluid-filled bulb for a tail that she can use to peck the keys on her computer continuously so that she won't have to remember her password when she hasn't touched the computer for 15 minutes."

I could actually feel my mind cringing as I read that request.

I believe such a device could be construed as a direct security attack on the network, bypassing necessary security measures. It's too early in the morning for this sort of vacuum.

This graph is a great example of the two types of gamers in the world.

The first type is more or less productive members of society and show up as the large heavy usage between 18:00 and start to fall off around 23:00 to midngiht. These people dont get home to start gaming til around 6 in the evening and have to get to bed around midnight to make it to work the next day. The other type remains online after midnight and seems to finally collapse on their keyboard in a puddle of drool around 4 or 4:30 am, and dont seem to wake up until around 2 in the afternoon. These are most likely students and have the summer off, or are jobless and mooching off their parents, spouses or other quality moochables.

I had a great deal of respect for Microsoft's Mac Business unit. Word and Exel are better on the mac than they are in the windows environment...their support for Exchange through Entourage is nothing short of abysmal however. They no longer support the .pst format which makes migrating between outlook and entourage a disaster, especially when it comes to importing contacts. What should have been a simple task, migrating a user from outlook 2000 to entourage 2004 became a nightmare. Microsoft's own support documents stated to export to vCards (requiring to move the contacts to outlook 2003 first) which lost all category information. Importing those vCards into entourage shredded about 40% of the user's data, whereas importing the same vCards into Apple's address book, made some minor field hiccups. Both methods lost all category data but that was easy enough to handle in Apple's address book. Long story short, outlook -> outlook 2003 -> vCards -> Apple Address book (then manually re-categorize, had just exported the vcards in batches by category, and one big export of all contacts to catch any that were not in a category, then just dragged into newly created categories in Address Book, allowing to overwrite to prevent duplicates. Then use a special applescript which syncs Address Book with Entourage. This moved categories over rather painlessly and got things back to about 90% of what it was in outlook 2000. If their own programmers just wrote in support for their own proprietary .pst format, they might have had a passable product, minus the rather shoddy Exchange support. In short: Avoid Exchange and Entourage whenever possible. Stick to IMAP preferably running on linux or unix based platforms. The extra benefits of Exchange aren't worth the hassle IMO.

I finally took the time to get the S/PDIF out ports working on my PVR machine, no more 1/8" miniplug outputs anymore on the sound from my TV. The downside is that I now need to get a center channel speaker to take advantage of it, as well as some decent rear speakers eventually, tho the crappy Panasonic ones leftover from an ancient stereo system from home will do for now. Whats nice is that Xine will pass the audio completely along to the stereo with no decoding or anything when it comes off the DVD, it was very exciting to see the little "DTS" light come on when I started up Run Lola Run. For PVR use theres no real benefit to the surround sound, other than when skipping through programs, the audio transitions much cleaner and without any hiccups.

Here is a picture of me as a space pirate.

Finally made it out to Nantucket for the first time since last fall. The weather station got some much needed attention as well as the entertainment equipment which we finally got a cart for.



Built the humidity sensor housing from an extra piece of PVC pipe and end cap and mounted it on a post in the back yard along with the rain gauge. It seems that the length of cable runs and the number of devices on the 1-wire bus here and is causing problems with all the weather station upgrades playing nice together. Added humidity and barometric pressure, broke wind direction and was unable to get the rain gauge workign. Ordered an improved 1-wire to serial bus adaptor which is designed to handle long cable runs and larger numbers of devices, hopefully this will make everything work together when installed.