So, today’s my 37th birthday, and lucky me it’s an absolutely georgous day out. So what am I planning to do for the day? Sit around inside working on computers. He he. Story of my life the past 5+ years. I took tomorrow off though and I’m going to go hiking along the coast for half the day.

I finally decided what to get myself for my birthday after much consideration. I ordered up a new MP3 player for myself this morning to replace the Neuros (which I sold off on ebay a few weeks ago for only $5 less than I paid for it). After much consideration I ended up choosing the Rio Cali Sport 256MB. The other models I considered were the Nomad MuVo and the iRiver IFP390T. The main features I wanted in a player were expandable storage and the ability to mount the device as a drive on windows or mac. Unfortunately no one makes such a device so I had to make trade-offs. I discarded Creative because I’m still disgusted with how they treat their customers and with how absolutely crappy their drivers are for their soundcard products. This left me a choice between no expandable storage with the iRiver or no mounting as a drive with the Rio Cali. I chose to go with the expandable storage. I really hope the bundled software for managing the music on the device is better than the stuff that came with the Neuros, or this thing will be up on ebay within a month or so and I’ll be looking for another player again. I’ll post about the player after I’ve had it for a month or so and have a good feel for how well it works.

I’ve also decided to cheat and get myself a couple of gifts – the other one is going to be a basketball hoop to replace the one the contracters pulled down two winters ago. I really miss playing hoops after work and the warm season is soon to be here. I don’t want to have another summer without one.

From Europe comes a great image editing app. It’s not going to compete with Photoshop, but if you’re looking for a compact, easy to use tool for editing those images that come out of your digital camera, PhotoFiltre is definitely worth a look. The price (free) is especially appealing, plus as with photoshop there are a ton of free addon filters for it. The only downside is that most of the support material including the forums are not available in English, and it’s Win32 only.

Cold Fusion is the holy grail of energy research. If scientists can unlock the power of cold fusion, the sky’s the limit for energy production, and we can offer a not so fond farewell to the era of petrochemical energy production. You might recall the furor the Stanley/Pons research caused in the late 80’s/early 90’s, when they claimed to have discovered a method of achieving cold fusion. To say that didn’t pan out would be an understatement, but now there’s a second round of research out [warning, NY Times link, registration required] on an alternative method of achieving cold fusion that is gaining positive commentary from the scientific community. Could this be it? Time will tell, it’s very cool though that the initial reports are so promising.

I spend so much time complaining about products and services on here, I thought I might try praising a product for once. Every winter I suffer from dry skin. This can actually turn into a dangerous health issue for diabetics, so the past two winters I have been paying closer attention to it and trying various things to alleviate the dry skin. Hand creams have done ok on the dry skin on my hands and face, but it’s particularly bad on my elbows, and basically nothing had helped. My doctor suggested I try Eucerin, and lo and behold, two weeks later my elbows are soft and the skin is alive again. Got dry skin? Give it a try.

[this message sponsored by Dave’s no longer dry skinned elbows ;-)]

Something’s put me in a whimsical mood of late. I keep stumbling across oddball stuff that makes me laugh. Imagine a pogo stick that lets you launch yourself 5-6 feet in the air. No joke. You’ll be able to buy one soon enough, and shortly after you’ll be hearing about the wrongful death lawsuits on the evening news 😉 Seriously though, depending on how much these end up costing I would consider getting one. The concept sounds like an absolute blast. Who wouldn’t want to bound down the street in 6 foot high hops?

There’s a short piece over on wired about an EFF proposal to handle the legality of file sharing. It’s a basic system I’ve proposed before – have all ISP customers pay (or opt to pay in this case) a small monthly fee, in return for which they can file share to their heart’s content. The money goes into a pool that’s payed out to the artists on the basis of popularity. I love this idea. I think it neatly handles the issue of compensating the artists, it sidesteps the middlemen (the big music companies) and it would enable a broader and more diverse sharing environment as the small indie artists could start to actually earn money, whereas right now they’re basically locked out of the music industry. Plus it emulates a model that’s already known to work, ie Canada where a large surtax is paid on recordable media to compensate the industry for the music you’re presumably copying.

A little over a year ago I pointed out that if you registered you would be entitled to as much as a $20 rebate as part of a lawsuit settlement dealing with price fixing in the music industry. You did pay attention and register, right? I got my check in the mail on Monday. Unfortunately it was for only $13.86 because of the number of people that did register for compensation. I’m thinking I will donate the money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the EFF) so they can spend it defending our rights against the predations of industry groups like the RIAA. I urge you to consider doing the same, assuming you did register and got your rebate.

Check out this awesome collection of blueprints for animated models you can make out of paper and paperboard. While these cost money, they’re really very cheap and they’re sure to make any kid under 10 giggle when they see them.

Well, at least if the people in question are the history faculty at the Waynflete Private High School in Portland. I participated in a professional development day they held for their staff on Monday as part of a ‘No Child Left Behind’ grant they got. All in all it went really well. If you’re interested you can go to my homepage or to waynlfete.blogdns.com to see an overview of the presentation and links to various related resources, including several that you can actually play around with. Those that are interested are encouraged to check out the Wiki, since I plan to bring one online here.

Of course the best part was my fee, I was paid $250 for my participation and there’s a possibility that more consulting work will emerge from this. It’s interesting, I used to do a lot of consulting back when I made a lot less money than I do now, and I grew to hate it. But back then I was doing mainly desktop tech support and website consulting. I liked the preparation for and process of giving the presentation a lot better. I guess it’s mostly because I have a passion for the material and I enjoy playing around with it and showing folks how it works, whereas with the tech support stuff was just a means to an end, it was about the money and not about the material.

This Monday I have a speaking engagement at the Waynflete school. They’re paying me to come talk to their history department about ways to use technology in education as part of a grant they got. As part of that presentation I’ll be using a lot of different web-based resources, some of which will be installed on Dave’s Place. While the weblog isn’t going away, the links to it from the homepage will be, and the homepage is going to look radically different. I’ll be leaving that page in place for at least a couple of weeks so the teachers attending the presentation can refer back to it for links and so on. So… if you haven’t already done so, bookmark the weblog, or subscribe to the RSS feed, because you won’t be able to find it from the homepage starting shortly.

I really need to re-learn how to install virtual hosts in Apache. Sigh. I knew this stuff 4-5 years ago.