At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here

I subscribe and post updates from my weblog to a site that aggregates Oregon weblogs, called orblogs.com. If you're from the area and/or are interested in the wide variety of opinions and thoughts that make up the blogging community in Oregon, you should check it out.

It looks like as sometime recently they have a RSS 2.0 XML feed available. It showed up in my referrers this evening. Not sure how I missed that, but it's a welcome addition to the site.

Yay! Publication dates!!

From Engadget: Update on RIM Blackberry 7100t (aka, the "Charm")

"We’re not sure how much this is going to change things we mentioned earlier today, but now that some corroborating photos have surfaced on an unnamed website, now we’re admittedly getting a little (only a little, okay?) anxious about the supposedly imminent release of the RIM Blackberry 7100t. Apparently (as pictured) T-Mobile appears to be a carrier, and we also understand it may have Bluetooth 1.1."

Cool keypad idea on this one, where they put two characters per key and then use adaptive text guessing to form your words for you (kind of like T9 text input, but presumably more accurate since the probability of getting the correct key combinations correct will be much higher).

Okay, so earlier this evening I was over at a friend's place visiting, and two of the kids there are attending Science and Technology high school magnet academy here in Beaverton, Oregon starting tomorrow. I was talking about how cell phones can be business leashes and how Blackberries, while quite helpful and useful from a business standpoint, are more like a ball and chain on the “Tether Continuum.”

Okay you smart math/science./technology students - here's a probability quiz for you: The popular T9 text input method uses a standard phone keypad and does predictive text analysis based on the combination of keys you press against a known dictionary of words. This new device has two characters per key instead of 3. Given use of the same dictionary on both devices, and that you are typing the same words and phrases on each device, how much more accurate will the Blackberry Charm text input will be?

Via Newsweek and PVRBlog:

“... now couch potatoes are perched on the cusp of true paradise. Soon they won't even have to stand up to trudge to the mailbox; fat broadband pipes will let them directly download movies over the Net to their television ...

“... In an interview with NEWSWEEK last year, CEO Reed Hastings predicted that by the end of the decade, Netflix will deliver most of its rentals over the Net, supplanting its distribution centers and trademark red envelopes. "We named the company Netflix, we didn't name it DVD by Mail," he said.”

Nice - so if I am subscriber to both TiVo and Netflix (which I am), I can order my movies and have them downloaded straight to my TiVo for viewing? Woah, cool!

Keeping my eyes open for this one. Something tells me I'll have to have a series 2 TiVo, though... Like the one I was eye-balling at Frys yesterday... Might just have to finally give up on the haX0red series one box.

It's another long weekend at home, and after pretty much nothing but clouds and rain Saturday, the great weather today means an opportunity to get some stuff done outside. Among the around-the-house items I have been tending to this afternoon, I harvested a bunch of garden stuff:

• The first (of many, it appears) ripe tomato
• About 20 ears of corn
• About 20 carrots
• 10 beets
• 12 bell peppers
• Uncountable sweet peas
• A few strawberries

And there's plenty more of everything where that came from, with the exception of the corn - the plants were a little too close together, it appears, and most of the ears are too small. But the ones that did grow are awfully good.

If the weather holds out, there's going to be a tomato give-away happening pretty soon - there's just no way I can eat all of those.

Oh, and the big sunflowers are topping out at about 18 feet at the tallest, with stalks almost as thick as my forearm. Those are some amazing plants!

The forecast I received this morning on my trusty mobile device told me it would be 73 degrees and partly cloudy, and offered the same for the rest of the weekend.

So far it's been drizzling rain all day and completely clouded over. My garden needs some sun. The lawn is too wet to mow. I drove the motorcycle to the shop in the rain to get the brake recall thing done, and got wet. I turned on the heat for the first time in forever.

Trusty mobile device. Yeah, right.

If this is partly cloudy, what's next?

If you run any version of dasBlog, this is important to you.

Thanks to Bliz for letting me know to update my dasBlog installation. A new patch is available to fix an issue with all previous versions that can allow a malicious person to gain access to your user credentials for the dasBlog app (but not the system).

• Get the patch
• Read the news
• Visit Bliz

Don't know about you, but I've had enough for one week. Three days off. W00t!

Plans: taking the motorcycle in for a brake recall, visiting a friend's coffee shop, hanging out, mowing the yard, and we'll see what else.

What's everyone else up to?

Sooner than expected, SharePoint 2003 technologies get their first service pack, with fixes and improvements in a few key areas. Note that some of the fixes in the service packs (there are two) were previously available as hot-fixes. Other changes are new in this release, and address important issues.

From Mark Harrison's weblog:

Today, customers using Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies began applying two new Service Pack 1 releases, which provide performance improvements for Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.

Enhancements in the Windows SharePoint Services SP1:

• Support for larger files. With Windows SharePoint Services SP1, customers and partners can save and share documents as large as 2 GB.
• Easy updates. Windows SharePoint Services SP1 greatly eases the patching process by enabling customers and partners to apply patches and hot fixes.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 customers and partners will need to apply the Windows SharePoint Services SP1 to download and apply the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP1, which features improvements in the following specific areas:

• Improved search results. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP1 improves search functionality in a number of areas, including propagation, crawling reliability, keyword or best-bet search results, alert conditions, more robust XML filtering, and linguistic accuracy.
• Content Watson functionality. This enables improved product quality for customers through streamlined issue reporting between a customer's networked computer and the Microsoft development team.

Now with Windows SharePoint Services SP1, customers and partners will be able to access language templates for 11 additional languages, including Croatian, Latvian and Slovenian. Windows SharePoint Services, currently offered in 25 languages, is a feature of the Windows Server 2003 platform.

Availability

Customers and partners can access the free SP1 downloads by visiting the following Microsoft Web sites:

Download Windows SharePoint Services SP1: click here
Updated WSS Admin Guide: click here
Download SharePoint Portal Server SP1: click here

More Info

Here are some KB Articles related to the service packs (via spsfaq.com):

• SPS fixlist
• WSS fixlist
• SPS SP 1 must be applied to all servers in the farm
• Install of patch incomplete if you install before creating configuration database
• Service pack language must match installed language
• Error attempting to patch if source files are missing and RTM files were deleted or changed
• Installing WSS SP 1 in a farm and how to verify the service pack installed correctly
• Error browsing sites if a content database could not be upgraded

Microsoft today released Windows Media Player 10 to the web.

Jump on over and grab the download, find out about some of the new and forthcoming devices that take advantage of the technology, check out the WMP 10 trailer (300Kb), or view out one of the online streaming videos just released that describe the new features of the technology:

Sync Your Portable Media Center Device with Your PC

Synchronize Music and Pictures to a Portable Media Center Device

Convert and Sync Video to Your Portable Media Center Device

Using Windows Media Player 10 to Create a Digital Jukebox

Cool stuff. I like the Bliss add-on visualization, that's nifty.

I have only found one minor glitch so far (and its one that occurred in the tech-beta version, as well, but this is a fresh install on a clean, non-beta-poisoned computer). In the upper right corner there is a broken image icon, reminiscent of Internet Explorer. I wonder how much IE is leveraged in the WMP10 interface. Interesting. A reboot did not fix the issue, either. Clicking on the broken image placeholder resultsi n the same menu associated with the down-arrow image to the right of the broken one.

Time to find a Portable Media Device!

CERT (the Computer Emergency Readiness Team) made it little more official this week and issued a Cyber Security Alert [SA04-243A] recommending that computer users upgrade to Windows XP SP2.

Taken from the US-CERT web site alert:

Recommendation

To help protect your Windows XP computer from attacks and vulnerabilities, install Service Pack 2 using Windows Update or Automatic Updates.

Note: Service Pack 2 makes significant changes to improve the security of Windows XP, and these changes may have negative effects on some programs and Windows functionality. Before you install Service Pack 2, back up your important data and consult your computer manufacturer's web site for information about Service Pack 2.

The recommendation is made specifically for home users, which stand to see the highest benefit, but applies in principle to businesses as well. However, note that many business computing environments are centrally managed. If you work in a company that has centrally-managed software and security procedures, be sure to check in with those people before you install SP2 - they may already have a plan in place.

I have FIVE FOUR THREE TWO  ONE [Sorry - ALL GONE! Next time!] Gmail account invitations to hand out.

Update: Six more invitations up for grabs here.

I've been a Dish Network customer for years, and before that I was a DirecTV customer. These days I have standard-definition Dish Network equipment with a TiVo DVR box, and in another room I have one of Dish Network's standard-def DVR receivers, as well.

I'll be honest: I don't like Dish's DVR receiver at all. I don't even use the DVR capability. It's annoying - it doesn't even download the programming guide on it's own - It makes me do it when I try to access the guide and it suddenly realizes there's nothing in memory to display. I have no idea who designed Dish Network's receiver software, but I can almost guarantee you it's been the same person(s) since day-one. All their equipment has this unusable "engineer" flavor. Instead I use my TiVo all the time, every day, with the TiVo remote and IR blaster controlling the satellite receiver.

But what I want is High Definition TV all-around. I have a nice high-def projector and I want to do more than playing Counter-Strike and Halo in HD.

Dish Network has a $1000 HD DVR available, but I can't bring myself to risk spending the money on it - every Dish Network receiver I have ever owned (and that's several) has been lacking in the usability department. Maybe they got it right on their new one, but there is no way for me to know. No one I know has one of these units. I can see the potential in it, but past experience scares me too much to pony up that much money. Now, if Dish Network wanted to send me one to try out, they could do that - I'd even review it (objectively) here. But no up-front money any more, not unless I can see it in action. Sorry, Charlie.

So, I have been looking at options to the Dish Network lineup. Probably the most obvious is DirecTV, my long-ago former satellite television service provider. They also have a HD receiver, and this one is a DirecTiVo model, which certainly catches my attention. TiVo's product is solid and ranks high in my one-man usability survey. If I try hard enough, I can probably find a place somewhere in this city to demo the DirecTV product. I will probably try to do that, since I doubt DirecTV will be willing to loan me one to evaluate, either. But if they want to, I'll gladly take them up on the offer.

But there's another company that's got my eye, as well. I have been watching a third company, VOOM, for the past several months. I like VOOM and their web site- they even show you on their site what you see on the screen, what the equipment is like, pretty much anything you want to know. Why don't all the companies do that? They also have something that just caught my eye, and which I might even be willing to wait around for - They're prepping a HD-DVR and their "Whole House Solution." This is looking very interesting. Accessing your PC - does this integrate with Windows XP Media Center Edition by chance? Maybe not, and that's a whole different post topic for another day - The only thing that's really missing from XP MCE -- in my not-so-humble opinion -- is high-def support. Anyone know? Hey VOOM - you need a market tester???

Ripped unabashedly and directly from the VOOM^TM web site and their future-stuff page:

With the introduction of our HD-DVR, you'll be able to watch and record any channel, whenever you want, in both standard and high definition. Every recording is a perfect digital version of the original. The VOOM DVR has multiple tuners, enabling you to record two shows while you’re watching a third! And you can expand the DVR’s usefulness even further with our Whole House Solution.

Our upcoming Whole House Solution extends the power of our DVR throughout your home. With a single click, you can pause live TV and HDTV, then go to another room and pick up where you left off. It also connects your TV and PC entertainment like never before. You can access your PC and enjoy digital music and photos on any TV in the house. That's VOOMing!

Obviously, this looks like it has some potential. I've been considering moving to a PC/network-based digital media solution, and Satellite TV in HD is the only way I can take advantage of the video equipment that is presently leveraged only by my X-BOX and DVD home theater systems. I'll be buying something eventually, I just don't know what.

If anyone has any personal experience with any of this new technology. please share your thoughts - We'd like to know!

My friend Dian wrote to say she is thrilled to let everyone know that the new Urban Grind Coffee, in the Pearl, is finally open!  They're done with construction and training and are fully operational. Head on down and check them out. Be sure to take your laptop - they're a Personal Telco site, so free WiFi is available!

Urban Grind Coffee is located at 911 NW 14th Ave. in the Pearl, on the corner of 14th and Kearny (Portland).  The building is just one block north of the new REI store in a very cool part of town. Their business hours are:

• Sunday 7am-7pm
• Monday/Tuesday 6am-7pm
• Wednesday-Friday 6am-9pm
• Saturday 7am-9pm

Right now they're focusing on espresso drinks and pastries, but should be adding more breakfast and lunch items in the coming weeks.  Desserts and wine/beer are a month or two away.

If you're in the area, stop in and check them out!

Web forums used to be useful. Then h4xZ0r teenagers found them, and the world changed (for the worse). Over at adminmod.org for example, about two years ago things in the support forums went to hell in a hand-basket - about the time goldzip came along (or a little thereafter). Forum flaming became an art for a short time, but as it is with most art-forms, it was quickly commoditized and thus cheapened.

But I digress...

Someone apparently picked up on this little-known and less-understood behavior over at the Steam forums, and having realized that a FAQ or sticky post won't get read by the people that need to read it, did what all good communicators do: Took it to their own medium and style.

Introducing: Posting and You

Pretty much hits the proverbial nail right on the head.