In the event that we should become multi-millionaires in the future, we want to make sure we know what we’re going to do with the money.  The following is an ongoing list of major things on our list:

Establish a Commune

And by commune, you have to understand my interpretation of the word.  The usual ideas just don’t cut it – my idea of a modern commune is little more than a community of friends living in close proximity, each generally having some arcane talent.  Other than that, everybody maintains their own job.  The added benefit is that you have a community of actual friends in close proximity to help with things.  Think about some of these nicer neighborhoods going up that include parks and community facilities like a club house or picnic area.  That’s where the millions of dollars come in – someone has to pony up the money to put it together.

Establish an Olde World Arts and Crafts Guild

Look into America’s early years after the Declaration of Independence.  As was popular in Europe, guilds popped up all over the place.  Funny thing was, they never seemed to last.  The guilds cranked out some epic-level work, but rarely made the profit needed to keep the their doors open.  The Industrial Revolution was what put them out completely.  Mechanized art, while not for the purists, was the way of the future and a clear winner in the end.  Revival after revival, it was only when the the passion was washed out by insufficient funds that the guilds closed their doors.  An arts and crafts guild would work today, but only if I could poor money into it endlessly.

Create an Elderly Care Facility that Cares

Most elderly care facilities – the ones that the average senior citizen could afford – are clever facades on the same old song and dance.  There are too many horror stories to count as you look across the gamut and research their “customer appreciation.”  A big reason for this is funding.  The hired help is majority volunteer, public service workers, or minimum wage.  When you’re not paying well, it’s hard to attract good help, but that’s just what you need.

My wife is the one with real passion for this one.  She would love to pour many into a retirement home that is treated more like a spa than assisted living.  It would have to be a non-profit venture with backing.  The key is to rally support within the area communities, government, and of course, mad money.

Build the Lake Lanier Boardwalk District

How cool would it be to have a boardwalk district on Lake Lanier?  I envision long wooden decking, boat slips, a beach, and fantastic night life and retail shopping.  There should be bars with karaoke, an outdoor stage, a gallery, and much more.  Normally, this kind of thing wouldn’t need so much money to keep it up, but I think I’d have to pay off the Corps. of Engineers a hefty sum to allow it!

Create a Seafood/Freshwater Fish Restaurant on the Lake

Along with that whole boardwalk idea, you have to have some big foundations.  I purpose a fish restaurant out on the water.  It would be awesome to have its center piece being a large circle of the lake with underwater lights and sub-level glass for viewing.  Above that, have two to three stories encircling the “aquarium” for diners to look down upon.  There is some real opportunity to make a case for the environmental concerns surrounding the lake in a venue like this.

Build an Irish Pub

Another permanent resident of the boardwalk should be a good old-fashioned Irish pub.  If you know of McGuire’s in Pensacola, then your thinking along the same lines.  Good food (or bad, but traditional!) and drinks.  These relics of America’s past have always been places of fun and festivity.

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I had thought this might be a good excuse to buy an upgrade to the newer generation Zune 80 or 120, but I’d have to find my place all over again in the current audiobook I’m listening to (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”).  Arrrrgh!

Search around on the net and you’ll find no shortage of complaints and Microsoft bashing surrounding this recent development.  It’s a sad day, and ironic one too.  I had just poked fun at a friend recently who bought an iPod without thinking of the alternative.  To be fair, however, had she bought a current model Zune, she’d be unaffected by the problem.

*UPDATE* Microsoft has released a statement regarding the Zune 30 bug that hit all of us this morning. They’re essentially telling everyone to wait until tomorrow morning to turn on the Zune.  As of 7:00am for Eastern timezone folks, your Zune will magically begin working again; almost ass mysteriously as it stopped.

Though it’s not in their official release, the problem is most likely due to a bug in its ability to handle a leap year, which 2008 qualified.  The idea being that a leap year has around 366 days instead of the usualy 365.  As of January 1st, Greenwich Meantime, the device will be back on 1 of 365 – and working.  It’s a logical solution, but a very unfortunate goof for the Zune hardware team.  Maybe we’ll get a coupon toward the purchase of a new generation Zune in the mail for our trouble (ahem…are you listening, Zune team)!

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The software sees improvements as well. There are some updated looks, an updated social system, and an improved search system among others. Channels in the Zune (software and hardware) look really great. I am a big fan of the Pandora project, so a Zune-similar feature is eagerly sought. The channels are updated automatically and based upon your ratings of music. It’s based on genres, which if yours are anything like mine, will need some cleaning to get narrowed down to a meaningful set. A new social feature allows you to find people in the Marketplace that listen to music like you. As Dunn comments, you can do this yourself now, but it takes quite a bit of time and clicking.

The one point that Dunn brings up as a downer to this feature-rich upgrade is that most of these concepts are designed around the use of a Zune Pass. For $15 per month, the Zune Pass allows you to download all the music you want for up to three people. They still haven’t worked out the issue of assigning different user profiles to this pass. Our pass is in my wife’s name, so I logon with her account to get subscription music. This will effect the way channels work (that is, averaging the music preferences between all users of the Zune Pass instead of offering an individual’s experience), but I know they’ll work this out in time. For now, I’ve learned to deal with the way the pass works and I can accept it. I doubt very seriously the Zune Pass will extend to such services as Audible (it doesn’t currently extend to the MarketPlace video services), so I’d have to look at another subscription price there. I’ve used Audible’s services before, and I did enjoy them very much. I’m a big fan of audio books, so I will likely pony-up at least a basic subscription.

The one thing I don’t know yet is when I can expect this update. Despite Dunn’s lack-luster summary of the 3.0 update, I am very much looking forward to it!

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There comes a time when I need to do some data manipulation within Excel and import the results into a database. Mostly, I don’t have data in Excel that is overly complex, and so doesn’t pose any particular challenge in doing what I want. Today I’m working on an Excel document in Office 2007 – not one I made, but rather someone else’s wretched representation of data. It has carriage returns within the fields themselves, and I need to clean those out before importing the data into the database. There are a variety of ways to do it outside of Excel, but not a straightforward method within Excel. Microsoft’s search & replace feature in Office 2007 does not appear to be any better than in the former products. Is a little regular expression handling too much to ask for?!? So here are the goods:

If you turn off “word-wrap” on the offending cell, you should see a small box in the field where a carriage return once hid itself. Excel 2007 doesn’t simply allow me to copy this character and use it to search the worksheet. Neither does it acknowledge any sort of ^p, \r\n, or vbCRLF. Instead, you need to key in the ANSI code for the character you wish to search (and replace) on. In this case, I searched for ALT+0010 (the linefeed) and replaced it with a space. You may need to search for ALT+0013 ALT+0010 (CRLF) if this doesn’t work for you, but in my case removing the LF seemed to have worked.

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Having spent the next couple of hours working around impetuous security personnel at the Hyatt hotel (you’d think it would be a little easier for actual guests to check-in), Jeff and I had fully unloaded three cars worth of supplies and costumes. It was a grueling effort even though we were parked only two blocks from the hotel. Finishing that, we had time enough to grab a quick dinner before the wife and I hit the DragonCon drum circle scene. I usually enjoy this very much and this was my inaugural jam to start the weekend off. As such, it was a little lame. The circle was in full force, but diametrically opposed. There was a small niche on one side that seemed to be taking it upon themselves to run the group. This is all well and good, except that they had formed a sub circle of their own – one that was not large enough to accommodate any dancers. That, and the other side of the room was cut-off and unable to hear their rhythm through the throng of dancers in the room. So they attempted to follow along only to create a contrast to the rhythm. It was also proving difficult running the circle on the star drummers that had taken the lead. Burn-out drummers, I can say. The type that crank up a really great sound up front, but drive everyone else to play faster. It just creates a chaos in the end that is destined to burn out. The larger the circle, the more definition needed to highlight the rhythm distinctions. The group that puts this on is in discussions on the subject for next year.

DragonCon in general proved to be more than the three hotels could manage under heightened security measures. Security was tighter than in years past and the con suffered for it. Despite there efforts however, some people did manage to slip through and attend the panels they had paid to see. We didn’t manage to see many panels ourselves, but only because we were busy doing other things. We did catch the Star Trek Reunion panel in which the audience asked some questions that the celebrities didn’t answer. Some of the questions were kind of lame, but the three cast members of Star Trek attending the con this year should have made more of an effort to answer the questions. Humor the geeks, mkay. If they do something like this in the future, the coordinators should really work up some questions before the panel and present them to the talent beforehand. That way proper answers can be prepared, and good questions often lead to more.

Masquerade this year was really good. Grant and Kari hosted the annual costume ball this year. They did a good job together. Grant was showing off his over-the-top nerd trivia. The guy knows his Sci-Fi! Spazz and Fox were also in the masquerade this year. A first for any of us! They dressed as the Duct Tape Pirates – also a first at DragonCon as far as any of us know. Their costumes were perfect! When they first entered the stage, the crowd gave them complimentary “oooohhhh’s” to the detailed description of their ornate costumes. Feathers, ornaments, lace, etc. At the end – we planned the description just right – they dropped the duct tape bomb on the crowd. It was smooooooth. They went wild. It was one of those roars of excitement that can only build from thousands of people. The girls got kudos everywhere we went that night and they deserved it. If not for the fantastic effort they put into their costumes, then for walking around in uncomfortable duct tape costumes while smiling for their adoring audience.

There’s too much for me to get my mind around, so I’ll just close this up with a link to the pictures. This year, Flickr really exploded after the event with DragonCon photos. If you want to see thousands more, check the tag dragoncon2007.

Flickr: Olaf’s Dragon*Con Set (Multiple Years)

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Tangents aside, the 16 tips that John Pozadzides offers are decent enough, if not mostly well known. I did find one real error in John’s ideas. It doesn’t take into consideration those afflicted with Pudding Brain. I hit Thoof on his list of aggregators to read – one I hadn’t seen before – and got really stuck. It’s one of those new-fangled aggregators that automatically load more items as you get closer to the end of the scrolling page. You can waste a lot of time there!

There’s something to be said for focus. Hitting the hot spots on the web for news is well and good, but it’s probably more productive to focus on those places that can offer you something to comment on, rather than simply steal your attention away from what you came there to do. Sites like YouTube, Thoof, and even Digg (though less so for me) are real time sinks. When it comes to blog idea hunting, I have more success trusting my own RSS aggregation. It may have a lot of the same stuff, but it’s interspersed with other sources and is slightly less accessible because RSS is abstracted from the website. I also like the idea of hitting the unpopular sites our there with very specific information to get ideas. It’s more likely to be original and it’s probably something you’re very specifically interested in.

Now, that said; I haven’t been inspired to write about much lately. But it’s not so much about my sources as it is my own intentions. The number one tip for blog idea brainstorming is this:

Take an interest in what you have to say.

If you have no interest, you have no story. You can see right through a post that is paying lip service to its readers by reposting content someone else has written. John mentions in his tips that he goes the extra mile to do some research on topics he is reposting. That’s exactly the right idea in my mind. He’s taken an interest and is providing original commentary on a popular topic.

So in between original content I fill in with interesting things I find elsewhere, or current news events. But I don’t just re-post other people’s content.

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You see, the folks at Read/Write Web are right. The Search is “game-over.” Google has won. But there is still a search for the Google-killer.  Problem is, everybody is going after the wrong features. from Read/Write Web: From Search to (Re)Search…

• Cool new features – user interface, alerts, visualization or whatever. The problem is that no single feature is enough for users to switch from Google and most people don’t have the time or motivation to use multiple search engines.
• Natural Language. There is big money riding on this one. It feels wrong to me. This is too much heavy science to crack problems that are totally simple for humans; and Web 2.0 is getting pretty good at aggregating the expanding global pool of knowledge workers.
• Vertical Search and Human Search. I put the two together. Human Search works best in well-defined domains. There are lots of Vertical Search engines that already work well and plenty more will come.

The article cites some good ideas for what this mythical Web 2.0 app should be, but that’s where my idea diverges.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of “concept searching” in my mind as of late. The problem with today’s search engines is that they’re still related strictly to my search terms. The problem is exposed when I need to do a search for terms that may not appear exactly as I type them, but together form more of a characteristic or conceptual pattern of something else. For instance, if I search for red, orange, and yellow, I will get a wide diversity of sites which have these words prominently displayed in HTML content. But maybe what I’m really after is artistic impressions of warm color use. Or perhaps I’m looking for images of fire…

The point is, the terms I specified are related in ways beyond just their placement on a web site. Flickr does a very nice job of demonstrating the power of tagging, categorizing, and respectively searching. By combining definitions of the words we’re searching for, they’re able to build what are called “clusters.” Clusters are groups of tags that seem related and Flickr allows you to pick a cluster to further identify the concept you’re searching on. It’s not perfect yet, but it demonstrates my point very well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/red/clusters/:

This is the next revolution in search engines. It’s a combination of Natural Language and research search types. By analyzing the words’ meanings and allowing the user to refine their particular definition, Conceptual Searching can be made possible.

*UPDATE:
I haven’t read into this much yet, but it looks like Microsoft is already entering into discussions based upon what I’ve said. I like to think they’re reading my blog and getting their best innovations here!

Microsoft Research

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As my previous experiences taught me, I don’t skimp on power supplies either. I was interested in a rock-solid performer with as high an efficiency (power supplied versus power converted to heat) as I could afford. I was surprised by what I found. While there are some exceptions, the more efficient PSU’s available today are running at < =85% efficiency. Of course, there can be dramatic differences from the max load efficiency rating (usually the highest number) to a 50% load average. Regardless, I won't really know what I have until it’s under load and the Kill A Watt is monitoring it.