This is a pretty neat example of using Flash and ASP.NET, 2 technologies that I have expreience with.

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/FlashUpload.asp

I will need to try this in one of my projects.

Here is a very interesting article:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html

Google let’s their employees work on whatever they want, gives amazing benefits (meals, gift certificates, stock), requires 20% of a persons time to be spent on their own side projects, doesn’t have due dates, and much more. 

Sounds pretty cool! 😉

Here is a pretty good list of articles that discuss ways to generate web traffic for your site:

http://www.copyblogger.com/increase-web-traffic/

Here is another list of some great freeware products, free browsers, anti-virus, anti-spyware etc.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm#9

A good friend of mine and a guy I hit with all the time played at Rutgers.  Now it looks like they are going to cancel the program.

A website has been created to raise some money to help their program.

http://saverutgerstennis.org/

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14489259/

I wish I coudl take credit for that line, but it was from Colbert.

So now Pluto is going to be a Drawf Planet, along with UB313 (Xena) and Ceres.

To see the full image you might need to expand your window or use the scrollbar at the bottom of this article.

UB313 is larger than Pluto, and farther out in orbit.

I kinda liked the idea of calling Pluto and Charon a “dual planet,” as Charon is so large that it was somewhat unfair to say that it orbits Pluto, but they aren’t going to do that.

Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt but because it hasn’t swept the area clear of other asteroids (and I guess it never will b/c of its close proximity to Jupiter) it will never meet the new definition of a planet:

“a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

This is really cool:

http://cre.ations.net/creation/44/really

I saw a link from fark to www.YourOs.com which is supposed to be a web based operating system.  I tried to do a demo but it was too busy from the /. crowd.

This would be interesting to try, they say they have MP3 players, word processors etc.

I figure I should put up a review of my Sansa e200 incase anyone else is thinking of getting one.

I had a couple trips I had to take last month and my old Archos mp3 player decided to die on me.  Luckly for me I was able to find a Sankdisk Sansa e200 or e220 or e2XX whatever.  My model is the 6GB version, which is the largest they offer at the moment.

The unit cost $280 at Circuit City and while I could have got it online for $250 or so, I was going to be on a plane the next day so I didn’t mind paying a little extra to have it with me on the trip.  Have I mentioned that I hate Circuit City?  Why is it that every time I got there I end up getting frustrated or pissed off?  I guess the one time I went there to see a TiVo demoed was ok… except now that I think about it they didn’t know how to work the Tivo.  I ended up buying one and loving it though (this was back in ’99).

Anyway, I have to say I am very pleased with the Sansa.  It was exactly what I hoped it would be in almost every way.

Battery life is awesome.  I think I read somewhere that it does 15 hours, which sounds about right.  I haven’t had it run out on me yet.  Oh, this does bring me to one of the few things I don’t like about it.  You can’t listen to it while you have it connected to your computer, which means you can’t listen to it while you are charging it thorough the USB.  Maybe you could “disconnect” through windows and have it still get power, but I don’t know.

Playback quality and volume are good.

Navigation is IPod-like, which is ok, but rather than use a “touch wheel” they have an actual wheel you can turn that makes navigating easier in my opinion.  The only thing I don’t like about navigation is that if you want to change to a song on another album by the same artist, you have to click Menu (down), Back To List (Middle), and then “Back” (Right).  I guess there is not obvious way to improve that, so overall I can’t really complain.

FM Radio / Video: Well I will never be using the video, and I am sorry to say that as soon as I started using the FM radio I realized how much I would have rather had AM.  Oh well.

Audio Recorder: Haven’t used it.

Graphics: I was a little suprised that there were now “Themes” to choose from, only the 1 default theme.  It’s not bad, just something I would have figured they would do.  They show the album cover if you downloaded it, which is cool.

PC Integration: Awesome.  My winXP computer saw it right away as some kinda media device, no driver installs or anything.  You go to My Computer, click on the Sansa icon (it’s almost like an external hard drive), and you just drag over your folders.  Once loaded, the Sansa will look at your MP3 tag info and index them all like the IPod does.

My wife bought me a little rubber case for it that I leave on all the time, and I have no worries about it breaking.  The thing feels really solid. 

Size: It looks bigger in these pictures than it is.  It’s smaller than a large pack of gum.  Very nice.

Overall I am very happy with it!!  I would really recommend it to anyone who wants a great MP3 player, but doesn’t want to get stuck with an IPod.

“Entropy collection”

“Left is best”