Logo by Tom Purves

8:36 PM
Phew!
Well, here I am back in Sugar Land, TX.  Goodbye, Philadelphia!   Quite an eventful day...I was almost killed (or perhaps just almost knocked unconscious) when a large branch from a tree decided to fall off its owner and land about a foot in front of where I was walking.  In fact, I heard something above, stopped to look, and that's when it came down.  If I hadn't stopped, it would've whacked me a pretty good one.

Anyhow, there's a few things I'm looking at.

First of all, I finally have time to get to those hard drive reviews...they'll be done this week.  (Finally!)

Second, have you checked out these new Palm PC's running Windows CE?  They basically look like Pilot's but run Windows CE and have a CompactFlash slot for expanding memory.  As one person said on the newsgroup, "I love standards!" and you should too...expanding a Palm PC with another 8MB of memory should easily cost less than $100.   Wonder if those 32MB CF cards will work?  The Everex Freestyle is currently making its way into stores like CompUSA across the nation.  And it's getting quite a response from many users, who seem to like it better than the Pilot line from 3COM/USR.  Since my Pilot got trashed in an unfortunate mishap, I'm considering getting one of these instead.

Third, I can no longer delay the inevitable...I need a 56K modem now.  The USB modem that I wanted earlier in the year from US Robotics is out, but still exceptionally expensive.  What to do?  I also need to switch from my ISP, AT&T, which has decided to drive away its users by breaking with the flat-rate pricing plan.  Now I'm probably going to settle on MindSpring, which appears to have won some awards for its exceptional service.  All I really want is to make sure they are national, reliable, and flat-rate.

3:35 PM
Service Pack 1 for IE 4.01
Eh, what does this do?  Read about the changes here.  Then download the full version with Service Pack 1 included here.   A patch is forthcoming if you don't want to re-d/l the whole version again.

FAT32 for Windows NT
is awesome.  The plethora of drive letters I had was really getting on my nerves.

Old news
You guys should let me know when the load times for the news page are getting out of hand.  It was up to 110K!  Or do you guys really love this page that much?  :-)

2:37 AM
AOL to buy ICQ for $300 million
Yow!  Man, I should have programmed that app.  :-)  Are they ever going to start charging for ICQ?  I might actually pay for it...ack!   Re-download ICQ, by the way...they're up to 1.26 now.

ZDNet's story

Godzilla
I actually kind of liked the movie. But I went in with very low expectations, and everything is relative, isn't it?  I basically laughed off the cheesy stuff.  The two worst bits are the fact that they tried to make Roger Ebert the mayor of New York along with his running mate Gene Siskel (lookalike actors), with associated lame jokes, and a scene in Madison Square Garden where the characters manage to survive situations that even a cat with 9 lives wouldn't make it out of.

WinAMP 1.91
The only thing I was really looking for in this one was the ability to disable the volume control, which I was positive would be fixed (got broken in 1.90) but didn't.  But there are a lot of changes, so download if you must.

By the way, did I mention my MP4 player outputs to the Wave Mapper now?  But man, it is so slow...needs a P2-233 to run in real time.

http://www.winamp.com

12:27 PM
StarCraft with no CD
Any of you fellows bright enough to figure out how to run StarCraft without the CD?  Virtual CD images don't count.  Must be able to work on Battle.net.  I just want to be able to play on Battle.net without a CD (I have my own CD-key, obviously.)  I ran across a few hex-edits of storm.dll on Dejanews in foreign languages...but surprise, surprise, they didn't work.

6:27 PM
FAT32 driver for Windows NT!
Oh man, I can't believe I almost forgot this.  System Internals released a read-only version of a FAT32 driver for Windows NT yesterday.  Unfortunately for us, the read-write version costs money.  But hey, if you need it, I guess you should pay for it.

5:41 PM
Microsoft got sued
Yesterday, but you already heard about that, didn't you?  Windows 98 is unlikely to be affected, but it still has broad strategic ramifications for Microsoft.

Sony's Vaio 505
It's quite a departure from your traditional notebook, but what a welcome one it is!  A notebook with a 200 MHz Pentium MMX processor, 2.1 GB HD, 10.4" TFT screen, built-in 56K modem and a PC Card slot.  Your regular laptop...except it's only 3/4" thick!  And in that stylized metallic blue magnesium alloy casing...it looks way cool.

Japan Palmtop Direct's info (expensive)
John Dvorak's plug

1:06 PM
Einhander music
Well, even as I finish off my paper for senior design, I've decided to throw up the first ten tracks of the Einhander soundtrack in the Files/Audio section.   I love this soundtrack and hopefully you will too.  1-10 are good, but they only get better, so you have something to look forward to.

2:42 AM
Microsoft/DOJ talks break down
Microsoft is alleging that the DOJ is making excessively unreasonable demands and it looks as if antitrust motions will begin in earnest against Microsoft from the DOJ and nearly 20 states come Monday.  Whatever concessions Microsoft made over the weekend will not be going into the final Windows 98 and it's actually unclear what concessions were made or what the sticking points are in the discussion.  What's your guess?

Apparently one of the concessions was the Microsoft Windows logo startup screen.   I didn't even realize that was an issue.  It doesn't sound like a sticking point to me.  My guess?  The anti-competitive bundling agreements to OEM's.   If I were the DOJ, I'd go after those.

Infoworld's story