So a month ago, I bought a Dell Dimension 5150 (though the front of the machine clearly says E510). Aside from small snafu’s early on, it’s actually worked out pretty well. One of things that I’m really pleased about it, is just how quiet it is. There’s nothing I hate more than machines with loud ambient noises (looks at my Toshiba Portege M200).

Apparently this Dell uses the BTX form factor, which replaces the aging ATX layout. And apparently, BTX hasn’t had a very good start - one site listed this as one of ten failed tech trends of 2005. Ouch!

Well if BTX means quieter computers, I’m all for it. Here’s to BTX!

MercuryNews.com | 08/13/2006 | Kit homes for storm victims
“It was a little intimidating at first,” said Kristin Bromm, a former Microsoft program manager who helped Hayter coordinate the church volunteers. Bromm said she had never worked in construction before.

But she said the effort appealed to her because “I believe everyone should be able to afford a home.” And while she’s donated time and money to other charities, she added, “I really like the idea of creating something out of nothing.”

Congrats on being quoted in the Merc, Kristin! Apparently Habitat for Humanity is working on some neat projects.

Every once in a while, I buy a pretty geeky to - this is my geeky toy of the month: The Kill A Watt. Here’s a picture and a review from The Gadgeteer:

Yours for just ~$30, you can quickly and easily find out how much power your devices are using. For example, I found that…

• My home theatre (mostly the Comcast PVR) uses about 58 watts when not active… and 250 watts when active.
• My microwave uses 1200+ watts when active… and 10 amps! 2 watts when not active
• The table fan I’ve been using consumes about 28 watts
• My PC set up right now is consuming 200-250 watts (fluctuating wildly)

Fun if you like lots of data. I’m curious to see what the ancient fridge in my apartment is using. It’s also eye-openning to see how many watts are used by devices even when they are “off”.

Visio can be used for a lot of things: network diagrams, timelines… and even crime scenes!

Microsoft Office Templates: Crime scenes with shapes

This Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003 crime scene template uses updated versions of the crime scene shapes that were available in Microsoft Visio 5.0 and Microsoft Visio 2000. The template provides a small site sample as well as small-sized, medium-sized, and large-sized site pages with reference points, text blocks, and scale symbols built in, as well as many new shapes for creating Visio drawings to depict crime, accident, or incident scenes for courtroom presentations.

Tonight I attended this:

Churchill Club - Event Detail - Startup Success 2006
Lauren Elliott, Founder, Third Rock Mining
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn
Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot
Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah
Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket

Moderator:
Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director, Garage Technology Ventures

Guy’s definitely a fun moderator.

Here are a fun quote that Joe had about Web 2.0:

Ajax, Adsense, Arrogance

Hah! I love it.

Bubba ran an itneresting email experiment:

Bubba’s Place: What is a normal email flow?

I archived all of my email last night. So, I had 0 items in my deleted items folder and 0 in my sent items folder.

24 hours have pased and i now have 183 in deleted items and 50 in my sent items. The crazy thing was I “went offline” today and ignored mail as best as I could in order to get something critical done. In my info-ho days I would probably have been closer to 600 in deleted items and 150 in my sent items.

Ok, it’s 3am. I’m done replying to all the work emails that I could today - still a few more unread than I had hoped. Let’s see what stats I come up with between now and the end of tomorrow.

Update: Ok, it’s 2am now the next day. Unfortunately I have a 10am meeting that I can’t miss so its time to go to bed. In the last 23 hours I sent 90 pieces of mail, and received ~161 pieces of mail that got passed my filters (e.g. ones that are addressed to me). Wow… that’s a lot of work email. Not too shabby considering that I had 6 hours of meetings today.

It looks like Bubba would beat me on a normal day though. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing…

The New York Times published this graph today:

Are you using Windows Live Toolbar? If so, be sure to check out this link to install a custtom button that will provide you with a shortcut to this blog:

Windows Live Gallery - decheung.com

Custom buttons are pretty cool. Mine allows you to see the titles of the latest entries when you click on the button. Other custom buttons can show you previews (there’s a traffic one!) or allow you to filter your search (to wikipedia!).

And most importantly, you can create your own custom button! Check them out…