There were many other activities while we were there. Of course, most vacation days are orientated around meals, and there always seemed to be something tasty. We made use of the Longmont health club, to try to work off the ridiculous amount of food. I used cross-country skis for the first time, and there were occasions that I could almost imagine that could possibly be a very efficient form of transportation. We enjoyed a couple of cups of coffee at the Winot Coffee Company. We visited Elizabeth's brother Greg and his wife Nicole, in his new auto repair business. The mellower evenings involved watching the Season 2 DVD's of The Office and reading Alan Greenspan's autobiography.

December 30 was our second anniversary! (See wedding pictures here, and here for our first anniversary.) We celebrated with a lavish dinner at the Greenbriar Inn, a lovely restaurant near the mountains. Interestingly, one of the highlights of the meal was the cheese plate with dessert... Lots of delicious choices.

• It now works for OneNote 2007, and PowerPoint 2007. It will NOT work for OneNote 2003 (use the older version for that).
• The layout of the slides seems to work better now, as they are imported via a table.
• Because of the improvements in the OneNote API, it will work with WebDAV shared notebooks.
• File sizes should be better. PowerPoint 2007 can sometimes export gigantic WMF files (bug?), so I switched to importing the pictures as PNG. This seems to work fairly well.
• OneNote will now do OCR on images. (This was one of the reasons I never bothered to upgrade PP2One until now.) So, you might not need to export the slide text.
• PP2One now uses the .Net 2.0 framework. (It was compiled with Visual Studio 2005.)

Here is the link: Zip file.

I've enjoyed each of my trips up there. This time around, some of the activities involved getting used to the new setup. Elizabeth forced me to swim around the island three times (each on different days), but that was a record for me. The water was cool and clear. The 2006 trip is documented here, while 2005 (an important trip!) and 2003 are also available in the archives.

I've also attached a couple of pictures from a hike with some co-workers up Mount Baldy (August 11, immediately after returning fit-and-trim from New York). We took the Ski Hut trail, and descended straight down the bowl. It was a moderately difficult hike, and it was pleasant to be down off the mountain before dark.

It contained a number of case studies from the Great War, used to illustrate a number of infantry concepts (obscurity, simplicity, terrain, time/space, mobility, surprise, orders, command/communication, fire/movement, artillery, etc). The case studies are morbidly fascinating... In each example, anywhere between tens to thousands of men slogged it out in the fields of Europe, often loosing their lives due to bad information, shaky leadership, or sheer chance. There have been a number of movies that depict the trench warfare of WWI (dark skies, muddy trenches, another wave of men getting cut down by in a hopeless charge at machine guns), and this is a good complement to understand why those things were happening (on a tactical level).

It follows, then, that the leader who would become a competent tactician must first close his mind to the alluring formulae that well-meaning people offer in the name of victory. To master his difficult art he must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types, long practice in making clear, unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind, are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war.

• 2003 (29)
• 2004 (30) - I like this entry
• 2005 (31)

Oddly enough, I didn't have an entry for last year.

I host this website myself. There really isn't a good reason to do that anymore… There are a large number of free (or almost free) blog-hosting services, which do all of the setup for you. The next step in complexity are the web hosting services, which run the servers and provide space to upload. Those are amazingly cheap, too, and provide 24/7 service.

But: I've learned a lot setting up Apache on Debian Linux, and I've gotten a better understanding of the infrastructure of this amazing internet. (The "New Seven Wonders of the World" are ridiculous and almost irrelevant. I like crumbling old monuments built with slave labor as much as anyone, but the REAL action is in the huge scale of humankind's more recent creative achievements. Where are the wonder drugs, like Herceptin, that save lives through detailed science of genetics? For the sake of all that is good, where is the Internet on that list?)

Anyway, I've purchased my domain name from GoDaddy, and that experience has been generally good. I recently upgraded my internet connection from Earthlink's residential DSL plan to the Small-Office DSL plan. This gave me a static IP address, a more stable connection, and better upload/download speeds. In the past, I used Dynu.Com for DNS (the service that directs requests from "borlik.net" to the IP address of my machine, e.g. 192.168.0.1). Unfortunately, their service has been HORRIBLE over the past several months, and (even though I had the premium plan) required a service ticket every time my IP address changed. I gave up on them, and switched to EveryDNS , and that seems to be a much better service. (By the way, DNSreport is a great way to check DNS configuration problems.)

So, I am much happier with our network now, and maybe this will even result in more blog content.

Mr. Godin advocated getting your customers to talk to each other. Certainly there are many more ways for people to communicate. And communicate with strangers and those outside geographical bounds. Blogs, newsgroups, rating sites, portals, wikis, etc. Happy customers are the best spokespeople. (The flip side is that it takes only a couple of missteps to ruin one's reputation.) On the other side of it, the companies can use those same tools to find small subset of people that are really interested. I like the idea that the most profitable advertising is the most focused, i.e. spam, mass mailings, and other interruption-based marketing don't work.

Anyway, I had watched the video because I was interested in Mr. Godin's presentation skills. Well worth it. His blog seems interesting, too.