I've seen many unthinking articles decrying Vista's UAC and some more interesting articles talking about what UAC does and doesn't do with respect to the theory of how PC security should be implemented, but Ed Bott has written a really good article about some practical tips for dealing with UAC in additional to describing what it does for users in concrete terms.

Today I received an email from the "non-petition" Trustees of Dartmouth College attempting to influence my vote in the Association of Alumni elections. The letter is posted on Dartmouth's website here. The I found the letter to be outrageous for a number of reasons:

• First, why are College funds and mailing lists and web hosting being used by a subset of the Board of Trustee to make partisan points in this election? These resources were not made available to those Trustees espousing the opposite viewpoint. As my wife incredulously asked, "Is this something members of a corporate board would do?"
• Second, the letter makes many references to "this group" but it is seldom clear to which group they are referring. Can you tell from reading the letter? I can't. Perhaps they refer to different groups in different instances, but it is impossible to tell. In any event, the effect is to falsely imply that a single small group is behind everything they mention.
• Third, in a display of chutzpah that is striking from a group of trustees that complains that others have "politicized Dartmouth elections" the letters authors proceed to unearth out-of-context quotes from their fellow Trustee (albeit a petition Trustee) Todd Zywiki "saying those 'who control the university today[,] they don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in country.'" Does anyone seriously believe that he was accusing the other Dartmouth Trustees and administration of being unpatriotic atheists? Not anyone sensible. In context the quotation was saying (with rhetorical flourish) that the perpetuation of the academy had become and end in itself that its members defend it against interlopers. More extended excerpts of the informal talk from which the quotation was taken can be found (with unsympathetic comments) here. After reading this letter from the trustees, it is hard to disagree one other sentence from Zywicki's talk "The establishment within these universities is vicious."
• Fourth, the letter is breathtaking in its Orwellian constructions, like "Four of our trustee colleagues filed an amicus brief against the College to try to achieve through the courts what they could not achieve in the boardroom through normal Board processes." I guess no one could possibly think that these board members were trying to achieve through dilution of alumni elected trustees a result that they could achieve through alumni elections.

This letter exemplifies why I (and I suspect many others) have voted for petition trustees in Dartmouth trustee elections. It is not that I find terrible fault with the direction of the College or believe big changes should be made (other than making it less expensive for my children of course). I do believe, however, that Dartmouth could use some fresh perspectives in its governance. A group of trustees that is so myopic as to believe that this letter actually does their cause some good needs to cede more power to independent Trustees not have the power of such Trustees diluted.

I was on vacation this past week and used Orb to listen to new podcasts that arrived on our home server in my absence.

I discovered that Orb has made some improvements that make it work much better with my HTC Mogul phone using the native Windows Media Player:

• I can now use the Windows Media Player in Windows Mobile 6 to skip forward in the track I am listening to. Previously this had required two tries at playing the tack after the advance each time I wanted to do this. This capability comes in handy when listening to a podcast that I had to previously stop in the middle of.
• If a streaming file stops, I can just hit Pause, then Play on Windows Media Player and the file picks up where it left off (actually a little behind) after rebuffering. This is much more convenient that having to go back to the Orb page in Pocket Internet Explorer and click on "resume stream" (which might well have been on a different page.
• Orb remembers the bitrate I like to stream playback so I no longer need to manually set that (or wait for Orb to test bandwidth with each playback).

Lastly, this isn't really an Orb improvement (at least I suspect not), but with EVDO Rev A, audio files are much more likely to stream without incident on my 35 minute commute. Previously, I could count on at least one time when I would have to spend about 5 minutes restarting the stream from where I was in a podcast because of network issues.

This new convenience of Orb will probably lead me to sync podcasts less to the the MicroSD card in my phone and rely more on Orb.

I've been in the process of reorganizing our family DVDs over the past several days. This has included ripping about 30 DVDs that I think I might like to watch segments of from time to time on a whim-- the advantage of having access to the ripped DVDs in Windows Media Center.

I have also revamped the storage of the physical DVDs. I had been using DiscSox storage sleeves, but I found myself less likely to play a DVD because it meant sorting through a plastic rack of sleeves (which would slip out of the rack and which was not easily accessible inside a cabinet).

I purchased two Koskin DVD Binders. They store about 90 movies (with room for two DVDs each and the sleeves) for only $30. The cases are easily kept in a cabinet and pulled out when I want to watch a movie.

This weekend I embarked on ripping about 40 DVDs and converting them to MPEG2 files playable in Vista Media Center using MyMovies. I had previously described my process, but I learned this evening that when MyMovies plays back an MPEG2 file on an Xbox 360 Media Center Extender, it only will play audio if it is in stream x80. This is the default for the main audio for most DVDs (but not all-- as I learned the hard way). Luckily, I was able to use VideoRedo to convert the VOB files from these DVDs (once reauthored into a single VOB file using DVDShrink) to DVR-MS files, which solves the problem.

In connection with The Digital Lifestyle's Ultimate Media Center Enthusiast Setup "contest" I took some photos of those parts of our home computer and A/V systems that relate to Vista Media Center. As I discuss these often, I thought these might be interesting. The photos contain descriptions of some of the hardware and software used.