Our house has a large concrete patio, and since we’ve moved in we’ve been wanting to get some furniture to enjoy it. Advice on the subject was pretty uniform - get nothing expensive, as the life of outdoor furniture is unpleasant and short.

I had the chance to get a large stack of teak wood decking for a low price, but I knew that if I tried to build all the furniture it would be August before we’d be enjoying it. So we shopped. We argued, and then we did what any red-blooded American couple does when they can’t decide: We went to IKEA!

We got 6 chairs, 2 folding tables, a bar/food cart, and a small picnic table for the girls. It was less money than the table & four chairs we were leaning towards at the local home center. The quality is better than I expected, with solid wood throughout and sturdy fasteners. The catch, though, is assembly is required. Lots of assembly.

So, here are a few tips if you find yourself outdoors in an ocean of flat boxes from IKEA, and a lot of stuff to put together:

1. Get some decent tools, and keep them handy. IKEA pretty consistently uses 4 & 5mm hex keys, and 13 to 17mm wrenches. If you get double ended wrenches and hex keys with screwdriver handles your hands will thank you and you’ll have 4 or 5 tools max. I wouldn’t go buy this stuff just to put a few items together, but it’s worth a trip to the workshop if you’ve already got them. Not to be totally geeky, but having a tool belt to keep them in reach and always in the same place is really nice as well.
2. Put the tables together first. Then you have a nice work surface to use to put everything else together.
3. Get a bowl, preferably heavy, to dump the hardware in. I was amazed at how even a light wind would take a plastic bag with a few screws several feet way. It’s not easy to find screws in the lawn!
4. If you have more than one of something to assemble, put them together simultaneously with an assembly line. This keeps tool changes down and it’s a lot faster.
5. Everything you get will come with a hex key. They are small and not very comfortable to use, but they are free. Leave them in drawers or some other handy place for tightening things as they inevitably loosen. I’m tempted to drill a few strategically placed holes in a few items to hold a wrench.

Or maybe “Should Be A Critical Element…” Because American business by and large doesn’t really care about security very much.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier we learn that the Indians are pushing to get the encryption keys to RIM’s BlackBerry system. What this means is that the messages sent to BlackBerrys in the field could be decrypted by the Indian government. Strangely, only non-corporate users are at risk for now.

How long do you think it will be before other governments get the keys in exactly the same way as the Indians did? How long do you think it will be before a corporate user is thought to be enough of a security concern that even corporate users must turn over keys?

The reason why this is significant for the BlackBerry vs iPhone situation is that the iPhone works differently. It doesn’t pass all messages through a server. It behaves like a computer connected to the internet, with a regular email client. So, as soon as someone is allowed to create an email client with encryption capabilities we will have secure mobile email. Apple has released the iPhone SDK, and is expected to unveil applications along with an improved version of the iPhone in June. It might even happen that Apple builds encryption into the mail client themselves.

The problem for RIM is that there is no way to do full decryption on the BlackBerry without doing it on their server, at least with their current software. Creating this after making deals with governments to provide access will be impossible.

So, if you believe in having privacy, and you conduct business overseas, it looks like BlackBerry isn’t the best choice.

Now that we live in a new, larger, house my wife and I get to do something we’ve wanted to do since we got together:Throw parties!

We had a small one around the time of Susan’s birthday, and it went fairly well. So we decided to throw one for Cinco de Mayo. At the same time, Susan decided to try evite.com, an online invitation management site. Being an avid scrapbooker, normally she will spend a lot of time hand crafting paper invitations, but the problem with them is getting people to RSVP. We thought the online system would make it a bit easier for people.

The party is tomorrow, and out of the original 31 invitations, 26 looked at the invitation. The system tells you when an invitation was viewed. Out of those 26, 24 gave an answer of yes, no or maybe. We have 11 yes, 5 maybe, and 8 no.

We invited a lot of folks we don’t know especially well, and people who live quite far away so I’m not surprised at the response rate. What is interesting to me is the 5 people who never looked at the invitation. Did it end up in a spam folder? I had one guest whose invitation did end up there. That’s the problem with the people who show up as non-views. You don’t know whether they got it or not, and are stuck with calling to ask. I suppose there’s no real way around this, though.

Otherwise the system works pretty well. It sends out reminders, and it provides a nice way to update everyone with a single message - handy in case of changes. It also provides really nice functionality for people to say how many they’re bringing, and to allow them to invite their own guests if you want. Since you need only an email address, it’s also very easy to add people.

Still, there are a few things that need improvement:

1. When you invite a couple, you can have four or more email addresses between work and home for each spouse. These days you don’t know who checks what when, or what gets filtered where. It would be nice to be able to tie multiple emails to one invitation so that when they respond for one email address they’re responding to all of them.
2. A “what to bring” function would be nice - lots of people offer to bring stuff, and a separate area where people could list what they’re bringing would be nice. This would prevent, say, everyone bringing the same side dish out of ignorance.
3. Adjustable settings for who gets reminders and how often would be nice. We all know people who need more prodding than others ;-)
4. Adjustable party info by group. Say, you’ve got an event where you’ve got family coming over to open gifts at 2, but regular guests are invited for dinner at 5. There’s no way to do that.

Overall I like the system and I’m already itching to throw another party to play with it!