In an effort to help our fledgling economy, I’ll be posting lists of items that I think are great buys on the Internet. Many of these items (I hope) will make great gifts for your friends and families as well. My first list is related to the growing trend to make your home or office wireless! Here are my quick picks for 802.11b/g equipment that you can easily setup:

SMC Elite Connect Universal High Power Wireless PC Card
Price: $72.90
This neat PC card installs easily into your laptop and gives you *boosted* range for Wifi connections, including 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g. You’ll consume more battery power, but this is a great card to have handy in those situations where you need to grab a distant Wifi signal. This card has been a life-saver for me on several occasions, especially when I present at conferences.

D-Link Wireless Cable/DSL Router 4-Port Switch
Price: $58.99, after mail-in rebate: $34.99
If you have a cable or DSL modem at your home or office and haven’t shared the connection with an existing router and you want to eventually upgrade to wireless connectivity, this unit is a steal. It currently has a $25 mail-in rebate, so if you buy this at Buy.com, you’ll be paying about $34 for it. I thought this was such a great deal that I bought two! (Note that the rebate is only good for 1 unit.)

SMC Barricade g High-Powered 2.4GHz 54Mbps Wireless Router
Price: $80.07, after mail-in rebate: $55.07
This offering is pretty much the same as the D-Link router, but it offers a great range with the wireless coverage. I ordered this one in hopes that it will outperform my current Linksys WRTG54. Even in our 2-bedroom apartment, I lose connection to the Linksys router when I’m in the living room. With the extra signal boost in this unit, you should be able to increase the range of your coverage in your work environment.

Netgear Wireless Travel Router
Price: $78.88, after mail-in rebate: $58.88
I’ve saved the best for last. If you tend to travel to a lot of hotels that offer wired connections in the rooms, this little router is designed for you. It’s lightweight and has a much smaller form factor than a traditional wireless access point or router. Essentially, you can plug the wired connection in your hotel room to this travel-sized router, and bingo! You’re set up for instant wireless with your laptop. What I really like about this router is that many hotels charge _per machine or device_ for the high-speed Internet connection. With this device, you can get away with only incurring one charge with the hotel while sharing the connection with all of your devices, from your WiFi-enabled Pocket PC to your Centrino laptop or Apple PowerBook.

The second tutorial in my Flash Communication Server MP3 series has now posted. In this tutorial, you learn how to take the code from the first tutorial and make a component called FCSBasicMP3Player.

Today my second article was launched on CommunityMX.com. This article reviews the current limitations of Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 and suggests changes that were not mentioned in the MAX discussion.

This past weekend, November 6th and 7th, I presented Flash sessions at the AIGA* IO Conference in Miami Beach, Florida. You can view my session notes here:

http://www.flashsupport.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=66

You can also read my interview with the AIGA Los Angeles chapter.

*The AIGA is American Institute of Graphic Arts.

At the beginning of October, I became a partner at Community MX (www.communitymx.com) and at midnight eastern time, my first article went live:

http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=EDE10

This article is a free article, so you don’t need a subscription to read it or download the support files. I’ll be regularly contributing articles and tutorials to the site.

Many thanks to Joey Lott, who got me involved with the site. (Joey has been contributing many articles and tutorials to the site for quite some time now.)

On Saturday, Snow, Cap, Nikea and I went to see the production of Blush at UCLA’s Royce Hall. (I’ll make another post about that later.) I saw Ms. Tierney standing with a group of people by the wine bar. She was dressed in black, I think, with nice black frame glasses.