Posts from — September 2004

What to Read: The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
What to See: Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow
What to DVD: Star Wars Trilogy
What to Watch: Lost
What to TiVo: Anything on SciFi (too many repeated commercials)
What to iPod: William Orbit’s Strange Cargo

Humorous: Confused senior citizen returns her rental car via airport terminal.

This news story amused me. I’m glad someone finally got punished for being inconsiderate to others. So keep it down when you’re talking on your cell phone. - via TechTV

I was walking behind some idiot this morning talking a loudly as he could on his cell phone. I thought to myself what is so freakin’ important that it couldn’t wait. And why did he have to talk so loud EVERYBODY could hear. I choose to be more discrete and keep my conversations more private.

Zipdecode is a very cool map that shows you where a zip code is on a map. - via TechTV

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is
worth reflecting on the death of a very important person which almost went
unnoticed last week. Larry La Prise, the man who wrote “The Hokey Pokey”,
died peacefully at age 93. The most traumatic part for his family was
getting him into the coffin. They put his left leg in. And then the trouble
started!

Aunty Spam is a good website for keeping up with the goings on in the war against spam. Their latest article about the new law prohibiting email being sent to wireless devices is scary. According to the article, the law will list domains that use wireless devices like cell phones and other wireless devices. They wonder how fast the spammers will take that list and add it to their databases. The CAN-SPAM act has done very little to prevent spam for me. When this new law goes into effect October 18th, how soon will it be when my phone starts ringing with unsolicted email?

My list of programs I load on every one of my new computers:
1. E-Trust EZ Antivirus from Computer Associates. Doesn’t hog system resources, cheap to buy.
2. Open Office - it’s free and works just as well as MS Office.
3. Windows Service Pack 2
4. Firefox - a great alternative to Internet Explorer
5. Spybot Search and Destroy/Ad-Aware
6. Spyware Blaster - prevents spyware from being installed in the first place.
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“RipCast is an application that allows you to connect to various SHOUTcast compatible servers/broadcasters and save the streaming audio to one or more MP3’s.”

I’ve been using it for a few weeks and my music collection is growing like crazy. You’ll need to download the latest version of Winamp but it’s no problem, it’s one of the best MP3 players for Windows out there. The shareware version is limited so I decided to purchase a copy, it was well worth the price.

I turn on the app before I go to bed and during the night it will stream and download MP3 files automatically. If you know SHOUTcast, there are hundreds of radio stations from which to choose. Pick your favorite genre, set it and forget it. When you wake up, you’ll literally have a hundred MP3’s waiting for you. According to the site, it’s legal just like recording a TV show is legal as long as it’s for personal use.

Now you have the chance to find new artists and music that you wouldn’t have normally found through other mainstream connections. I’m ready to vote this app my favorite so far this year.

Thanks for this link, Steve.

David Letterman’s No. 1 way for CBS to improve its image:
- “Oh, I dunno, stop making up crap.” (via Buzzmachine)

“A visual history of spam (and virus) email.” And I thought I got a lot of that crap.

From T-Shirt humor:

Tricks of the Trade from the Morning News shows how various professions have clever occupational secrets. The reporter asked readers to send in secrets from their jobs and he compiled them in this fun list.

I began to wonder what tricks I do with my job. Like the Desktop Support person in the list, I have acronyms for various things. “Error ID-10-T” is one we’ve all been using for years. “FGI” (F-ing Google-It) is a new one that I’d like to use with certain people. Wired magazine has their monthly Jargon Watch list that’s a good source of offbeat words to use in the workplace.

Another trick is when people ask you to fix their home computer, I often act like I don’t know the answer. It’s a tricky maneuver since I don’t want to jeopardize my credibility. With practice, I’ve become quite good at pretending not to know a thing about what’s going on with someone’s home computer; while proficiently fixing very similar problems at work - where I get paid to do it.

The things Google knows about you. And this is just what they are telling us.

Here is an awesome flash movie with great music. It’s worth the wait while the animation loads.

“Actual” On-Star service call transcripts.

Speaking of Google. Let me know if you would like a Gmail invite. I have a few left.

I finally had some time this past weekend to update the design of the site. It’s nothing huge but there are a few new things. Here are some of the updates:
1. The Moblog shows the latest image taken from my camera phone. Textamerica is hosting the image files.
2. The Sidebar features quick snippets about items I run across. It’s not working yet.
3. The archives are on a separate page. Not posted yet either.
4. I’m using Blogrolling to handle my favorite links.

Let me know what you think.
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