Category — Internet

There are loads of very useful Web 2.0 pages available on the internet. Here are the sites I use regularly:

Jott - call Jott and it will transcribe your voicemail into an email. So don’t type to send a text message, just use Jott. If you want to send an entry to your blog, call Jott and it will do it for you.
Remember The Milk - a very handy online To Do manager. You can even send a Jott to RTM to add an item to your to do list.

Grand Central - give people your Grand Central phone number and your cell, house and office phone all ring simultaneously. When you sign up, ou are assigned a local phone number with the usual features like voice mail and caller ID. Right now its in beta and its free.

Page Once - from their site: “simply select your personal accounts from social networking, email and travel to entertainment, banking, credit cards and add them to your personal page.”

Mint - “the free, automatic online way to manage your money.”

Stuffsafe - online home inventory.

Like everyone else, I get a huge amount of email. Many of these messages have signature files at the bottom. Most of the time they are simple one or two line paragraphs that include the person’s name and phone number.

Every once in a while I’ll get one with a famous quote or clever saying. These are nice but some senders feel the need to add paragraphs of information including their email address (I know what it is because you just sent me an email), fax number, home address, names of their children and a bunch of useless data.

In the early days of email, signature files (and .plan files) in the Unix environment were unique and fun. Now they are becoming increasingly annoying.

Some emailers with too much time on their hands, create these elaborate signature files with animated GIF files that couldn’t be more irritating. I’m sure these people think they’re being clever but these signature files are about as tacky as pink flamingo or roaming gnome lawn ornaments.

Have you seen the ones with the name in a tacky neon green 72pt script font that’s barely legible but nonetheless extremely gaudy? How about the ones where an image is pasted into the signature box and stretched out of proportion making it blurry and illigible.

My philosophy for email: keep it short and simple. Don’t waste bandwith on stupid signature files that take up more disk space than the message itself. And get to the point with your message too, I won’t sift through a bunch of dribble just to get to your one line of useful information. You’ll be wasting your time emailing me such crap as I won’t read it.

And please no animated GIF’s of hopping bunnies in your SIG file.

For some good examples of annoying signature files, visit The Gallery of Annoying Email Signatures.

Lord of the Rings is coming to DVD next week. But there is another version, the extended version with 30 minutes of extra footage, coming November 12th. You may consider waiting for the longer version. That’s what I’m going to do.

If you are broke, don’t give me financial advice. If you are overweight, don’t advise me how to diet. If you’ve been involved in multiple car accidents and have received numerous tickets, don’t tell me how to drive. But here’s my advice: shut up.

Close your mouth while you are sitting there. It makes you look stupid, you mouthbreather.

Mailwasher manages your mail BEFORE it arrives in your inbox. If spam does get through, you have the option of bouncing back to the sender. I like it. It doesn’t work with any web-based mail like Yahoo! or Hotmail.

I don’t know anyone who likes spam. Then why are these scumbags permitted to clog our inboxes with this garbage. It should be a federal crime to be a spammer.

If I tell you how to pronounce Sirius then BELIEVE ME. Just because you have trouble formulating sentences doesn’t mean that I do. I have been an amateur astronomer for a long time. Everybody in astronomy knows how to pronounce the name of the North star (or Dog Star), Sirius. You don’t have to confirm what I told you with someone else. Just read the word, carefully. Sound it out…That’s good. Thank you.

Several parody sites exist on the web. My all-time favorite is The Onion. But have you also tried Satirewire or The Drudge Report? Then there’s Landover Baptist, a site that pokes fun at the religious community and I’m sure offends a whole lot of people.

Did you hear about that asteroid due to hit the earth in 17 years? Now they are saying it will miss us. But they don’t rule out future collisions. That’s very scary.

If you want to “hear” what Frontsideback sounds like, go to Webplayer. This site creates music from some algorithm found in the code of your web page. The sound created from FSB’s code is nice and soothing. It makes “good music to watch URL’s by.”

I’ve been doing a lot of photo-surfing at Photo.net. Great site, lots to offer, worth a look.

Noah Grey (of Greymatter blogging tool fame) has a very good photo site. I am very impressed with his work each time I visit the site.

Balloon Festival.

We went to a hot air balloon festival on Saturday. More about it later when I get the pictures developed. I forgot to take my digital camera so we have to wait until the film is developed. How quaint. We are pictured on the Official 2002 Hot Air Jubilee web site. The picture shows us relaxing next to the trailer waiting for the event to begin.

The Gallery isn’t working. Several error messages have begun to pop up lately and now its preventing me from uploading any images. From a quick glance at the Gallery support page, I may need to upgrade to a newer version. I’ll investigate.

We didn’t do much yesterday, didn’t even leave the house all day. Sometime its nice to putz around and not go anywhere. When it got dark, I setup a blanket in the backyard. We had a nighttime picnic to watch the fireworks in the neighborhood. There was quite a show this year, bigger and better than before.

Go here for 304 Photoshop 6 tips. Even if you don’t have version 6, I think you’ll find it very useful.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine listed their “50 most useful sites” this month. Among their choices are: speedtrap.com (avoid speed traps), mapblast.com (better maps than mapquest), askmehelpdesk.com (get expert advice) and Daypop.com (track news stories).

Go to Yahoo Internet Life to see all the winners. Be sure to look up their featured Useless sites while you are there.

There’s a fresh new trailer out for Star Trek: Nemesis.

It takes big bucks to beam up Kirk’s chair.

You’ve heard of Epinions where you can find reviews of various products submitted by visitors to their website. I routinely check Epinions if I’m buying a higher priced product. But sometimes its nice to hear the reviews of experts before you buy something. Consumer Search rounds up all the expert reviews and gives its recommendation. Very cool and worthwhile if you are buying something.

I found out the other day there is medical condition named after me. It’s nothing exciting but my last name is in the medical books. Go to WhoNamedIt.com and find out if you have a disease named after you.

Remember I had a link to the song that’s played during the 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse commercial? I found it here. This site lists all the songs for loads of commercials. After you find your favorite song, take a quick trip to Limewire to download a copy.

I never thought I would say this. I really like the new Eminem song. Often he goes way too far but I still respect him as a good talent. Go to his website (which is very slick) and check the songs and videos for yourself. I was surprised he allows people to listen and view his music that easily. I guess he’s got the right idea about that too. Music should be free or at the least cost a whole lot less. I could go on and on…

My IE bookmarks are a total mess. What do you use to organize your favorite sites?

We Love Free Stuff is a site that contains links to other sites where you can get all kinds of free stuff. We’ll all like that, don’t we?

I met Lil Bow Wow and Russell Simmons again last Friday. There were in the office for a meeting with one of the ad agencies. Cool.

Need a logo? Go here for some great ideas.

Pam and I have become somewhat addicted to “Whose Line is it Anyway?” Have you seen this show? These actors doing these improvisations are geniuses. Do yourself a favor and tune in to the funniest show on television.

The sprinkler guy came and fixed our sprinklers. When we went to turn them on for the season, something broke. An easy call to Don, The Sprinkler Guy was all I needed to get it repaired within a week. It’s funny that our neighbors were feverishly watering their lawns the entire time our sprinklers were broken. Our grass still looked just as good as theirs. It makes me wonder if we have to water as much as we do.

Mike D. mentioned the Turbo Encapulator the other day. Go to Acme Vaporware for a similar experience. Here’s a sample:

“Fulcrum and gratuitous packaging. Dataguards are about 2 angstroms per displacementand ,” said Michael, CEO of Frontsideback. Michael added, “more violent fulcrum ring and the 698995980 UAA Tester prohibited by our own John Stugelmeyer. While designed for replacing old or damaged Torpovapor bivalve chamber - is available on packets of some new kind of the time, almost …the rest hasn’t to date reached a level of conceptual verbalization.”

Big News! My site was awarded the prestigious Golden Web award. I would like to thank the academy, my family and all those who made this site possible. Thank you.

Kartoo is a cool graphical search engine.

If you like to collect fonts, then go to Blambot! This site has loads of comic book fonts free for you to download. I plan on using one of them to create a new FSB logo for the top of my page.

I have a terrible cold that I can’t shake. It started when I was down in Texas and got worse when I got back home. I haven’t been sick in many years. I can’t remember the last time I had a cold. I don’t think that I’ve ever had the flu. I’ll be better soon. Thanks for caring.

I am not looking forward to work tomorrow. Besides any work that has piled up, I will have to tell the “funeral story” over and over during the day. I guess I don’t mind that much. People are only asking because they care.