Month: August 2006

  • Explosive Plot Was Ridiculous

    The day they announced that terrorists were planning on blowing up airplanes and were thwarted I devised a wonder conspiracy theory. I love making up conspiracy theories but I don’t take them seriously regardless of how plausible they sound. (I have to link to this amateur video of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center because I opened it in a tab while looking for reopen911.org so all I was getting was sound and I thought I had opened porn…try it. Close your eyes and see if you don’t find yourself turning the speakers down!)

    Anyhow, this computer security specialist says the liquid explosive plot was implausible. Think about how much fuel the airlines will save by the reduced weight of not carrying bottled milk, water and shampoo!

  • Woot-Off today!

    If you don’t know what a Woot-Off is then you probably don’t know what Woot is. Woot is one of those wonderful ideas that makes you slap your forehead and cry out, "why didn’t I think of that!" Woot is associated with Overstock.com and releases 1 product Monday through Friday at 12am Central time (1am Eastern). The product is available in a limited number and often sells out in the first hour. The product is almost always significantly cheaper than anything you find on Froogle.

    A Woot-Off is basically a chance for Woot to clean out their warehouse.

    Woot-Off Light…a short term frenzied mutation of our product posting procedure. In Woot-Off mode, a new product is launched immediately after the sellout of the previous deal. There is a half-Woot-life of 12 hours maximum on any product within a Woot-Off that does not sell out. The number of Woot-Off items, sequence, and quantity will not be announced. When Woot-Off mode is over, the orange lights will disappear and our normal schedule will resume. Depending on its success, this may be a mode we would go into once or twice a month for a relatively short duration of time (24-72 hours generally.) [Source]

    I have purchased twice through Woot and been thrilled each time. Both the products are regularly used and were fantastic bargins. I wish we weren’t in tight budget mode or I would buy my wife the Bluetooth iPod headphones right now. My other favorite bargin hunting site is Slickdeals.net which reports coupon and rebate combinations that often result in wonderful deals or free products. It’s sister site is Slickfillers.net which helps you find low dollar items to push an Amazon order over the $25 mark to gain free shipping.

  • August Challenge – Getting Things Done

    1and1 Webhosting

    I highly recommend my web host. The way it reports statistics in the user control panel is a little weak. I have full access to the server logs and could process them through Webtrends for detailed reporting but it should be easier. I have been procrastinating on installing PhpMyVisites for my wife. Little procrastinations hang over your head and become huge burdens. I finally have a nice statistics report package in place for my wife to monitor her sites!

    Can you meet The August Challenge?

  • Olga Goes Down

    On July 15 I said it was coming. Tom Maszerowski shows us it is here!

    OLGA.net, The On-Line Guitar Archive has been served a take-down notice from the NMPA and MPA (whatever the hell they are) referencing the DMCA as grounds. OLGA’s crime: making text files with the chords of songs available for download. How this violates the DMCA beats me. [Source]

    For those that have have never visited OLGA, it has been around for ages and is an incredible resource for aspiring musicians. For all practical purposes, it is an education site more than anything else. Regular people interpret, not copy, songs showing the guitar chord changes, riffs and lyrics. The site has inspired me to buy CDs by the artists so that I had the actual music to play along as I learned the song.

    This is an atrocity in the name of a lawyer pocketing some dough because the idea that OLGA deprives any artist of revenue is ridiculous. OLGA is a easy target to set a legal precedence in order to tackle the sites that actually make a profit from selling lyrics online.

    ogla offline due to legal takedown notice

  • LOST nears and so do the spoilers

    Hello LOST fans! If this site is to be believed, they have juicy spoilers! So, if you don’t want to see what is coming in Season 3, do not click this link.

  • Mac Converts

    I want a Macbook Pro! Microsoft likes them and so does this guy.

  • The USA Does Not Do World’s Fairs Anymore

    There was a World’s Fair in New Orleans in 1984. That was the last US participation. In 2002, the USA had its membership in the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE – the sanctioning body of the World’s Fair) withdrawn due to non-allocation of funds by Congress. Can you say war funding? The US quietly becomes more egocentric and disconnected from the world. I know I as a citizen did not realize until today that we, as a country, no longer participate in the World’s Fair which dates back to 1851. Way to be a world leader!

    Look for further discussion at Atomic Tumor.

  • A new hobby? Parkour

    Me thinks I have to try Parkour aka PK.

    Parkour (often abbreviated PK) is a physical discipline of French origin in which participants attempt to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping, vaulting and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The obstacles can be anything in one’s environment, so parkour is often practiced in urban areas because of many suitable public structures, such as buildings, rails, and walls. [Source]

    See also: A much longer description of Parkour. Wikipedia also has a detailed explanation.

  • What is up Google’s sleeve? Photo searches?

    Google, which just launched its free Wifi wireless Internet service in Mountain View but denies plans to create a national free Wifi network, has purchased a photo recognition company.

    We’ve been working to make Picasa (Google’s free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we’ve found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google. [Source]

    This means that in the future Picasa will not only search your harddrive for pictures but will classify them for you. Perhaps it will recognize all the pictures with granny in them and automatically label them "grandmother" and so forth.

    In other Google news, they have released to beta the first major revamp of Blogger since its aquisition from Pyra Labs in 2003. (oops. That article is from May 10, 2004 Thank you Jonathan Hickman for point it out.) I still hate blogger and advise against using their service due to poor business practices. I was burned by Blogger and lost much writing and advise that you blog using WordPress on a hosted solution. I will happily help anyone setup their very own WordPress blog.

    India has begun blocking Blogger and others such as Typepad. India following in China’s footsteps?

    Update: The striked reference above may have been a typo in the date. C|Net has the same information with an August 15, 2006 publishing date. So, strike the strike. See also Update aims for friendlier Blogger (which they won’t achieve unless they have fixed their customer service issues). From the horse’s mouth at Blogger Buzz with an August 14, 2006 publishing date.

  • Abstinence education in place of Sex education won’t work

    Just say no! to naive school boards that try to do away with sex education in favor of abstinence education.

    An Ohio school board is expanding sex education following the revelation that 13 percent of one high school’s female students were pregnant last year.

    There were 490 female students at Timken High School in 2005, and 65 were pregnant, WEWS-TV in Cleveland reported. [Source]

    I wonder how many guys were involved in this?!

    Oh, the school board’s response in Ohio?

    …the new curriculum moves beyond the "Just Say No" approach…

    No kidding!

  • IP Tools

    I frequently use DNS Stuff and DNS Report. You can also use Sam Spade for things like finding out who owns your ip address.

  • Test your speed.

    On August 9 I asked How fast are you? C|Net brings a new speed test service to our attention. Speedtest.net uses a snazzy graphical interface and records results. Other than making it look like the icon of the person is taking a whiz on the servers, the interface really brings this one home. I question the accuracy as it is the first service to truly rank my connection at the 6.5Mbit/s that it is supposed to be.

    C|Net also offers their own meter similar to http://www.testmy.net/ and http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/.