http://www.ComputerBob.com/journal_archive/2006/06.php .
.
.
If you're thinking of buying some new PC hardware, electronics, or service, or if you're like me and just like to know what's out there, you'll probably enjoy reading about The 100 Best Products of the Year.
I suggest that you don't leave your child at this guy's daycare center.
This video shows examples of several things that I wouldn't choose to do even if I could do them. Still, I'm very impressed with both the bikes and the riders.
His friends can't figure out why Jim looks different than they remember.
My wife and I saw this woman do her "Stupid Human Trick" on Late Night with David Letterman many years ago. Once you see
what she can do, you'll remember her from now on, too.
Two weeks ago, I told you about the upcoming new "Dapper Drake" release of Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux, and where to order CDs of them for free. Dapper Drake was released yesterday, and a quick Google search shows that it's getting a lot of positive feedback, including this article that introduces it and these reactions to the article. I ordered my free CD of Kubuntu a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to trying it out when it arrives, after I read the 25+ Tips to Get Started with Dapper and these comments about those tips. And don't forget -- each free CD functions as a "Live CD" that lets you run Linux on your PC without installing anything onto your hard drive, and as an "install CD," if you choose to permanently install Ubuntu or Kubuntu.
Even though our phone number is on the U.S. National Do Not Call List, my wife and I still occasionally receive calls from telemarketers. I always ask them their name and what company they are calling for, inform them (by name) that our phone number is on the National Do Not Call List, ask them to remove us from their database, and remind them that they could be liable for a huge fine if they ever call again. If they talk non-stop and don't even give me a chance to speak, then I waste as much of their time as possible. While they're talking, I quietly set the phone down and walk away. A few minutes later, I check back to see if they're still there. Here are some funny things to say to telemarketers, and here are even more.
The next time you make a stupid mistake, take heart in the fact that at least you weren't responsible for any of The Worst: Stupid Engineering Mistakes.
This video's description says that it's about "How a resonance has his invluence on rice." I'm not a scientist, but I suspect that the interesting patterns have nothing to do with the fact that they used rice, and everything to do with the resonance of the metal plate that the rice is sitting on. In other words, I think they would have gotten the exact same results if they had used sand, metal shavings, salt, or any other granualar material. Either way, the visual effects are interesting to see.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy 20 minutes of comedy from
Louis Ramey
It's currently kind of pricey, but it's still pretty impressive that someone has squeezed a desktop computer down to fit into a network wall port.
I don't know her at all, but I'm very proud of Judith Kallos.
Here's a video of William Shatner -- Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek TV show -- performing the Elton John song, Rocket Man. Though it lasts nearly 5 minutes, I could only stand to watch the first 2 minutes and 11 seconds. I dare you to try to watch more than that.
Juggling is one of those talents that we've all seen so much of that it takes a lot to make us say, "Wow!" I think I've only featured 2 jugglers here so far: the guy who juggled to the music of the Beatle's Abbey Road flip-side, and the guy who played a huge piano keyboard by bouncing balls off of it. Well, here's a guy who juggles up to 7 balls at a time
inside a clear inverted cone.
If you have a digital camera, handheld computer, MP3 player, or other electronic device that takes CompactFlash memory cards, do yourself a big favor and get a SanDisk 512MB CompactFlash Memory Card from Best Buy today, before they're all gone. Why? Because they normally cost $44.99 (U.S.D), but right now, you can buy one on sale for only $19.99, plus there's a $15 mail-in rebate, so your final price is just $4.99. If you order it online, you can pick it up at your local Best Buy store, or Best Buy will ship it to you for free. I'm going to try to get one for my digital camera, which currently only has a 32MB CompactFlash memory card. UPDATE: The $19.99 sale price must have been a one-day sale, because Best Buy changed the price back to $44.99 after I told you about it. You can still get the $15 mail-in rebate, which lowers the final price to $29.99 -- but that's way more than the $4.99 final price that it was.
If you're wondering what to do during your upcoming vacation, here are over 325 TV shows and over 500 full-length cartoons that you can watch online.
Here's a a good example of how a commercial that is targeted to one audience can have a totally different effect on a different audience. It's a Toyota commercial that illustrates how Toyotas have the Human Touch. I'm assuming that the target audience (in Japan?) found it to be very comforting. I found it to be really creepy.
When I was a kid, I thought the Monty Python comedy troupe's antics were hilarious, even though I often couldn't understand their exaggerated British accents. Here's their classic
Dead Parrot sketch, which still holds up after all these years.
Have you ever gone for a walk, stepped into some quicksand, sank below the surface, and died? I didn't think so. Here's why.
What would it take to rebuild the Titanic? According to a guy who's doing it, it will take about 5,200,000 wooden matchsticks.
How To Act Convincingly appears to have some good advice, but after watching its funny demonstration videos, I think you'll agree that it should be called "How to Over-Act Un-Convincingly."
Every summer from age 12-15, I caddied at a few local golf courses. I even have one shoulder lower than the other to prove it. If they had given out a trophy for the worst caddy, I would have won it hands-down. I didn't know a thing about golf, or which club to recommend; I never saw where my golfer's golf ball went; and I never laughed at their dirty jokes. At one course, I earned $4 (U.S.D) for 18 holes, and the golf course kept $1 of that, leaving me with $3 for 5 1/2 hours of work. Needless to say, those experiences killed any interest in golf I might have ever developed. Still, here's a video of an amazing, delayed-action hole in one.
Most parents try to save up to pay for their child's college education. I have a feeling that
this dad will be spending that money on his son's psychotherapy.
If you spend much time reading blogs or journals like this one, you've probably seen them many, many times. If you write your own blog, you may even be guilty of committing some of them. They're the 10 flagrant grammar mistakes that make you look stupid.
You've seen the beautiful sunset photos in my Florida Photos section. Now you can learn How to Photograph Sunrises and Sunsets.
My cousin Wayne has the worst allergies of anyone I've ever met. I think that means that his immune system is always overworking like crazy. Scientists should study him to find ways to increase the immune systems of people who have HIV and AIDS. If you suffer from allergies, here's some advice on how to get rid of a stuffed or running nose without using drugs.
It would've been a lot easier -- and a lot safer -- if
this guy had just asked them to turn off the automatic doors for a minute.
If you're thinking of registering a new domain name, either for your own Web site or for a client, you'll need to find a name that hasn't already been taken. For example, ComputerBob.com was actually my third choice, because ComputerGuy.com and ComputerMan.com were already taken at the time. In the past, it's always been a tedious process to find a new domain name, because you had to go to a domain registrar's site, type a chosen-name.com into their search form, and then wait to see if that name was available. Then try the name again with a different generic top-level domain (e.g., chosen-name.net). Then again, with .info or .biz at the end. You had to repeat that process with every name that you thought of, hoping to find one that wasn't already taken. The good news is that NameWidget Domain Searcher makes it really fast and easy to check the availability of domain names. Just start typing any domain name and NameWidget will instantly list that name with several different generic top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info), showing you which ones are taken and which are available. In case you're wondering, all of the ComputerGuy and ComputerMan domain names are taken, but ComputerBob.info is still available.
I looked all through the extensive, alphabetized List of Psychic Abilities & Forms of Prophesy, but I couldn't find any information about my psychic power. Am I the only one who has ever had this amazing gift?
I don't read German, but apparently this is either a diagram of the inner workings of a Wankel engine, or the most impressive parade route I've ever seen.
If you like clean, funny comics, The PBF Archive is for you.
This video that shows what I like to do in my spare time. You guessed it -- what I like to do is find interesting videos to show you.
My free Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux CDs haven't arrived yet, so I haven't had a chance to try them out, but from everything I've read about them, I'm hopeful that one or the other may eventually replace -- or dual-boot with -- Windows on my main PC. I tried downloading Kubuntu for free a couple of weeks ago, but my download was corrupt and took almost 10 minutes to boot up, so I shut it down. If you're trying to decide whether to try out Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux, here are a few things that may help you. Six Things You Didn't Know About Linux: A Beginners' Guide answers several of the questions that most people have about Linux, while Linux? Windows? Huh? will probably answer several more general questions you have about Linux. After you read those, take a look at EasyUbuntu, "an easy to use script that gives the Ubuntu user the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks that are not found in the base distribution - all with a few clicks of your mouse."
It's an ancient theme -- man rebelling against his creator. In this clever and funny video, an animated man rebels against his animator.
Are you old enough to remember the pre-Leno days when Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show? Are you old enough to remember straight-laced, "just the facts, Ma'am," Jack Webb from the old Dragnet police drama? I bet it took a lot of rehearsal (and self-control) for Johnny and Jack to perfect this discussion of an ever-more-complicated tongue-twister of a crime.
For decades, John Cleese has been a genius of straight-faced silliness. Here he stars in the famous Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks skit.
If you're one of the millions of people who use the free, award-winning Firefox Web browser, and you have your own Web site, do yourself a favor and install the HTML Validator Firefox extension. "HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page." I use HTML Validator because it almost instantly validates my Web pages to my choice of several W3C and accessibility standards. Plus, it also shows me what's wrong with everyone else's pages, which can be very educational.
Sometimes you can save a boatload of money just by asking for it. For the past few months, I've been thinking about how I could possibly save my aunt, who lives an hour away, some money on her Internet connection. She uses Roadrunner's fastest broadband service, in a combo package with her digital cable TV service. Since she only uses the Internet to check her email and browse the Web, I wondered how much she could save if she switched to Roadrunner's slowest broadband service. Thursday, while I was at her house, I called her cable provider to ask them. In response to my question, the Roadrunner customer service woman started rattling off a list of pricing specials that Roadrunner is offering right now, on all the services that my aunt uses. Fifteen dollars per month savings for 12 months on one of the services that she uses. Fifteen dollars per month savings for 6 months on another service that she uses. More than $3 per month savings for 12 months on another service that she uses. A few minutes later, I had saved my aunt more than $37 dollars per month for the next 6 months, and at least $22 per month for the following 6 months after that -- while keeping her television and Internet services exactly the same as they are now. All because of that one phone call, my aunt will save at least $354 (U.S.D) on her cable TV/broadband bill over the next 12 months. She could save even more if she calls her cable TV company when the one 6-month special price expires, because if they're offering another special price on that same service at that time, they'll give her that special price, but only if she calls and asks them for it. Oh, and it turned out that if she had switched to Roadrunner's cheapest, slowest broadband service, her bill would have been $2 more per month than her new, lower bill, because she would've had to buy each of her individual television and Internet services separately, instead of in the specially priced combo packages. Amazingly, if I hadn't called my aunt's cable provider, they wouldn't have given her any special pricing. Have you talked to your cable TV/broadband provider lately?
Here's an old, old joke: Why didn't the skeleton dance? Because he didn't have the guts. Here's a skeleton who has the guts and talent to dance pretty well. I wonder what he does with that microphone?
My first reaction was that I thought this Pepsi commercial was pretty funny. A second later, I had second thoughts. In a world full of disrespect and win-at-all-costs mentality, I think it's kind of sad that this commercial glorifies the idea of a guy happily taking advantage of his opponents' deeply ingrained cultural custom of respect in order to humiliate them. That makes me wonder if Asians think that it's a funny commercial.
I've often thought that many of the photos in my Florida Photos section would be perfect subjects for inspirational or motivational posters. Now,
Motivator will let me make my own mini-posters out of any image I choose, using any text I choose. It only took a minute to create my first one, using a photo that I took of my buddy, James, the real Easy Rider, on the tricked-out trike with a La-Z-Boy seat that he built a few years ago.
As I mentioned on May 31, 2006, we're a few months from the release of Microsoft's long-awaited Vista operating system, and Microsoft is doing everything it can to promote its new OS, including badmouthing the security of its older operating systems. Wouldn't you know it that Microsoft has just discovered a critical vulnerability in Windows 98, 98 SE and ME that "it cannot fix." Was the convenient timing of that discovery just a coincidence? If you're like me -- thinking about switching from Windows to a free version of Linux -- you should proabably read Basic Things to Know When Switching to a Linux Desktop.
According to Cape Cod Today, a new U.S. Department of Energy report says that "there is as much wind power potential (900,000 megawatts) off our coasts as the current capacity of all power plants in the United States combined." That's good news only if the U.S. federal government takes action to utilize that wind power. Unfortunately, all of that wind coming in from off-shore will probably be neutralized by all of the wind blowing out of Washington, D.C.
The 2006 FIFA World Cup soccer championship competition has begun. Though it's arguably the most physically demanding sport, soccer just doesn't hold my attention. On the other hand, I like
these funny soccer mistakes and
these "best moments" in soccer.
I can hardly believe our good fortune. My wife received a letter from PEOPLE magazine yesterday, with a very special offer. Apparently, PEOPLE magazine does a lot more than just build up the careers of dubious talents and then leech off of their reflected glory. The letter says, "PEOPLE. Once a week for 4 weeks. The perfect therapy for your mind, heart, and soul... The quiet moments you spend with PEOPLE are yours to savor all month long. For best results, read all 4 of your FREE issues. Then, consider making PEOPLE a part of your regular routine. Your heart and soul will reap the benefits."
Cousin Rita sent me this one. A credit union hired a security company to evaluate its security. Despite the fact that the credit union's employees knew that they and their security systems would be put to the test, the security company easily got into the credit union's computers. How? By counting on the stupidity of the credit union's employees. Would you have passed the security company's test?
Are you amazed at these Amazing Animal Facts?
Here's an amazing animal: A cat who repeatedly chased a black bear up a tree.
Here's a video to remind you of
the awkwardness of young love.
I wonder: Why are so many car wrecks caused by reckless drivers?
Here's an old article with some timely advice for anyone who has a Web site, or who is thinking of starting one: Designing your website: Knowing what not to include is important.
Here is yet another reason why I'm hoping to find a free version of Linux to replace Windows on my main PC as soon as possible. Microsoft has just admitted that the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy feature in every copy of Windows XP has has been acting like spyware -- "phoning home" to Redmond every day since July, 2005, without users' knowledge or permission.
I've always been fascinated by the commercials for that high-tech, ultra-expensive Dyson vacuum cleaner that "doesn't lose suction." Well, it looks like the truth is that it sucks. Or, more accurately, it doesn't suck, so it sucks.
If you like to see cute kittens, here's one trying to catch the moving objects on a laptop computer's screen.
The World Cup of soccer is going on right now. It's one of the biggest, most popular international sporting events of the year. Here are The Simpsons, cynically showing why most Americans (U.S.) don't care.
This was in Sunday's edition of The St. Petersburg Times. It's so good that I'm adding it to my Favorite Quotes page:
"On the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the BBC produced a documentary about that era. Using the Beatles' song of that summer, All You Need is Love, as a starting point, the producers asked, "Is love all you need?" No, said radical leader Abbie Hoffman, we need justice. It's awareness we need, said poet Allen Ginsberg, because love arises from awareness. LSD guru Timothy Leary said we need much more than love - we need intelligence, precision and an absence of discrimination.
And then they asked the question of (former Beatle) George Harrison. He arched his eyebrow, calmly reached for the Bible on his end table and read this, from Apostle Paul's letter to the Corinthians: 'Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking... It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.'
Then Harrison closed the Bible, looked in the camera and said, "We stand by our story."
If you've noticed that Windows XP doesn't seem to run as fast as it used to, some of that slowness may be due to things that you've installed over time, that are running all of the time and using your computer's memory and CPU cycles. You might want to look in the Windows Tray (down by the clock) and decide whether you can safely disable any of those items. Afterward, if you want to optimize WinXP as much as possible, you'll find plenty of ways to do it on the Optimize XP page, along with links to pages that tell how to secure XP, diagnose XP, and much more. All of that should keep you busy for several hours.
If you live for another decade or more, you'll undoubtedly witness the development and usage of many creative new ways to provide for the needs of the world's ever-growing population. Some of them might be on the current list of Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies.
After you read them, you may think that they're great ideas, you may think they're just common sense, or you may think one or more of them are unethical; No matter what you think of them, My Eight Best Negotiation Tips will probably make you think, and they'll give you insight into how the people that you deal with may be thinking.
Way, way back when my wife and I sang for a living, we performed in 427 places in 26 states over a 5-year period. We saw a lot of things, but we rarely had time to stop and enjoy much of it. In fact, we probably wouldn't have had time to use any of the Top 10 Coolest Travel Gadgets. Ah, memories...
Here's a video of what will probably happen to billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump at the exact instant that his pact with the Devil
expires.
Eight Problems That Haven't Changed identifies and describes 8 Web site usability problems that have been brought to Web designers' attention for over a decade, but which still show up on many Web sites. How many of the 8 problems does your site have?
If you disagreed with yesterday's negotiating tips and their basic premise that, in negotiations, you should never make the first offer, see what you think about When to Make the First Offer in Negotiations, which says that making the first offer can give you an advantage.
Some movies are so bad that they're actually good. Other movies are just bad. The same type of thing is true about dogs. Some dogs are so ugly that they're actually cute. Other dogs are just ugly. Take a look at several ugly dogs and then vote for The World's Ugliest Dog.
Here's a Web site that lets you listen to thousands of live broadcast radio stations from all over the world.
The male Lyrebird's complex song is fascinating to hear. Why? Because, to impress its potential mates, it imitates the sounds of many other birds, plus any other sounds that it hears in the jungle. Turn your volume way up for this one.
Speaking of fascinating sounds, here's a video of the late great guitarist, Stevie Ray Vaughn,
effortlessly seducing the blues out of his favorite instrument. You might want to turn your volume back down to normal for this one.
Over the past few months, I've spent countless hours repeatedly searching through all of the Web's most popular video sites, looking for interesting videos to show you. That experience has taught me one very important lesson that could save you a lot of time when you visit those sites: Any video whose description says that it is "hilarious" or "awesome" will be stupid, useless, and not even remotely funny, except possibly to 8-year-old boys.
If you have a Web site, you should pay attention to What Users Hate Most About Web Sites.
If you're like me, you still use an old CRT monitor, while you wait for the quality and prices of LCDs to rival those of CRTs. Well, now it looks like we might be halfway there. There's a new LCD technology that reportedly outperforms CRT technology.
One of my most prized possessions is Grandpa's Watch, a technological marvel of its time. Here's an interesting illustrated story about a man who actually built his own pocket watch, piece by piece, including making all of the gears, screws, and levers by hand. Now that's what I call craftsmanship.
Don't ask me why, but in this nearly 10-minute video, former Beatle and current billionaire Sir Paul McCartney demonstrates how to make mashed potatoes. I can hardly wait to see his 1-hour video on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Wow, it's deja vu again. Microsoft has announced that the upcoming Windows Vista is the most secure operating system in the industry. That's what they said about Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP when they marketed each of those operating systems. Vista might be the most secure version of Windows to date, but I very seriously doubt that anyone except Microsoft thinks that Vista is more secure than every version of Unix, Linux, BSD and MacOS.
Even though you're their customer, paying for their service, that doesn't always make you right. Often, your Web designer knows more about what your company's site needs to succeed than you do.
Have you ever called your company's IT department just to thank them and tell them that everything's working fine? I guarantee they'll always remember you with fondness if you do, because nearly all IT workers feel traumatized by their work.
Here's more evidence to support my theory that most modern art is nothing but a hoax and a joke. An artist submitted a sculpted head on a wooden base to be considered for an art exhibition. Thinking that they were two separate works of art, the judges chose to exhibit the wooden base but not the head.
We've all seen the trick where the magician saws a woman in half. Here's a magician who helps two audience members
pull a woman apart.
If you're a regular reader of this Journal, you've seen me mention Linux several times recently, as I wait for my free CDs of Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux to arrive in the mail. Here's an article that lists several of Linux's apparent advantages over Windows and then asks, Why hasn't Linux made it mainstream on the desktop? Linux fans will tell you that it's only a matter of time, especially now that many Linux distros are very user-friendly.
For awhile when I was a kid, my family subscribed to Popular Science magazine. I still remember looking forward to reading the amazing ideas and seeing the futuristic inventions in each new issue. Now, PS has assembled what I think is a very sensible list of 10 Steps To End America's Fossil-Fuel Addiction.
You've probably heard at least a couple of them, but you may not know the interesting stories behind all of the Top Ten Accidental Discoveries.
Music and Life is a thoughtful and thought-provoking animation about enjoying life's journey.
A few years ago, I created separate HTML files for my Web pages' header, navigation column, and footer, and then used PHP Include statements to add them to each page right before it is served to my site's visitors. The main advantage to that approach is that I can quickly and easily change my entire site's header, navigation column, or footer by simply changing one of those three included files
For that same reason, yesterday, I executed several carefully planned-and-tested "search and replace" operations on this site's files. Now my Web pages' DTD information, shared meta tags, favicon information, stylesheet links, and a special javascript, are all in one HTML file that gets included at the top of every page. Hooray for PHP Includes!
Where will the U.S.'s next Silicon Valley be? Beyond the Valley: 10 Blooming U.S. Cities for Tech will give you some clues.
Are you happy? Here are 9 simple ways to improve your level of happiness. Actually, there are 10 -- if you count the one in my comment at the end of the article.
Here's some video of an interesting Japanese parking garage. If I'm not mistaken, one of the kids that I babysat for eons ago had a garage like that made out of plastic for his toy cars.
I could really use some comedy today. Here is Mr. Bean,
visiting the local swimming pool with
very funny results.
Have you ever wanted to take a cute little teddy bear, pull its head off, plug its headless corpse into your computer, and then save data onto it? Well, now you can!
Here are some tips to help you win the war against telemarketers and junk mail.
Whether or not you're old enough to remember listening to them live, you'll probably enjoy this collection of free old-time radio shows, including comedies, dramas, mysteries, westerns, music, and more.
If you've ever wondered how a chimpanzee would act toward a dog, here's a very short video of one such encounter.
Can you walk on water? It looks like
this guy can. Or can he?
Fred Langa, the author of my favorite PC newsletter, The LangaList, is always coming up with valuable information. His newest article describes Windows XP's No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option. It should be valuable to anyone who's responsible for one or more Windows PCs.
50 ways to become a better designer is an interesting compilation of best practices and good advice from 17 leading Web designers.
My digital camera's maximum resolution is 3.2 megapixels (3.2 million pixels). The best consumer-quality digital cameras are currently around 8 megapixels. Now a company in England has invented a 4 x 4-inch digital image sensor with 111 megapixels -- a new world record.
Here's an amazing car that can pass you out on the highway
and out on the lake.
In the past, one of the reasons that have kept me from replacing Windows with Linux on my main PC was that I couldn't find a version that recognized all of my computer's hardware. I don't think that's a problem any more. Another reason was that there weren't Linux software applications to do all of the tasks that I needed to be able to do. Well, nowdays, most Linux distros come with all kinds of useful free software applications, and you can download thousands more from online software repositories. Here's a year-old table of Linux replacements for Windows software that proves that, even then, the applications gap between the two operating systems was narrowing. Please write and tell me if you find an updated table of Linux applications.
I've worked as a consultant to corporate and educational clients for years, so I can confirm that the 10 Top Goofs Interns Make also apply to consultants.
If you ever need to assume an entirely new identity in a hurry, Fake Name Generator will make up a new one for you. The name that it randomly chose for me was "Michael M. Hammond." Too bad the domain name ComputerMike.com is already taken.
Do you remember the
Magic Eye posters and books that were really popular in the early 1990s? It took me many tries before I was finally able to see one of those 3-D images for the first time. Now I'm going to have to start trying all over again so I can see
this animated one. UPDATE: I can see it. It's swimming to the left, and it moves both its head and tail as it swims, but it's made up of the same millions of colored dots as the background. Please write and tell me if you can see either the shark or the background in a solid color instead of those colored dots.
For years, I've read horror stories about people having all kinds of trouble when they tried to cancel their America Online accounts. One of the latest ones I've seen involves a man who called AOL to cancel his account and had to deal with a customer service representative who insisted that he was trying to help the man by not cancelling his account. Here's a video of that poor man being interviewed by Matt Lauer on WNBC's Today. Then there's the woman whose mother was killed in a car accident. When she called AOL to cancel her mother's account, the customer service representative tried to convince her to keep the account going. When she refused, the rep told her that her (dead) mother would have to call to cancel the account herself. Remember, "Friends Don't Let Friends Use AOL."
SafeFromScams.co.uk provides tons of free expert advice on how to protect yourself from all kinds of scams.
How stupid and reckless does someone have to be to try this extremely dangerous stunt on a city street? After you view this video, imagine how it could have turned out much worse, like a head-on collision with another vehicle, or running over a child playing in its yard. I sure hope that someone gave a copy of this stunt to the police, and another copy of it to the guy's truck insurance company.
Here's another Monty Python skit from the 1970s.
The Argument Skit is even funnier than I remembered. No it isn't. Yes it is! No it isn't. That's not an argument -- simply saying "No it isn't" isn't an argument! Yes it is. No it isn't!
On June 12, 2006, I told you that Microsoft had admitted that, every day since last July, its "Windows Genuine Advantage" anti-piracy software had been "phoning home" to Redmond from every Windows XP computer, without users' knowledge or permission. If you want to keep using XP but you don't want WGA to spy on you anymore, you might want to install a new free utility that blocks WGA from phoning home.
Here's a short but helpful list of basic troubleshooting steps to try when Windows XP gives you serious problems. It's kind of like a first aid manual for XP.
Do you use Windows XP? Do you want to secure it from hackers, viruses, spyware, trojans and other bad things? You should read The Complete FAQ Guide to Securing Windows XP.
My sister-in-law Linda is a librarian. I sent her this video about librarians,
shot like an episode of the TV show, Cops. I wonder if she'll think it's funny.
Over the years, this site has grown from its original 13 pages to about 700 static pages and several hundred dynamic pages. I've grown along with it, by using many different tools and scripts to create it. I started by hand-coding really simple HTML pages, after figuring out the basic HTML tags that I saw in the source code of other sites. I eventually moved on to Microsoft FrontPage. After a couple of years, I graduated to Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. I also tried several free, enhanced HTML editors, but never really liked any of them. About 3 years ago, when I redesigned this site to use XHTML, CSS layout, and PHP-included services, Dreamweaver 4's WYSIWYG mode couldn't display my pages correctly any more. Since then, I've mostly used Dreamweaver's text editor to create my pages and then used its intelligent site synchronization feature to upload them.
I'm happy to have learned countless lessons and picked up countless skills by doing things the hard way over the years. But now, I think this huge site would be easier to manage and would enjoy increased visibility and user participation if I started using the interactive blogging, indexing, and syndication features of a powerful, efficient CMS/blogging tool. That's why I'm taking a good look at WordPress. WordPress one of the most popular, Web standards-compliant, fully supported blogging tools out there. It's also completely free and open source. On top of all that, it's highly recommended by one of the heroes of Web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman. I'm currently trying to figure out how hard it would be to use WordPress for this site's different page layouts (e.g., a 3-column home page with dynamic news headlines and random Florida thumbnails, 2-column content pages with dynamic forum or user ratings pages, 2-column photo gallery pages, the dynamic left navigation column, etc.) I was very pleased to see that the WordPress site provides boatloads of useful information about the extremely impressive product. Unfortunately, it's almost too much information to wade through for someone like me who has very specific "pre-sales" questions about its capabilities. I wish I could sit down with a WordPress expert for awhile and pick their brain (that's an American idiom that means "find out what they know.") If you're a WordPress user, do you think that WordPress would work as the overall CMS for this site? If so, how would you create my site's existing look in WordPress? Would you create one WordPress template for each type of page layout? What would be the easiest way to convert my hundreds of pages of existing articles (currently in XHTML with CSS layout) into WordPress posts while still retaining their original posting dates? Please, have a seat -- I'm listening. Would you like a cold drink?
If you're more than 25 years old, you probably have many fond memories of buying new high-tech gadgets, only to see their prices quickly drop to a fraction of what you had paid for them. Do you remember when we all eagerly awaited the first 4 ppm laser printer that was priced at less than $2000 (U.S.D)? I remember when one company that I consulted for paid $2500 each for its 21" CRT monitors. Here's a list of the Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Past. See how they compare to your current gadgets, both in features and in price.
The Hard Rock Cafe chain is having a hard time providing impressive memorabilia for each of its franchisees. Here's a funny photographic look at the Crisis At Hard Rock.
There aren't very many of them, but they're funny. They're the Winners of the "I Look Like My Dog" Contest.
Would you be scared if you opened a door and suddenly saw
The Rat Monster? I know I would.
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm considering whether or not to convert this entire site to use WordPress. The more I learn about WP, the more I think it just might work for this site. I even figured out that it would be relatively easy to manually paste each of my existing Journal articles into WP and set their WP posting dates back to their original posting dates. Yesterday, I spent several hours reading the online WP documentation and messages in its support forums. I also tried out its admin features at OpenSourceCMS, a great site that lets you try many different types of software, including forums, portals, blogs, image galleries, and much more. I really liked WP's interface and its many powerful features, but we all know "the Devil's in the details," so I want to learn a lot more about WordPress before I decide whether or not to use it.
Hey, the pizza guy is here! It's a very clever idea, but how do they get people to look at it -- stick it on their front door, ring the doorbell, and run away?
In 1995, a 10-year-old boy wrote a "message in a bottle" and threw it into a nearby lake. This past February, he died after a motorcycle accident. This past April, one of his closest friends was at the lake and found the bottle with his message inside.
There's nothing like a dog to make us smile.
Would you be scared if you opened a door and suddenly saw
Al Gore? I know I would.
My research into WordPress continues to be profitable. Yesterday, I found and bookmarked more than 40 good sources of general and specific information about WordPress. Based on what I know now, I've pretty much decided that, instead of converting this entire site to dynamically generated, interactive WordPress documents, I'll probably convert the hundreds of pages of my (currently static, non-interactive) Journal to WordPress posts, while leaving the rest of the site as static documents. Right now, I think that option would give me the best cost/benefits ratio for the amount of work I would have to do versus the benefits of making my Journal more semantically interactive. Then, if I decide that it's worth it to convert other parts of my site to WordPress in the future, I'll be able to modify my Journal's WordPress templates for that purpose.
The more I learn about WordPress, the more I understand that anyone who maintains a blog has to carefully balance interactivity with security. You want users to be able to post comments in your blog, but you don't want spammers to post spam. If you have a blog, I highly recommend that you learn the valuable (and possibly surprising) lessons contained in Interview With a Link Spammer. I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to configure WordPress to minimize any possible spam problems in my Journal.
Can birds "do the moonwalk?" This one can.
I'm thinking that a good way to punish reckless drivers would be to make them stand out on this track while the car "drifts" around them.
Here are some
stars before they were stars. When I watched it, I was struck by how incredibly far apart Susan Sarandon's eyes are, and by what a horrible little monster Britney Spears must have been when she was little.
Google has a pretty extensive Webmaster Help Center, with answers to many questions about how to get Google to index your site -- or stop indexing your site.
When we lived in the Frostbite State, my wife and I kept all of our most important papers in a fire-resistant safe. We sold that safe before we moved to the Sunshine State. Since then, our important papers have been scattered throughout several different folders in a wooden file cabinet. What Belongs in Your Safe Deposit Box will remind us which items to take out of the file cabinet and put into our new fire-resistant lock-box.
The driver who caused this accident must have had a hard time explaining it to his insurance company.
This video shows a 3-dimensional optical illusion. A mask of silent film star Charlie Chaplin's face slowly rotates. As the back side of the mask starts to rotate into view, we can see that it is hollow and concave. But, as soon as the back side's facial features begin to appear, the back side suddenly looks like it's solid instead of hollow. See if you can convince your brain to see that it really is hollow.
On the old TV show, The Newlywed Game, husbands and wives were separated and asked questions, to see how much they knew about each other. When asked whether her new husband is more "rural" or "urban," this wife describes how her husband has been
having problems with his urban.
My free Ubuntu and Kubuntu Linux CDs haven't arrived yet, but I'm still looking forward to trying out those reportedly very user-friendly distros. As I've said many times before, my ultimate goal is to eventually replace Windows with some version of Linux on my main PC. Here's a Windows user who decided to try to do his normal computer work in Ubuntu, without using Windows. Ubuntu was able to do what he needed it to do, but only after he did some extensive homework to deal with a few issues that came up. Time will tell whether Ubuntu or Kubuntu will be able to do the things that I need to do without requiring me to do a lot of extensive homework.
When you use your computer on the Internet, do you feel confident and safe, or do you feel frightened and suspicious? You might feel a lot more frightened and suspicious and confident and safe after you read The 10 Biggest Security Risks You Don't Know About.
Really good Web designers troubleshoot their sites by viewing them in several different browsers, and on several different platforms. The rest of us try our sites in a just a couple of browsers on a couple of platforms, because we can't afford to set up several different computers with several different operating systems and several different browsers. Or we use online tools like BrowserShots to see images of what our sites look like in 20 different browsers, and on 5 different platforms. Unfortunately, as I type this, the queue time at BrowserShots is more than 11 hours, possibly because a well-known news site recently mentioned it. I recommend that you bookmark BrowserShots and try it next week, after the current crowd disperses.
This piece is 2 years old, but it's still fun. It's The 10 Weirdest Things Ever Sold On eBay. I think that if they ever update this list, they'll probably include the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich. If you think that's weird, take a look at this.
Sometimes, magicians can do the same old tricks that you've seen many times before, but you're still entertained because
they do them in a clever new way.
My evaluation of WordPress continues. The more I learn about it, the more I'm impressed with its powerful and intelligent features, ease of use, security, user-interactivity, and helpful support community. I'm almost ready to install it and start configuring it for this Journal. Anyone who really knows me, knows that I research the heck out of things before I buy them or use them. In this case, I've been extra, extra careful to do my homework, because I don't want to do anything with WordPress that could mess up anything else on this site. That's why I've spent hours and hours reading everything I could find about it. I've also saved nearly 75 bookmarks to the WP tips and how-tos that I'll want to have around while I'm installing and configuring it. Late last night, I finally felt like I knew enough to be able to ask some halfway intelligent questions in my very first post in the WordPress Support Forums. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of support forums over the years, I was very pleased with how quickly I got my first reply, and by how friendly and helpful it was.
The controvery continues to swirl around Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy software that's built into every copy of Windows XP. Many of us disabled WGA several days ago, when Microsoft admitted that WGA had been "phoning home" to Redmond from every Windows XP computer, every day since July, 2005. Now, a rumor quotes an unnamed Microsoft representative as saying, "In the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if it's not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now." If that rumor turns out to be true, I hope it causes a lot more people (and corporations) to consider switching from Windows to a version of Linux.
If you're thinking of working for an employment agency, you would be wise to read The Tech Worker's Contract to Nowhere. From my experience, it's very accurate.
I don't know about you, but my brain is semi-fried from all the WordPress research I've done in the past several days. I'm going to sit back, relax, and listen to a very funny man,
Anthony DeVito.
According to a blog on PCMag.com, "A security researcher in Singapore found a way to create malware that's 100% undetectable on Windows, even on Windows Vista." Every Windows user should be very concerned to see how this story develops.
I think The Ten Assumptions of Tech Support should be required reading for the management of every technology company that provides tech support services.
Your brand new DVD burner may become obsolete very quickly. Japanese researchers have developed a method to shape laser beams that could potentially squeeze ten times as much data onto each disc.
I may have mentioned this type of technology before, but it's very clever, so here it is (again?) There's a new type of paint that blocks cell phone signals. Just imagine all the places that could benefit from it. I'm reminded of comedian Steven Wright, who said, "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it."
I think it's a clever idea. You might think it's a dumb idea. Either way,
How to get a Heads Up Display (HUD) in your car for 5 cents is an idea that will probably work for a lot of people.
