In honor of Halloween, here’s a game of Halloween Hangman. My best score was a 190, but I got one of the words without missing a letter. The skeleton taunts you after you miss a letter, but he needs a few more insults. He started repeating them so much it became annoying.

Categories: Entertaining

This game is fun to play, but can be maddening when it doesn’t work out just right. The instructions are all in French, but it’s easy to figure out. You just move the mouse trying to keep the lower ball on the bar while keeping the other ball bouncing. I loved playing [...]

Categories: Games

I’ve been looking at web hosting alternatives for a while now for some potential web site ideas I’ve had. I went with Bluehost and have been reasonably pleased, but I don’t like how they handle multiple domains. Since they have a 30-day grace period, I’ve been thinking about canceling and switching to a [...]

Categories: Web hosting

Neighboroo is a simple, but very cool, idea. They’ve gathered data about cities all over the US on lifestyle, politics, crime, education, air quality, home prices, rent, cost of living, commute time, household income, tax rates, population density and others, and display a heat map of the US.

Here’s an example of housing prices.
(via dumb [...]

Categories: Useful

Mike Rundle observed that experts in the Web 2.0 industry tell others how to be successful, yet they aren’t having much success themselves.
He makes a good point.
I took a business and entrepreneurship course in college and all through the course we were told stories of entrepreneurs who were told their idea was stupid. The [...]

Categories: My Thoughts

Those Japanese are a funny bunch. Their recipe for a game show is quite simple: Say a tongue twister without any mistakes or get whacked in the kiwis.

Another Japanese game show recipe is to go to the library and draw cards to see who has to do the painful and/or unpleasant activity.

They also enjoy [...]

Categories: Entertaining

As a follow-up to the post about a new type of school, here’s an article by Dan Poynter loaded chock full of statistics about books and reading. It was summarized by Mike Pope.
The part that floored me was who is reading (and who is not)

One-third of high school graduates never read another book for [...]

Categories: Education

I have two monitors at work and only one monitor at home, so when I work from home, all the applications on the second monitor aren’t visible. This was a problem that I had a hard time solving because none of the typical windows commands were made to switch an application’s desktop.
My solution is [...]

Categories: Useful

I used to think Organic food was for hippies but after watching these two videos, I’m starting to see the point.
Store Wars
The Meatrix
(via lazy way)

Categories: Society

What is the Emily Post way of saying you’re done eating when you’re at a nice restaurant or eating at someone’s home (in the United States)?
I was under the impression that it was rude to put the napkin on your plate and that you should put the napkin on the table, lightly folded (i.e. not [...]

Categories: My Thoughts

MyHeritage has a celebrity face recognition tool where you can do two things.
1. Upload your photo and find out which celebrity you resemble the most
2. Upload a photo featuring one or more celebrities and watch MyHeritage.com identify them
Number one was fun at first, but the more I played with it, the worse it seemed to [...]

Categories: Entertaining

You may have had the same experience as I when hearing people say vice versa. Some pronounce it as vice (rhyming with rice) verse-ah, while others say vice-ah verse-ah. I decided to find the correct pronunciation (if there is one) and as is often the case, they’re both considered correct. The wikipedia [...]

Categories: English

I’m the last person you’d want to decorate your home. I don’t know what to put where to make a room look pleasing and inviting. However, I consider myself a decent judge of aesthetics, so even though I don’t know how to do it, I can tell between my decorating job and that [...]

Categories: Useful

I ran across True Majority, a site where Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerries explains the United States budget with Oreos (here’s the transcript).
At first I was outraged and in complete agreement that we should reallocate the national budget. But there are always two sides to the story, and I wondered what the other [...]

Categories: Finances

Here’s a list of the top 10 most stolen cars.

1995 Honda Civic
1989 Toyota Camry
1991 Honda Accord
1994 Dodge Caravan
1994 Chevrolet 1500
1997 Ford F-150
2003 Dodge Ram
1990 Acura Integra
1988 Toyota Pickup
1991 Nissan Sentra

I’m surprised there aren’t multiple cars from different years, given that the top three are extremely popular cars. I also wonder if they took the [...]

Categories: Automotive

Nowadays, the only time I put pen to paper is to write a note on a birthday card or to jot down notes in a meeting when I don’t have my laptop.
Nearly all personal correspondence has been via e-mail or typed letters for the past few years and I envision that trend continuing.
With the exception [...]

Categories: My Thoughts

I spent the last few weeks searching for an inexpensive airfare to visit family for Christmas. I did an initial round of searches on every web site I could think of to get an idea of the current market price, then set up a daily e-mail notification on Kayak.com and checked flights almost every [...]

Categories: Travel

Actors from a TV show called The Office (I’ve never seen it) are in two spoofs of Microsoft training videos. They’re funnier every time I watch them, and the outtakes are hilarious. (Note: There is some profanity) They’re fairly long (20 and 17 minutes) so I was going to suggest skipping right [...]

Categories: Entertaining, Humor

Bloglines was acting weird a few weeks ago. It showed new posts on the left pane, but when you clicked on the feed it showed no new entries on the right pane. After a few days of this I got fed up and began looking for a replacement.
I wanted a free, online RSS [...]

Categories: Blogging

If you’ve filled out an online registration form you’ve probably noticed the latest security idea - challenge questions. These questions are used if you forget your password to make sure you’re you, but they are also a prime way for hackers* to infiltrate your account. It occurred to me that a reasonably skilled [...]

Categories: My Thoughts

A site called The Purification has created quite a bit of theories, but no answers (yet).
Someone posted a question asking what it was all about on Ask Metafilter two days ago and it’s amazing to see what they’ve been able to learn so far.
I’m guessing they’ll have a satisfactory answer within a few days.
(via waxy [...]

Categories: Computers

CNN compiled some interesting facts about the growth of the internet in the US and its adoption by different age groups.
The growth has been phenomenal. In June 1995 only 14% of adults were online and in June 2004 it was up to 66%. Internet use is about even between men and women now [...]

Categories: Technology, Web stats

Click the image you like better and eventually the brain will turn pink, indicating it “knows” something new about you. Click it to find out what.

Categories: Entertaining