My name is on a headstone (or grave stone, tomb stone or whatever you call it). The story goes like this: My Dad was setting up the affairs of my grandmother several years ago and she had requested to be buried in a cemetery in our town. When he began making the necessary arrangements, he […]

While chomping nerds I noticed that they were made by the Willy Wonka Candy Factory in Itasca, IL 60143. I loved the movie (with Gene Wilder) and wondered if the factory might be visible from Google Maps. Maybe it had been made to look like it did in the movie and was a tourist attraction. […]

In an article announcing Cisco’s acquisition of Arroyo Video solutions, it talked about the growing IPTV market. I had never heard of Arroyo Video Solutions, nor IPTV. Having used Vonage, I’m quite familiar with VOIP so it wasn’t too hard to guess that IPTV was quite similar. It’s the technology to watch

I’ve found a solution to send e-mail notifications of blog entries that resolves almost all of the issues I discussed previously. The first problem was that I didn’t want to post multiple times a day to avoid sending multiple e-mails a day. The solution sends out a notification once a day at 5am. It includes […]

Forbes released their latest list of the 400 richest Americans. I find the sources fascinating. They range from tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Dell and Oracle to Walmart and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Then, for something completely different, there’s candy and chewing gum. There’s an awful lot of hedge funds too. I’m going to have to take […]

There are various versions of the Bible online. A few that I’m aware of are at lds.org, byu.edu and bible.com. I even found an audio version, and a site with over 35 versions. But there’s a new site called Ebible (free registration required) that allows you to store bookmarks, search for topics or passages and […]

I recently converted my 500+ CD collection to MP3s. Here’s how I did it. I used Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs. It was really slow in secure mode so I switched to burst mode and used copy and test which does CRC comparisons to make sure you got the same audio in two […]

Are you a freak? I got 16% What is your world view? I’m an Idealist Third grade US Geography test. Unfortunately, I will be taking the 3rd grade over again.

Every once in a while the tooltips start showing up behind the taskbar so they can’t be seen. This is very annoying. I found a fix that worked, but I’m surprised and a little dismayed that it fixes the problem. It’s like telling someone with a headache to jump around clucking like a chicken, but […]

First off, it’s nice to see TIME magazine using YouTube. They have 10 juggling videos of the brother and sister team, Vova and Olga Galchenko, as they grow up juggling together. Some claim they are the best juggling team to have ever lived. Wikipedia has more information about the juggling duo.

Daily Lit (via JD Roth) is a fantastic idea for a service. You pick a book and they e-mail you a portion of it each day (at the time of your choosing). It’s free too. They have some classics that I’ve wanted to read and this is a great way to do it. The only […]

Glen Stansberry over at LifeDev put into words the process I have adopted to use draft blog entries. It helps to come back to something I’ve written after a few days because I’m fresh and may notice ways to improve it that I wouldn’t have seen if I did it all at once. I currently […]

IRC isn’t as popular nowadays, but every once in a while I have a reason to use it. I’ve used xChat on Linux but on Windows I didn’t know of a free IRC client. I Googled around but found only commercial applications. Then I found one right under my nose. Literally. I was using Opera […]

Opera changed a few shortcuts to match Firefox (like Ctrl-t to open a new tab), which I like because it makes it easier to switch back and forth between browsers. However I couldn’t figure out how to switch between tabs. I looked on the opera keyboard shortcuts page and found that you have three options. […]

I was floored when I learned about a new type of school. It reminded me of the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the onrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart […]

I started a weekly Tuesday Trivia on my coin collecting site, but it took me a while to find a good solution for displaying the questions and answers. I had the following requirements: 1. Easy to enter, since I have to do it every week. 2. Easy for the reader to get the answers, but […]

Men’s Health published a list of 18 tricks to teach your body. I hadn’t heard of most of them, but I plan to try them out next time the occasion arises.

If someone says you’re worth your weight in gold, do you know how much that is? If your answer is no, here’s a web site where you can calculate it. Just enter your current weight and it will tell you your weight in gold based on the current spot price (I hadn’t realized gold was […]

If you use del.icio.us and have lots of tags, you might have noticed that the pages take a long time to load. I just discovered a very easy way to dramatically decrease the time it takes to load the pages. Go to the very bottom of the tags on the right and collapse them. The […]