I’ve been a fan of the Air Force Blues online comic strip ever since I first heard about it. (If I had the money I’d gladly send the author a donation – it’s on my list.)
This particular “episode” struck me as particularly funny because one of my best friends works on UAVs as a defense contractor. I hope you enjoy it, too.
//Steve//
This has got to be the most disgusting commercial I’ve ever seen. Hopefully it never actually got on the air…
See http://tinyurl.com/l28tjv – but make sure you have a strong stomach.
//Steve//
I’ve noticed that having a business card, even just for your own personal information (as opposed to being for a business), makes a significant impact when you’re meeting someone for the first time.
There’s an outfit called VistaPrint who provides business cards from their stock layouts in small quantities for nearly free. You do the layout online, choose from one of their stock backgrounds and put in your information.
The cost of the business cards, in my view, barely covers the cost of mailing, but it’s great when you need to give someone your information (at the pharmacy, auto shop, wherever) and you just hand them a card. I usually keep a half dozen or so in my jacket, just in case.
This particular company also provides a lot of other cool items, like baseball caps, fridge magnets and so forth. Some cost a bit, others are very inexpensive. It’s worth looking into.
No, I’m not connected with VistaPrint other than being a customer.
//Steve//
I’m not sure what to make of it, but we’ve actually had rain in the past few weeks!
When we were in New Mexico for Thanksgiving, it poured there for several days. We told people there that they had more rain in two days than we had in two years, something they could hardly believe. We’ve been in a drought here for at least three years, maybe more – depending on how you define a drought. Tonight it’s raining again!
Hopefully this will have an impact on our water rates, which here at The Farm are astronomical (and a major source of discord among residents here). Then again, probably not… <sigh>
//Steve//
I recently purchased a bottle of liquid solder flux, made by GC Electronics. Among the cautions on the “Warning” label:
“flammable. Vapor harmful. Do not use near heat or flame….”
Don’t use it near heat? Now that will be a neat trick…! :)
//Steve//
There are a lot of online comics out there. The ones that I frequent every day, and which more than merit a mention here, are:
| UserFriendly | http://www.userfriendly.org/static/ |
| General Protection Fault | http://www.gpf-comics.com/ |
| Air Force Blues | http://www.afblues.com/ |
| Swivel Chair Patrol | http://www.swivelchairpatrol.com/ |
| Crew Dogs | http://www.thecrewdogs.com/ |
| Office Offline | http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/ |
| The Joy of Tech | http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/index.html |
There are of course others out there, but these are the ones I visit every day.
The geeky ones are pretty self-evident, as I’ve been a geek for as long as I can remember. The others attract me because of my service in the Air Force and the Civil Air Patrol.
Enjoy!
//Steve//
Well, at least it should be…!
(Spotted it on a Yahoo! Groups home page, couldn’t resist!)
-- //Steve//
Yes, many of today’s IM clients from the various IM hosts – Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. – support multiple services, but none of them supports nearly all of the IM services.
For that, you have to go out to a third-party product. There are only a few that do this. Pidgin, Trillian and Digsby are about the only ones I’ve seen that fit this bill. My personal preference is Digsby.
The biggest advantage to Digsby is that it stores your user profile on their servers, so all you have to do is log into Digsby on whatever computer you’re using (and have Digsby installed on), and your profile travels with you.
See http://www.digsby.com for details. I think you’ll like it.
//Steve//
Note: I have no connection whatsoever with this company other than I use their product and I like it.
With any reviews or other postings that you’ll see here on the blog, I am beholden to no one, and I will accept no compensation in any form for a good review. I’ll put the information out here – “warts and all,” as the saying goes – regardless of who makes the program. If there’s even the slightest hint of conflict of interest, I’ll either make that known at the outset of the posting, or I just won’t put it out there at all.
A good example is this: I’m working on one right now about a program I’ve been using for several months. Here’s the 411 on that, just up front:
Those who have worked with me before know that I can be pretty blatantly honest when it comes to giving someone my opinion about something. It’s even cost me my job once:
At a former employer, I was asked at one point by a fairly senior person within the company what I thought about such-and-such a project. I asked him if he really wanted my honest opinion, and he said yes. I told him I didn’t think it stood a chance of a snowball in hell of catching on in the marketplace, it sucked and shouldn’t be pursued. I was right, in the long run, but I had no way of knowing that this was his pet project and that he had a pretty serious (emotional?) attachment somehow to the whole thing. Up to that day, I was pretty much the boy wonder with the organization, but from that day forward, I never saw a single raise or had a positive review, even though nothing else had changed with regard to the performance of my duties.
Obviously I won’t provide the name of this person, or that of the company involved. Those who knew me at that company are still around and might even read this, so I ask only that if you are privy to that information, please don’t include it in a comment to this posting – I’d like to avoid legal entanglements, since I really can’t afford an attorney right now! :)
Bottom line: I’ve never had even a hint of a problem with conflict-of-interest issues, and I’m not about to start now.
If all that sits well with you, great: stay tuned and I hope you’ll like what you see. Otherwise, please “change the channel” and have a nice day. :)
//Steve//
I’m one of those people who lives in Outlook 2007. It’s by far the most heavily-used program on my system.
Until just recently, I hadn’t had much use for Twitter. For one thing, it required me to go out to the web rather than just have the Tweets come in to me in a way where I could manage them and look at them offline. No more excuses! I’m tweeting now, because of this great new tool.
It’s called Twinbox, and it’s an Outlook add-in from TechHit. What it does is provide a toolbar within Outlook, plus an automatic download of tweets from everyone whom I’m following directly into a folder in Outlook. The toolbar looks like this:
Within Outlook, I see each tweet as though it were an individual email. Grouping them by the “from” field in Outlook, it keeps the tweets organized, but it also stores them offline so I can look through them even if I don’t have an Internet connection at the time.
The way I handle them is to go through each one, and if the information looks interesting I can either “flag” it in Outlook for action, or move the message to a “To check out…” folder to follow up when I’m online. I can also use the buttons on the toolbar to respond to the tweets, or put my own out there to annoy the world. :)
The only down side I have found to the program is that I can’t queue up tweets while I’m offline. Unlike regular emails, I have to be online in order to enter a tweet or a response to one. (With emails, I can create messages or replies which sit in my Outbox until I go online, but it doesn’t work that way with Twinbox.)
Thus far, it’s the only way I’ve been able to cope with the veritable flood of great bulletins about Windows 7’s launch and all the cool features that people have discovered in the new OS.
Icing on the cake: it’s free! Details are at htttp://www.TechHit.com/Twinbox/.
For the record, I have no connection whatsoever with TechHit other than the fact that I use the program.
//Steve//
I was taken by surprise when paging through the latest L.L. Bean catalog. First glance, it looked a little strange, but obviously it makes sense when you put more than two brain cells together to work on the problem.
A “Solar-Powered Flashlight” on the surface seemed a little silly, but… :)
//Steve//
