Another year-end summary post December 30, 2005
Posted by Perry in Technology.add a comment
Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has posted his contribution to the year-end post genre in which he lists the Web 2.0 companies he couldn’t live without. I find posts like this provide a remarkably good way to discover tools and resources that I might not have known about previously. I recommend that you visit the article and then follow the links to learn about some of these services that he mentions.
Here’s his intro to the article …
There have been numerous 2005 “best of� and 2006 “predictions� posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of� awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end.
What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day.
Health report December 29, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal.4 comments
They say “timing is everything.” And I’d have to agree.
When I retired at the end of August, I had until November 15th to decide about whether to activate the COBRA option to retain my health coverage for the coming year, until I reach 65. As that deadline approached I decided it was best to activate it, and when I called to do so I realized that I would have to pay the back coverage from September through December. However, during that call, I learned I could activate only the dental or the visual coverage for that time, reducing my cost for that back coverage from about $1200.00 to about $100.00 (for the dental coverage) and that as of January 1, 2006, I could change that over to the regular hospitalization coverage at the rate of about $300 per month. So I decided that was a worthwhile gamble, to activate only the dental coverage for the rest of the year, and hope that I didn’t have any medical issues until after January 1st.
Well my timing couldn’t have been worse. On December 23, 2005, I noticed a few red bumps appeared on my forehead. I put some ointment on them, thinking they would go away in a day or so. On the 24th, I went to visit Cheryl, Mike, and Connor to exchange gifts on Christmas eve. Cheryl said, in a rather alarmed voice, “what’s wrong with your head?” The bumps had become inflamed, were red and had grown in size. I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll see about it after the first of the year.” It turns out that by the 27th it was obvious that I couldn’t wait until the first of the year to go to the doctor. My face had begun to swell and my right eye was closing. So I called and scheduled an appointment with my doctor even through I had no insurance coverage.
Upon seeing me Dr. Gleaves indicated, without hesitation, that I had shingles. This disease, which in some people manifests on the body and in others on the face, causes itching and painful blisters that eventually burst and leave scabbed sores. For me the disease involves the head and face. My right eye is swollen shut and this morning the beginnings of the left eye’s swelling concerns me that soon I won’t be able to see anything until the disease goes away.
Needless to say, it isn’t pretty. So before posting a picture, I’m going to split this post so that the picture won’t show up here on the front page of my blog. If you wish to see it, you can click the “read more” option. If you don’t care to see them, you’ll have gotten all the necessary news on this page. Fortunately, shingles is neither fatal nor permanently disfiguring, under normal circumstances, so in the words of Gloria Gaynor, “I will survivie.” It’s just going to be a bit uncormfortable for a while.
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The Best FREE utilities December 23, 2005
Posted by Perry in Technology.add a comment
The author of Tech Support Alert, Gizmo Richards, has produced a list of what he calls the 46 best-ever freeware utilities. This list is worth reading if for no other reason than to see the 46 catetories of utilities there are. You’ll find it educational, I’m sure. I did. You may also find it worthwhile to bookmark his website as there appear to be a lot of useful links there.
By the way, the source for the link I’ve blogged about above is Lorelle on WordPress, which is an excellent source of information about WordPress in particular but also about things that are happening on the web in general. Her blog has become one of my daily visits.
PC World’s Top 100 December 22, 2005
Posted by Perry in Technology.add a comment
PC World, in a July 2005 article, lists the top 100 products of 2005. Their product of the year is Firefox.
Among the products that I use, Gmail ranks as #2 on their list. Skype is #8. Thunderbird, the Mozilla email program but not a product that I use, ranks #28. Flickr ranks as #51.
Although such lists can reflect the personal preferences of the authors and hence your evaluation may differ from theirs, reading this kind of list is an excellent way of becoming familiar with what else may be “out there” and if you are the adventuresome type, you may find some tools you weren’t previously familiar with. I find such lists worth considering, and I enjoy following the links both to the reviews and to the products’ websites.
One noteworthy quote from their introduction to this list is this comment:
And 23 of our 100 winners have the best price of all: They’re free.
In case you hadn’t noticed … December 21, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal.add a comment
Christmas is upon us. Therefore you can anticipate that my blogging will be lite for a while. Since I haven’t sent out Christmas cards this year, let me point you to this online Christmas greeting (in the event that you care for such things) that my friend Jane Hascall made me aware of. Clicking the symbols from right to left progressively changes the image.
Merry Christmas to all of you. I hope your celebration is joyous.
A most interesting project December 17, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal, Podcast, Technology.add a comment
It’s never too early to think about one’s New Year’s resolutions, and as I was doing my morning surfing today, I came across the LibriVox Project, which seems like a worthwhile effort. This article on Wired News gives a good overview of the goals and objectives of the project. Not sure yet whether I’ll make participating in it a part of my resolutions for the New Year, but it seems like the kind of thing I might enjoy doing.
Tired of IVR? December 14, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal, Technology.3 comments
IVR, or Interactive Voice Response systems, are those annoying “machines” you get when you call a company. Most of the time you must wait for all the options to be explained to you, trying all the while to decipher which option gets you to the service you want, before you can speak to a representative of the organization. Many of us, myself included, find them just another bane of modern life. One enterprising gentleman, Paul English, has created an IVR Cheat Sheet that gives you the codes to enter into your phone that will immediately send you to a human being. This is, in my opinion, a valuable resource worth bookmarking for future use.
Fighting Spam December 11, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal, Technology.4 comments
Spam is a pain. That, I know, is not news. However, the pain of it can be lessened. The way I deal with it is by using a program called PopFile, which is pictured above. If you’d like to see a much larger version of the image, click here. The program is open source and free and available from Source Forge.
I last reset my statistics for this program on May 15, 2004, and since that time, it has accurately classified the messages I receive as either spam or personal in 99.85% of the cases.
If you’ll note in the picture, I have the “Subject Header Modification” turned ON for the messages it classifies as SPAM (designated in the image by the left-facing red arrow), and I then filter mail in my email program so that all messages that have that word in the subject go to a folder that is called, not surprisingly, “Spam.” That way, I don’t have to deal with them in my inbox.
Periodically throughout the day, I quickly review what is in that folder to check for any “false positives,” of which there are occasionally but not very often a few. I delete those accurately classified as Spam and correct the classification of any false positives. Reclassifying false positives helps the program “to learn” what is and what is not spam.
I have found this solution to the problem of spam to be quite satisfactory for me, and if you are beset by spam and looking for a solution, I’d recommend you give this one a try.
Jamestown ND fire of 2005 December 10, 2005
Posted by Perry in Blogs and Blogging.3 comments
My friend, Tom Simpson who runs Webfeed Central and works nights at a hotel in Jamestown, captured some dramatic video of a fire that occurred last night at about 2:30 A.M. in his town. This photo from his Flickr site shows the fire in its early stages, and the video shows about 18 minutes and 30 seconds of its progress over a two-hour stretch. Judging from Tom’s comments as he was taking the footage, it was very cold as you would expect in ND at this time of the year. I also noticed that his coverage of this event made the Top Posts from around WordPress.com page.
Dawn December 10, 2005
Posted by Perry in Personal.1 comment so far
It’s always good to get an early start on the day and sometimes you are rewarded with a beautiful sunrise. It’s cold here in Knoxville today, but it looks like it is going to be a spectacular day, one just right for getting me in the Christmas spirit. Now to make something of the day that is before me!
