Total Nonsense

I'm a big fan of backgammon, and am always looking for a good computer opponent.

Since I'm always looking for a good deal, a freebie like this is hard to beat.  This is a multiplatform game with totally free version for windows, mac, and linux.  The download for windows was only about 7 MB.  One installed, this program is configurable to an amazing degree.

Follow this link to go to the download page.

 
The default 2d look is clean, but sort of boring, so you might want to adjust the visual settings which offer some very nice 3d effectsand animations.  This program is superb it just about every way and comes highly recommended if you love backgammon.

With the volatility of the housing market here in the U.S., it's often hard to keep track of what your home value is or what the trends are.

Enter www.zillow.com.

This site takes your address and combines with google maps to give you a live map that shows all kinds of interesting information about your property including its current market value and the value of all the other houses in the neighborhood.  One can also get much of hte public information available (value for tax purposes, size of lot, # of br's, bedrooms, etc.  The site is very easy to use and the data comes up quickly.  It's fun to see what information the site comes up with for one's property.

Often, I'll need to create a PDF from a document for distribution
and I'm not keen on paying Adobe lots of dough for their now bloated
and in my mind highly overpriced "Acrobat".  In my experience, most
people want to simply create pdf's for distribution and a very small
percentage have the need to adjust/change them after the fact. 

For
those who absolutely need to make forms, insert javascript code, etc.
(ie very advanced features), the Adobe product works and works well. 
However, for the rest of us who merely need to create pdf's, I've
searched for a reliable free solution.  And the good news is that there
are nice open source alternatives out there.

Right now, I have
two favorite solutions.  If one wants to create a pdf document from any
program, I'm going to strongly recommend PDF Creator. 
This is a small program that installs as a print driver under Windows
XP.  So once it's installed, one simply chooses to print to
"PDFcreator" and selects the options for output (as one would with
normal printing) and instead of printing to paper, a pdf formatted file
will be created and save to your hard drive.  This file can be read by
Adobe's official reader.  PDF created with this have several advantages.

I'm in process of redoing the entire site, so bear with me.  The look will likely change and hopefully I can add some content.  Perhaps I'll blog a bit.

Both forums can be accessed via their links to the left.