Total Nonsense

When I updated the site recently, I had lost several of my wife's painting and drawings. So I've re-uploaded them. There are a few new ones that I think are pretty nice.

Noticed this site a while back and thought "Gee, I think some of those 'after' shots look better than some of the fast food I've gotten in the past".

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality Each item was purchased, taken home, and photographed immediately. Nothing was tampered with, run over by a car, or anything of the sort. It is an accurate representation in every case. Shiny, neon-orange, liquefied pump-cheese, and all.

Since my wife and I bought our house a few years ago, we've been inundated with credit offers filling our mailbox. Just about every day, we could count on getting preapproved credit cards, pitches for loans, and other lovely offers to feed our shredder. As you can imagine (and I'm guessing many of you don't have to imagine at all!), this got old pretty quickly.

Unless one opts out of these offers specifically, these companies can sell your personal information to any marketeer willing to pay for it. Hence the overflowing mailbox.

While checking out a few consumer websites, it came to my attention that the the four (used to be three) major credit companies have set up a site specifically to allow consumers to opt out of these preapproved offers. I'm sure they do this to cover themselves legally, knowing few will take the opportunity to opt out.

As some of you out there know, the Mozilla foundation (makers of the popular "Firefox" web browser ) also offer a free e-mail client called "Thunderbird". Now this particular product (totally free of course) fits somewhere in functionality between Microsoft Outlook Express (which comes free with Windows) and the very pricey full version of MS Outlook. One area that Thunderbird excels at is in catching and filtering spam.

However, all e-mail clients have a bit of issue with a new spam technique being used these days that combines text saved as an image (usually used to manipulate penny stocks or sell you viagra). Without some kind of special intervention, these e-mails tend to slip past a lot of filters causing a lot of aggravation.

PC world recently posted up its 10 Worst PCs of All Time. To my everlasting shame, as a much younger person, I actually sold a plethora of the machines listed at number one on this list. And I completely agree with the assessment of these particular computers. You'll find some pretty big names on this list, showing that Apple, IBM, Commodore, etc. were not immune to putting out some really awful product back in the day. I'm old enough to remember all of these, and while I've had experience trying to assuage the pain of friends/family who bought some of these stinkers, I was lucky enough to personally avoid them.

They're offering 1st generation iPod Shuffles (1GB) for $49 ($4 shipping) which seems pretty good to me.

They've also got.

• iPod Nano (1GB) - $79 free shipping
  
• iPod Nano (2GB) - $99 free shipping
• iPod Nano (4GB) - $149 free shipping
• iPod Video (30GB) - $179 free shipping

The Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple Certified Refurbished Products Listed below are great deals on Apple Certified Refurbished iPod models. Apple Certified Refurbished products are pre-owned Apple products that undergo Apple's stringent refurbishment process prior to being offered for sale.

If one clicks on the "Apple Certified (Mac)" button, some very good deals on Macbooks and other computer equipment can be found.

I can't speak for everyone, but I love "retro" style gaming, especially when nice folks out there program open source (free) versions of my old favorites. Here's a great (and free!) version of the classic game "Tempest". Actually, this is a version of the advanced game Tempest 2000 which was a highly acclaimed for its playability on the short lived Atari "Jaguar" game system. This version has great graphics (smooth and pretty psychedelic). It plays well with keyboard, mouse or joystick (Joystick was my preferred mode here). One tip. To get to the options screen, simply hit the "enter" key after the game has been loaded.

Typhoon 2001 - Overview

Wow. I know some of you might have seen a few of these before, but make sure to check out how some of them look from the "wrong angle" and you'll see how clever this fellow is in achieving the illusion of 3D in a 2D space.

Julian Beever's pavement drawings
Julian Beever has made pavement drawings for over ten years. He has worked in the U.K., Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Australia. The pavement drawings have included both renderings of old masters plus a wealth of original inventive pieces of work.

So it seems the U.S. Mint will try once again to market a dollar coin to the American public. In an attempt to stave off the failure of the Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea dollar coins, they'll try to make these more collectible by having four new designs each year, each with a different president on the face. If the new dollar coins turn out nicely as the recent nickel coin redesign , it's my opinion that that they may actually make it into active circulation (and perhaps save the U.S. taxpayer a substantial amount of dough spent on continually reprinting one dollar bills).