Dr Copa

There is a great new search engine in town called local.com that helps connect consumers with local businesses.  This new search engine acts like a local yellowpages and combines the citysearch, yelp, yellowpages, and superpages websites to give you a comprehensive local search engine that “does it all.” 

What I think is so remarkable about this search engine is that it offers free advertising to businesses.  This is a great boon to businesses, as advertising is one of the biggest budget busters in most business ventures.  To be able to get listed in a search engine such as this for free is a great value!

The website offers driving directions and business contact information, as well as business hours and reviews from a variety of websites.  Users of the website can also contribute to the website by writing their own reviews.

I was shocked to read in the Time.com website that a bomb attack was carried out on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. From what I understand, no terrorist organization has claimed “credit” for the bombing, but it is clear that the Marriott was the target of the attack. Fifty three people died, and two hundred sixty six were injured as a result of the attack.

The bombing was carried out by way of a suicide truck forcing its way through the gates and exploding. I have to assume that it was a suicide attack; and assume that the driver of the truck is dead. Assumptions are being made that the Taliban is involved/responsible for this attack.

I think terrorist attacks are the most contemptible feats possible. These are acts of cowardice, not courage. These people believe they are going to some kind of great martyr-dom heaven, but I believe that they will be going to the “other place” that is not quite so pleasant!

When my wife and I have gone on vacations together, we have tried a variety of lodging accommodations.  We have tried the standard hotel/motel room, we have tried renting hotel suites, and we have rented vacation condos.   To be honest they have all worked out fairly well, but for the most part we have preferred renting out condos.  The hotels and motels were nice enough, but we frequently found our sleep disturbed by noisy people walking down the hallways in the wee hours of the morning.  And in a hotel room, or even a hotel suite we found it difficult for one person to watch television without disturbing the other’s sleep.

We much prefer renting out vacation houses or condos.  It’s easy to find a place we like through the homeaway.com website!

We like the spacious feeling of being able to stretch out, and not be cramped all up in just one room.  We really like the convenience of having our own kitchen so we could put restaurant leftovers in the refrigerator and heat them up later in the microwave if we wanted.  And the best convenience was being able to go to the local grocery store and buy breakfast foods so we could eat breakfast right there in our place and not have to try to find a restaurant for breakfast.  We really don’t mind eating one or two meals out during the day on vacation, but we don’t want to eat ALL our meals out!  We like the extra amenities that often come with renting a vacation condo – access to a swimming pool, a nice private patio/balcony, and private jacuzzi tubs right in our own bedroom suites!  And the price of renting a vacation condo is usually less money than renting just one cramped room in a hotel!

So for us, when we are planning a vacation that is more than just a one or two night stay, we usually try to rent a vacation condo, and a hotel is usually our last resort option.

My wife likes to spend a lot of time thinking about ways she could be decorating and furnishing our home to make it look more like “us” and less like “flea market.”  I have to admit we have a lot of hand-me-downs from family members that we have been using for a very long time, and we certainly have a strange eclectic mix of furnishings in our home.  The biggest problem we have had in decorating is that she likes the country/traditional style but I like the modern style, and those two styles are hard to reconcile when buying new furniture!  So for the most part we have been settling for “functional” because of the price tag involved – money is tight, so price has always been a big issue from the beginning.  It would be great if the item looked good, but function and price are the number one considerations!

My wife has been looking for a great looking storage bench to put in the mud room, where people could sit down and put their shoes/boots on or off as they are coming or going.  She is always reminding people to please remove their shoes before coming into the house, to reduce the amount of dirt that gets tracked in.

She also has been looking for coat racks to buy, as she seems to think we don’t have quite enough closet space. I have to agree that once we get all of our coats put into the closets there doesn’t seem to be any room for shirts, pants, sweaters, dresses, etc. So she is probably right about trying to find solutions to that situation too!

When she puts her mind to finding something specific that she wants to buy, she likes to use the shopwiki.com website. Unlike most shopping search engines, the shopwiki website searches throughout the entire Internet and brings up all of the results – not just the results of their paid advertisers. So she gets a lot more results to look at, and has a better chance of finding exactly what it is she really wants.

The local stores have a very limited supply of lighting fixtures, and my wife and I want to buy some new outdoor lighting fixtures for our house.  We’d like to replace the lights on either side of the front door, and on either side of the garage door, and a nice lamppost at the end of the driveway.

Living far out in the country however, there really is not a large variety of stores to choose from, and we really don’t want to spend a lot of time going from store to store, looking for what we like. So we are doing our preliminary “window shopping” for our new lighting fixtures on the Internet.

We’ve found quite a few nice lighting fixtures that we like and I’ve bookmarked the webpages for us to be able to go back and look at them again for future comparison against other fixtures we might find. The pages I’ve bookmarked are from the farreys.com website are:
Forecast lighting, Maxim lighting, and Fine Art lamps,