Since my wife introduced me to the computer, the Internet, email, and blogging a few months ago, I have become quite fascinated with the workings of the Internet and websites. I used to avoid the computer completely, telling her to take care of anything that needed to be done on the computer. Now it seems that I just can’t get enough information about how things work.
We’ve been learning a lot about website hosting, trying to figure out if we already have the best deal, or if we should consider changing our host services. I really have learned a lot about the subject of web hosting from a website called webhostingrating.com. I’ve been reading their webhosting articles about website security, and the benefits of dedicated server hosting and I’ve really learned a lot. They had one interesting article about sharing a host, listing the pros and cons of sharing a host, but I think that a dedicated host is the better option for the money. They also rate and rank different web hosting services to help folks determine what the best value is between the different services.
I was watching the CNN Headline News this morning and saw that there is a county in Florida (I think it is Broward) that has actively helped the eligible high schoolers register to vote, and has actually transported the high schoolers by school bus to early voting so they could participate in the election. The story indicated that there were 3600 of them that voted! I think that is a wonderful thing to do; I think that all high schools across the country should do the exact same thing!
Doing business with someone who is a certified expert is becoming more important everyday. I keep reading about scam artists who successfully misrepresent themselves and end up taking a lot of money from unsuspecting victims. There is a website called Clicksmart.com that lists only businesses that are properly licensed in the state in which they do business in, and are in good standing with the Better Business Bureau. They list a large variety of professions, such as Realtors, florists, contractors, mortgage brokers, massage therapists, etc.
The website is easy to use to find what you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for certified Realtors in Minneapolis you would go to their home page at clicksmart.com, then click on Real Estate Agents, then click on Minnesota, then click on the letter “M” and then finally click on the city of Minneapolis. That will take you to the page Minneapolis Realtors that are certified experts. However, I suggest that you take a moment to check the home page for their list of top realtor cities because I see that Minneapolis Realtors are listed as a link right on their home page!
I was reading on the Time.com website that unemployment is continuing to be a growing problem here in the USA. I think that we need to stop giving tax breaks to the large corporations that ship our jobs overseas and give tax breaks to the businesses that keep the jobs here. As long as unemployment grows, our economy is going to suffer because people are not going to have the money to spend buying the products that are on the market. I was watching the news a couple of days ago and the program was talking about how the sales in thrift stores are increasing rapidly because people are hunting for bargains. That is no surprise to me; I like to shop in thrift stores myself! Anyway, as long as unemployment continues to rise, I think that the economy is going to keep slipping.
Almost everyone that I know that has a computer tells me at some point in time their computer has managed to contract a virus. I don’t understand how naive these people are; they get the virus by visiting unscrupulous websites (for example sites that are trying to make money selling pornographic materials) or they are opening up emails from senders that they don’t already know and trust. I thought everyone knew by now that when you do that you are opening up yourself to the very real risk of getting a virus or a spyware program put on your computer. And once those little stinkers get into your computer, they wreak havoc! Your computer can crash, or your private information, such as bank account and credit card account information is at risk of being given out to unscrupulous people who will use that information to their advantage!
Everyone should have the best Virus Removal Software they can get on their computers if they access the internet at all. Cyberdefender sells a great software package that protects your computer against spyware and viruses. They have real-time security updates and 2GB online backup. They are fully compatible with other security software. They have been endorsed by USA Today, eWeek and ComputerWorld as being effective, fast and easy to use.
The phone rang at 8:15pm last night (we go to bed at 7pm because we get up at 3am!) from The Washington Post newspaper, trying to get us to subscribe to their daily paper. We already get the Sunday paper subscription. They call us at least once a week trying to get us to upgrade to daily. We’ve told them several times to put us on the “Do not call” list but they keep calling! Anyway, they woke us up and we couldn’t get back to sleep until 10:30, so we were NOT happy! Next time they call us I think I’ll tell them AGAIN to put us on the “Do Not Call list” and tell them that they next time they call us we will cancel the subscription that we DO have!
How do you define “home?” For some of us, “home” is where we grew up as children, no matter where we moved to as adults. For others, “home” is wherever our toothbrush happens to be! My wife and I, we like to travel from time to time on vacation, but we are essentially folks who like to put down roots and enjoy ourselves right in our own little house. My wife’s sister, however, she likes to travel around and “see the world,” not staying anywhere very long.
We found a website that talks about how different people are in their attitudes towards home; the website calls the different types of people growers and nomads. The website is called growersandnomads.com. It really is a very interesting site, with links to blogs and stories from a lot of different folks with different tastes and opinions. All of these different people make up the growers and nomads team, and I think they’ve done a fine job of creating a lively and informative site. I especially like the link to the Home Improvement Tools that they provide. That link goes to a wizard that helps you to figure out what the costs of repairs and remodeling might be. It also takes you to some informational links that helps you to learn about the basic systems of your home.
My wife has a job driving as a substitute school bus driver. This morning she had to get up at 3am to get to the bus yard to be “on standby” for 5:30am. It’s awfully hard to get up at 3am! We went to bed early last night, about 7:30pm so we could get enough sleep.
Anyway, when my wife left for work this morning there was frost on the windshield. I was surprised because I didn’t expect it to be that cold! We have not even pulled out the window scrapers yet! So we had to let the car run for five minutes to clear the windshield. Winter is surely coming!
I guess I’ve been living in a cave or something over the past several years. I had never heard of Herbalife until my neighbor came over yesterday and was telling me that he has joined the Herbal Nutrition Network with the Herbalife Company.
My wife and I have become interested in Herbal Nutrition over the past couple of years because my wife has had a lot of issues with digesting synthetic supplements. Herbalife is a large company that sells a lot of nutritional products targeted at several different markets – weight management, energy management, and several targeted segments such as women’s health, men’s health, digestive health, heart health, and others.
I was looking at their website today and was surprised to see that they also sell personal care products such as skin care and fragrances. I like experimenting with different fragrances; I think I’ll buy one of their “Man” fragrances and see how I like it!
For many years I’ve been wanting to get a Shih-Tzu puppy. My wife says she would prefer a Pomeranian. We already have two dogs, one is about twelve years old, the other is two years old. The older dog is a large dog, the younger is a small dog. The younger dog is deaf, and we have talked from time to time about how at some point we will need to get another dog in the house to “help” the deaf dog to cope with life. One of the things that has prevented us from getting the new dog is the cost of buying a purebred dog, as well as the stalemate of what breed to get.
Well, I ran into a friend of mine two days ago and he tells me that his chihuahua dog is pregnant and he wants to GIVE me (for free) one of the puppies. What a dilemma! We are considering it, not sure yet if we really WANT one of those little critters! I mean they are REALLY little! And our HUGE cat might mistake the puppy for a mouse and eat it! Well, we’ve agreed not to be TOO worried about it at this point, the puppy hasn’t even been born yet, so we will bide our time and see what happens.
There have been some lively discussions at our house regarding religion and spirituality. We each have our own beliefs about that. Some of us believe that you can’t be spiritual without being religious, and others of us believe that you CAN be spiritual without being religious. I guess the definition of “spiritual” and “religious” are something we just don’t agree on, which is part of the problem here. Some of us claim to be spiritual but don’t want to go to an organized church, citing corruption and violations of trust.
My wife and I have been talking about how to best dispose of our garbage. She would really like to compost and has been asking me for months to set up a compost pile. She keeps telling me that the compost would be good for our garden. We don’t have a garbage disposal: and I tell her that I’d rather just get a garbage disposal. Composting sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t feel like doing the work. She tells me that garbage disposals are bad for septic systems, but I know lots of people with septic systems have garbage disposals!
I was reading an article on the Slate.com news website that discusses whether people should use garbage disposals or just put their garbage in the trash to be hauled to a landfill. The article assumes that no one has a septic system, and it recommends compost piles as the first and best choice, the garbage disposal as the second best choice, and putting garbage in the trash to be hauled to the landfill as the worst choice. I wish the article had addressed septic systems!
I love shopping on the Internet, especially now that the economy is struggling and the price of gasoline is so high. Since I live so far out in the “boonies” there really IS no place local for me to shop! So the Internet has been a great help to us. The Internet has such a wide variety of things that you can buy; I’ve found that I LOVE the convenience of shopping from my desk at home!
There’s a great new shopping search engine that I like to use that searches all of the stores on the Internet – all thirty thousand of them, not just a few that pay to be part of a commercial shopping search engine. The shopping search engine site is Shopwiki and they have search engines for the United Kingdom and the United States.
My wife got very excited over the link that the site has to a new trend in clothing Eco-Fashion. She’s been so concerned about the environment that she tries to buy as many things as possible (when she needs to buy something) that is ecologically friendly.
As I was explaining a little bit earlier, I took the car to a car wash. I was very unhappy with the poor job that the car wash had done. At this particular car wash, you pay AFTER the car is washed, not before. (Bad business, that one!)
So the attendant had not thoroughly sprayed down the car with cleansers and the car came out looking almost as dirty as it did going in. So I told the lady who was collecting the money that I was not going to pay $8.00 for such a cruddy job. I wanted them to wash it again, this time using the cleansers that they should have used the first time. She said if I wanted it washed again, I had to pay for two car washes! I told her that I was not satisfied and they needed to give me a clean car for the original $8. She got nasty and I told her that she could kiss my *** (well, you get the idea, right?)
So she said “You’re a crazy man, I’m calling the police!” I told her “Bring it on!”
One of the things that I’ve always been a little bit concerned about with these flash drives is how secure could they be? They are so very small it is easy to lose them, and it could be very easy for some unscrupulous character to “palm” them and take off without you even knowing it! Well, leave it to Kanguru Solutions to come up with a Security system they call the Kanguru Remote Management Console that allows the owner to access (and block) the Kanguru brand of flash drives, the Kanguru Defender, Kanguru Defender Pro and Kanguru Bio AES drives remotely! What will they think of next? This is SO Futuristic!
With this new system, if one of the Kanguru flash drives goes “missing” it can be remotely deleted! That prevents the data from being accessed by unauthorized users. This puts me in mind of the old “Mission Impossible” television show where the tape automatically self destructs!
If the flash drive user forgets their password, the administrator can reset the password remotely. The drives can be set to lock out users or delete themselves if the drive does not connect to the authorized server within a prechosen time period. What great security measures!
I was amazed the first time I saw a USB flash drive. My kids call them “thumb drives.” The first one we bought didn’t have much memory (I think it was 128) and was really expensive, but it was a convenient way to move files from one place to another. The next one we bought was four times the storage size (512), but the same big price. A couple of months ago we found a USB flash drive for sale that was a the same price as the other ones we had bought a couple of years ago, but it had whopping 8GB storage! It’s incredible how technology advances so fast!
I’m a big superhero fan. I love watching all of the superhero movies, and if there’s a television show about some kind of superhero, I watch that too. When a new superhero movie comes out to the theaters, I’m right there on opening day if there’s any way possible for me to be there!
I loved the Ironman movie. I bought the DVD a couple of weeks ago when I found it for sale at Wal-Mart. I was looking at Halloween Costumes at the halloweenadventure.com website and found the best costume I’ve seen in a long time! The Ironman costume!
I like to collect a variety of costumes. I don’t know exactly why, but I have always like doing that. I really like superhero costumes the best. My wife thinks I’m crazy, collecting all of the costumes, but she humors me. She says “at least I’m not out catting around!” I guess ever since I was a little kid I’ve fantasized about being a superhero. When I was a kid I went so far as to jump off the roof of my house, thinking I could fly like Superman can! (Thanks to my older brother’s encouragement, my mother just about killed him for talking me into that stunt!)
I noticed that my wife’s car (a white Subaru) was in desperate need of washing. So I told my step-son to take it to one of the car washes in town and get it washed. My wife overheard me telling him that and she suggested that I simply take it myself the next time I run errands and take it to the car wash myself. Well, I objected because I wanted my step-son to be doing something useful and contributing to the household needs. I told her that, too. Her reply was “If you want something done right, you should do it yourself.”
I was surprised that she said that because it was right in front of her son when she said it! I gave her a “funny” look that meant “are you crazy, he can hear you!” So she said “why are you giving me that funny look? You KNOW that when he gets to the car wash he won’t know which options or packages to order. You know what you want done, so why don’t you just take it yourself? That way when it’s done, you’ll be happy!”
Well, I hate to admit it, but she was right, and we both knew it. So I took it to the car wash yesterday.
My wife and I were talking about automobile maintenance. She seems to think that it would be really nice of me if I would help her out by keeping track of the maintenance of her cars, and helping her out with minor things like oil changes. That’s something I’ve just let her take care of in the past – they were HER cars, so I let HER take care of them. Lately, however, she’s been overwhelmed with her job and extra family responsibilities and so she asked me to help her out with her cars. As much as I’d like to argue with her logic on that, it really would do no good. I’m home all the time anyway since I got hurt in that car accident last year, so I have the time.
She told me that she found a website recently that she was thinking about using for car repair estimates and to help find a car repair shop for her car. I told her that I’d check it out and see what it said about Toyota Camry repair.
So I went to the website and saw that there were several places in the area that we could use for her car repairs if I couldn’t do it myself. I saw that they had a section of their website that you can click on to see if there have been any recalls on your car, and listed common problems for that make and model of car so I checked that out while I was there. I was glad to see that there had not been any recalls on her cars yet.
I stumbled on a story on the Time.com website that was talking about the new Paris Hilton for President campaign video that can be seen on the funnyordie website. The story had a link to the video, so I naturally clicked on it (just curious, you know!) and watched the video. The ad was not quite as funny as the first one, but it was good for a few chuckles. I hope she produces a couple more of these, the world could use a few good chuckles!
One of the biggest headaches of owning a car is that so much of car ownership has been challenging getting information that you need in order to keep your car running safely. Up until now, it’s been hard to know exactly what to pay for repairs on your car in your town. And, being new to this area, it’s been extremely difficult to find the best mechanic.
I’ve heard about a great website called Driverside.com that has been set up to let consumers find out just about EVERYTHING they need to know about the car that they own, or about new cars that they are thinking about buying.
The website will tell you what your car really is worth. If you sign up and become a member (it’s free) they can notify you before your car drops below its residual value so you can protect your investment. They will list your car for sale for free when you decide to sell, and they can help you find parts and accessories specifically made for your car.
The feature that I like the best is that you can get automatically notified on every recall for your vehicle. I like that feature because I’m always concerned that there might be a recall on one of my used cars that I own and that I’d never hear about it.
I was quite surprised when I drove into town today to run errands to find that the price of gas had dropped about a dime since yesterday! I was really glad to see it because I needed to fill up my tank and also fill up some portable gas tanks for our lawn mowers! I had heard that the price of gas was dropping a little bit, and the “experts” about the economy seem to think that is a bad sign for the economy. They said it had something to do with reduced demand, and if the price keeps going down then the folks that are investing in alternative energy will stop investing in the alternative energy. Well, I’m not quite sure why that could be – I sure was happy to see the little bit of relief it brought to MY wallet! As for people investing in alternative energy, I think they should just keep on investing in it because we need it desperately. I have not enjoyed being held “hostage” at the gas pump due to high oil prices!
My wife’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago and she had to work all day, and into the night. So I couldn’t take her out to eat supper on her birthday. I felt bad about that and promised her that I’d take her out to eat supper tonight. Her favorite local restaurant is Applebee’s, so that’s where we’ll be heading tonight. She LOVES their riblets. Almost every time we go out to eat she orders what their version of spare ribs are, to see if they are as good as Applebee’s riblets, and so far she says no one’s as good as Applebee’s. She’s said a couple of places have come close, but Applebee’s is still the best. I can remember one time we went to Applebee’s to eat on Mother’s Day and they were out of riblets so she insisted we leave the restaurant and go eat somewhere else that day! That woman is SERIOUS about her riblets!
