Posts

Posted on

The best of the worst domains out there

I know that I don’t have the most amazing domain name for my blog here, but at least it’s not as bad as some of these. Caught wind of this from PC World, and it is the “top ten worst domain names” that, oddly enough, companies actually use.

A few of my favorites…

1. A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com […]

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net […]

10. Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe ? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com [easywebbers]

Try them out for yourself. They all work, and some are more legit than others.

Posted on

Weather Bonk

Weather BonkTod Maffin mentioned this on his blog sometime ago, and it’s too much fun to not pass on. Weather Bonk is a great mashup of Google Maps and The Weather Channel, not to mention a variety of other great utilities.

I use a combinations of widgets to get the current weather for Vancouver on my desktop, but the Route Weather is a pretty amazing tool for mapping out the forecast of your road trip. I also love the variety of webcams that you can locate with the map. The site seems to have a pretty good pulse on what is available for nearly every major city in North America.

Be careful. You could end up toying around with this site for hours.

Posted on

iPhone is hot, but it doesn’t even exist yet

iPhone popup adIt has appeared to the world at MacWorld Expo, and I’ve watched the keynote to know that it’s freaking sweet. The fact is, you can’t buy one yet. That’s why I find this pop up ad incredibly interesting, even though the sucker seeped through Firefox. “Sign up now to win something that no one can get their hands on yet!” Sounds like… fun?

The iPhone is hot even before anyone can actually buy one. I even made Rebecca watch some of the keynote, and though it was a bit torturous for her, she’ll admit that what she saw was pretty cool. Who knows when we’ll be able to get our hands on one in Canada, but the hype is a bit over the top for me.

2 megapixel camera, music, movies, pictures, calendars, contacts, web browsers, and a phone. Now that’s not all that it has, but the biggest hard drive you can get on it is 8GB, not to mention battery life? I’m not totally sold on wanting one until the storage gets bigger and the power supply lasts longer.

I realize that my iPod mini and Nokia 6682 are completely lacking in comparison, but it can work for me right now. However, if it came down to getting a Blackberry or an iPhone for professional needs, I’d go with the Apple product.

Posted on

Climbing ice silos in Iowa

DSCN1931
Photo credit: khockett on Flickr

I am hardly an authority on the topic of climbing, especially when it comes to doing it on ice. All I know is that you’d need metal, spiky things and some rope, not to mention a lacking fear of heights. And actually, heights and me don’t get along all too well, but I’m working on getting better at that as I get older.

When Rebecca’s cousin came back from a recent trip to Las Vegas, he brought me back a copy of the L.A. Times with an interesting article on the front of it. Turns out, some dude in Iowa has a real knack for ice climbing. Snow and ice is very common this time of year, but mountains and cliffs are not as abundant, all year round. So what does he do? Staring at an abandoned grain silo one day, he has the idea to cover it in ice and climb it.

When I read the first few lines, I knew that this had to be the idea of some college professor looking for a quick fix for a lack of good places to climb in the prairies that make up most of the state, and my hunch was spot on. Don’t ask me why, but I spent enough time around like minded folks to just make an educated guess. Combine the expertise in DIY engineering that only comes from the minds of farmers from the midwest, and this is what happens. Granted that he is a physical education instructor at UNI, but this sense of “craziness” has the ability to rub off on you.

Weekend America did a piece on the story, and you can check out the rest of these pictures that I found on Flickr. Not sure that I’d try to do this, but the site would be neat to see. I’d also like to be there when all the ice melted and came crashing to the ground.

Posted on

A golden ticket to punk rock

This is cool and clever all at the same time. I also have a bit of fondness for MxPx.

In a recent promotion of “Bremerton Blend”, a coffee endorsed by MxPx, the band has randomly inserted “golden tickets” in 2 of the 200 bags of the product.

We will be putting in ONE ‘Golden Ticket’ naming the lucky recipient as the winner of the signed guitar! We’re also putting in a single “golden ticket” in a second 1 pound bag for a 50 dollar shopping spree at the MxPx Merch Arsenal.

To check out the coffee or the promotion,head over to this link. [punknews]

Pushing products in the name of your fans and the rock. I can dig that. Wonder if the coffee’s any good.

Posted on

With warming there is dimming

I discovered something new last night on the Knowledge Network when it comes to the issues of climate change and global warming. Global dimming[wiki] is a fascinating phenomena that doesn’t get as much press as the previously mentioned topics do. It’s a friend and foe all at the same time.

This is the best, basic explanation that I could find.

Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.

Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflexsive. More of the sun’s heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.

This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming. [globalissues]

So of course, the more sunlight you reflect into space, the cooler the temps are on the surface. The way the program put it, there needs to be a delicate process of reducing these particles because a sharp decline of air pollution will accelerate an increase of temperatures on the surface of the Earth. And with this being a recent discovery among climatologists, it’s making a lot of current models regarding the future trends of global warming to be reevaluated.

I try to keep a very open mind when I hear about these things, but the data is really hard to argue with. The simple matter is that things need to change for the better, and this needs to happen soon rather than later. Even if nothing will happen for another 10 years or 50 years, everything that is done now can make things better for the next 500 years. We cannot, as a global community, keep pumping junk into the atmosphere.

Oh, and by the way, they are discovering new islands around Greenland at an amazing rate. Not from volcanoes, but because the shorelines are melting away.

Posted on

CCM is RBK

I’ve asked this question to Rebecca numerous times, and it totally drives her nuts when I do that. Today, I actually remembered to look it up.

CCM Does CCM still exist on their own or have they been gobbled up like Nike did to Bauer?

The answer is that they do exist, but the brand name is owned by RBK, or Reebok. However, there is no direct melting of the two brands when it comes to hockey equipment. This is particularly interesting because RBK is the big sponsor behind superstars like Sidney Crosby, but CCM[wiki] is a long time leader in the manufacturer of hockey equipment. Reebok uses superstars to push their company, but CCM is such a staple in the sport that the name is strong enough to exist on its own.

When Nike grabbed up Bauer, the brand almost immediately became “Nike Bauer“[wiki]. For now, CCM is still sold on it’s own name. However, “CCM RBK” or “RBK CCM” is just way too ugly to say. Good to know that they haven’t devoured the CCM namesake, yet.

The same can’t be said for Koho[wiki]. They were an offshoot of CCM, so that was turned into what is RBK today. I used to drool over Koho goalie equipment all the time, and it stands to reason that even Roberto Luongo[wiki] uses their stuff almost exclusively. However, there is just something about Koho that is just not as cool as having RBK’s logo on your pads. Who else to use a side by side comparison for this other than Mr. Koho himself, Patrick Roy[wiki].

KOHO vs RBK
Tell me that having “KOHO” written all over your pads isn’t a tad more menacing than the swooshing, almost flowing RBK designs. Comparatively, Koho even stands out a heck of a lot more, meaning quality advertising. At least Reebok knew enough to not mess with the CCM branding… yet.

Posted on

WordPress releases and betas

I’m knee deep in the world of WordPress right now. I actually oversee five setups, and when there is a new release of an upgrade, that’s five sites I have to work through. Backup here, backup there, overwrite the old, and in with the new. It’s a few hour process when all is said and done.

The big thing right now is that 2.0.7 was released just a few days ago. In fact, 2.0.6 was released not even two weeks ago, and I’d avoid that version if I were you. There was some security concerns in the PHP, meaning that could allow some hacking to happen to your blog. Not good.

The hugely geeky reason that I know this is that I have recently joined up with the development mailing list. Just a couple of days after the 2.0.6 release, there was an announcement on the list about the issue and a test version sent out to all subscribers for testing. This is why I always hesitate to be on that “bleeding edge” of things. It’s good to let people much smarter than you test things out if you don’t have the resources to do it yourself.

The WordPress Podcast is what really got me into the idea of joining the testers mailing list. WordPress 2.1 is in beta, and I get a kick out of seeing the exchange of knowledge about what’s new, what doesn’t work, and so on. You can get more info about it at WordPress Planet.

I did a local install of it and made a preliminary look through of the next generation of WordPress. There’s some interesting things, but it’s still too early for me to report on it. Regardless, I’m looking forward to the full release, as many folks have for over the past year.

The WP Podcast did just mention that there is talk about a 120-day turnaround between versions 2.1 and 2.2, a vast departure of the development, or lack there of, that we’ve seen from the WordPress folks. This won’t stop me from doing development from here on out in 2.1. Who knows when it will go into full release.

Wrote this post while waiting for the last of the sites to finish updating and listening to the They Might Be Giants podcast. Holy crap. Now back to your regularly scheduled geekiness.

Update: This post about 10 things you should know about WordPress 2.1 is a really great read about the new version that should be coming out soon. In fact, this article sites as January 22, 2007 being the day that this version is to be fully released.

Posted on

Muse – starlight

I posted this earlier, but it mysteriously vanished. My ISP has been doing some things behind the scenes to help improve things, so I’ll chalk it up to that.

Anyhoo, been listening to the new album from Muse a lot lately, “Black Holes and Revelations”. A lot of the tracks on this one have a political layer to the lyrics. This one, not so much. Still, I dig the video.