I’ve posted a page devoted to upgrades, mods, and hacks for the MacBook Core Duo. Yeah, I’ve really pimped it out with MacStyles, iColours, an OptiBay, and 802.11n card! I’m devoted to trying to keep this computer for as long as possible minus AppleCare!
I’m happy to announce the birth of Today’s Reason to Play Hooky. “Isn’t this basically Today’s Reason to Drink?” you say. Well, yeah, kind of. However, I’ve reworded the reasons and am working on adding additional ones. Plus, this is much more family-friendly. One of the things that likely hurts Today’s Reason to Drink is it isn’t listed in the Google Gadget Directory unless users specifically search for it, so I’d been meaning to put together one that’s not quite so drinking-oriented for a while.
Anyway, add it! Let me know if you like it! And of course, tell me how I could improve it!
Also, these sorts of announcements and more are always available at my company blog.
I bought a Master combination lock sometime last year to use with hostel lockers, but I keep on forgetting the combination. Every once in a while, it comes back to me in a flash of enlightenment, but I can’t really count on that happening by tomorrow. (I leave for NYC, then Philly, then DC for two days each on a crazy $0.50 total Megabus trip.) A little Googling turned up this page on cracking a Master Lock, which works! Thankfully, I didn’t have to try all 64 combinations, as I remembered the lock repeated the first and last numbers, which was somewhere in the thirties.
Anyway, this is really cool. I don’t have to buy a new lock or go through the ridiculous process of finding a notary and getting them to send me my combo.
It appears that the Google Gadget Directory now has a critical mass requirement before they’re willing to add gadgets. As a result, I guess I’ll announce these three gadgets here and hope that some of you add them to your iGoogle pages. Just click this button 
to add all three in one fell swoop. If you know anyone who may be interested, then please tell them! I’m especially proud of the pollen count gadget, as it’s truly useful and will be something I check everyday to determine whether or not I should pop a pill.
The first gadget is Today’s Reason to Drink. This one’s been around for nearly two years now and has ~100,000 users, so I’m not too concerned about publicizing it. However, if you haven’t seen it before, then here’s your chance to add it!
The second gadget is the Local Pollen Count. It reports current pollen and air quality data internationally using data from AccuWeather.com. Seriously, you can put in anything from a zip code to an international city and get local data, which is really cool.
The last gadget is Blingo Search & Win. Basically, it allows you to search using Blingo from your iGoogle page. It includes web, image, and advanced search.
I’ve been on a real gadget-writing kick lately, so there will likely be more to come shortly. In case you can’t tell, I really like iGoogle for this, though I’ve branched out a bit into other APIs.
MPR: Select a Candidate 2008: President
This is a pretty nifty tool that matches your opinions with those of the presidential candidates. I especially like how it doesn’t even tell you their party affiliations. As I suspected, Barack Obama’s at the top of my list with Ron Paul (whose name is intractably associated with RuPaul in my head) at the bottom.
When I moved to the new server, I didn’t quite move everything. Now, I’ve uploaded anything that might be of some interest to someone out there. It’s all quite outdated, but it’s there in case anyone wants to take a look (and people actually do from time to time):
My stress level suddenly decreased drastically. Why?
Next steps:
If you happen to know someone who works for a booze company (or really any company) who might want to sponsor the Today’s Reason to Drink gadget, then please please please let me know. This thing eats up bandwidth and server resources like nothing else. It currently gets about 2 million page views per day, so this is by no means a bad marketing opportunity!
I can’t wait to cancel my old shared web hosting! I’ll wait a few days, though, to ensure that everyone’s DNS caches are up to date, though.
The list of things that I’ve won from Blingo keeps on getting longer and longer. I’m excited to be the latest winner of a $5 Amazon gift certificate! I had the choice between that and a free movie ticket. While the movie ticket may be worth more monetarily, I opted for the Amazon gift certificate, as I’d get much more utility from that.
Anyway, if you haven’t joined Blingo yet, then what are you waiting for? Seriously, they actually give away stuff, and you can actually win. If you join using my link, then I get to win when you win, too!
I just watched The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard and found it to be a good and enjoyable overview of the evils of American consumption. My only criticism is it doesn’t go very deeply into how to fix all these problems. The video just glosses over the solutions and names a bunch of terms that it doesn’t even define. However, the point is unmistakably clear: buy less crap and save the world!
