• (Nov.26.05) If you are concerned that you might be taken in by a phishing scheme Earthlink has some protection for you. Their Earthlink Toolbar® featuring ScamBlocker®. I haven't tried it nor even read reviews of it. I am just saying that it seems like a good idea and a worthwhile product.

• (Nov.26.05) A scan through Gizmag.com came up with some things for my Christmas list... or, at least, my when I hit the lottery list:

  • My next sports toy: The PowerSki JetBoard - EXTREME watersports and the one after that, the Bionic Dolphin.

  • My next computer user interface: the VirtuSphere and the one after it, BrainGate

• (Dec.3.05) Do you use a computer someplace aside from your home? Have you ever been engaged in such activity and wished that you had a certain bookmark that is on your home computer, that you weren't forced to use Internet Explorer, wished the browser had the customizations you are used to at home, wanted to check your email but your ISP doesn't have a web interface or they do but it doesn't have your address book on it, or, perhaps you wanted to log into a site that you often use but, because of an auto-login setup you never memorized your username and password? Well, if you have a USB drive you can avoid all of that and more. John T. Haller has put a much time and effort into creating portable versions of popular open source(free) applications that you can just copy to your USB drive and, then, run them from it.

  Portable Apps Suite Contains: Portable Firefox (web browser), Portable Thunderbird (email client), Portable OpenOffice.org (office suite), Portable AbiWord (word processor), Portable NVU (web editor), Portable Sunbird (calendar & task list), Portable FileZilla (FTP client), Portable Gaim (instant messenger) and will fit on a 256Mb USB thumbdrive.

  Portable Apps Suite Light: Leaves out Portable OpenOffice.org and will fit on a 128Mb USB thumbdrive.

• (Dec.1705) For those software developers out there; an interesting talk by Charles Petzold.

I added a page for the newest addition to the family here.

Must see information about George W. Bush.

If you are having computer problems, here is some online technical support.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

Congratulations! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be. You can smell a grammatical inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is revered by the underlings, though some may blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just jealous. Go out there and change the world.

How grammatically correct are you? (with answer key)
brought to you by Quizilla

I have been declared a Grammar God. I just had to post this to annoy a certain former coworker. But, I do think this title is passed out a bit too generously since 32% of the 1300 people who took the quiz attained such deity status. And, while the questions are each weighted differently, you can attain god status by answering as few as nine of the questions correctly as per the answer key. (This was based on my testing. It may be possible with fewer correct answers.) But, this is not to say that the quiz is easy particularly, if you are most accustomed to hearing common American English.

A interesting look into a possible future of where IT in general and Web Services in particular are headed. The Information Grid....

With all of the hub-bub about all of the languages that are dying in the world it is nice that Google.com not only is trying to save them but also to promote new languages. Check out some of Googles translations options:

• Bork, bork, bork!,
• Elmer Fudd,
• Hacker,
• Klingon,
• Pig Latin

I added a menu of informational items to the footer of the pages. This included some updates to mksite.pl to dynamically create a site map.

The Whizzinator..."life immitating The Onion". I could have provided a link past the premercial but I found it amusing.

If you too would like to google me, click here.

Well, if I wasn't already famous, here is a shot at it. While I was living in England, United Kingdom, I volunteered as a photographer for the English Heritages Images of England (IoE) project. This means that I went around the local area taking pictures of historically listed (i.e. significant) buildings. This was sponsored by the national lottery fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund. They would pay for any reasonable expenses which, specifically, did not include pints. (Come on, some of those days, that I was walking around outside hunting for buildings were quite windy, cold, and soggy--I think a pint or two to be quite reasonable!) The pictures are added to much other information in the National Monuments Record, such as, architectural investigations, aerial survey and archaeological survey information from the National Building Record, The Ordnance Survey , Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME).

To see the pictures I have taken you need to register with the site, which is free. If you would rather not register, you may use mine which uses the username nocrud2003@yahoo.com and the password none. Then go to the photographer search (Advanced Search / View Photographers), enter my last name, Coakley in the surname box, click Submit, click my name name on the result page. This will return you to the Advanced Search page with my name filled in the View Photograpers section. You can now click Submit to see most of the photographs that I took for IoE.

Also, from the Advanced Search, you can choose Search by Map, click on the dot for Oxford (lower center), click on the dot for Kidlington (bottom center). The Wotton in the top left is where we lived. You can click anything of interest. I took pictures in Combe, Shipton-on-Cherwell and Thrupp.

This should be on every Star Wars fans gift list this summer.


(© Popular Mechanics May 2005)

Scientific American Mind (www.sciammind.com) is a new quarterly magazine put out by the creators of Scientific American (SciAm). For those literalists, no, it is not just about the minds of American scientists. It focuses on..., you guessed it, the human mind.

Apparently, with the advent of fMRI and the dropping in cost of other scanning techniques, this has become a hot area of research.

Whats scarier than a rootKit on your Unix system? A rootKit on your Windows system. Be Afraid. Be very Afraid. The wonderful guys at SysInternals.com, Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich, have created a program to detect these scourges. More information about their RootkitRevealer can be found here.

Added a Job Support Calendar for the Twin Cities, MN.

I added RSS (Berkman RSS 2.0) and XML (W3C RSS 1.0) feeds of this journal to the site. You may now feed your addiction. Want to know what RSS is? or where to get software to read an RSS feed?. The one this page doesn't mention is the highly regarded RSS reading plug-in for Internet Explorer (IE) known as Pluck. Get Pluck here.

Here is a something should have been made much more public, much sooner than now. Be warned: If you are on hold with a company, everything you say may be recorded. Just think, have you or your spouse ever said a credit card number, pin number or online account login while on hold thinking nobody would hear? You might well have been wrong. Bruce Schneier reports on: Telephone Monitoring While on Hold.

I updated my computer security page.

I removed the pretty music from automatically loading with the this and the home pages. Here is the link if you are still interested in it: Something special for the holidays: A new album!