Each year, my family puts up the Christmas Village at my parents’ house. This Department 56 collection has grown year after year and it is now an event several hours long to get it all out of the crawl space and set it all up. Despite the inevitable debates about who’s in charge of the […]
Almost every evening, my relaxation is interrupted by at least one phone call from a telemarketer. I can almost always tell it’s them calling because it’s usually a long distance call exactly at dinner time. Although I have gotten them as late as 10:00pm! The caller id display also typically shows some kind of fake […]
Many people would describe me as an ‘intellectual’. I tend to live my life catering to my intellectual needs, so the activities that fill my spare time are chosen because they are interesting, challenging, or creative. This puts the 3 other cornerstones of a balanced life: emotional/social, physical, and spiritual into a slightly neglected second […]
The first half of 2008 has brought a few changes that have affected my monthly budget and finances, so now is a good time to do some housekeeping and make some adjustments. Three different expenses have gone up for me this year and the most obvious one is gas prices. My monthly gas costs have […]
I’ve been working on searching out sources of free for any use, royalty free (personal or commercial) icon sets that are of high quality and professional looking. I use these in my web-development projects. I’ve had such a hard time finding sets that are free for commercial use. But, after several weeks of searching I’ve […]
While companies are spending billions of advertising dollars to convince you that their brand is cool, trustworthy, and reliable… behind consumers’ backs they are also paying their engineers to create products that will break down sooner than necessary. That’s so you’ll buy another one, and if they’ve caught you with their advertising, you’ll buy it […]
Why can’t I buy this in Canada yet? The ZENN car (Zero Emission No Noise) is developed and built in Canada, plugs into a standard outlet, costs about $12,000, is perfect for city driving, and yet it’s not legal for it to be sold in Canada. Yet. I want one! Check it out on the […]
The online security community is alerting consumers to the fact that joining the Sears My SHC Community program results in spyware being installed onto your computer which tracks all of your internet activity- including logins to bank accounts and other personal data and sends it to a third party (not Sears). This is completely unacceptable […]
I realize it’s a 6 year old article, but it’s new to me and I had to respond. Michael S. Berliner writes in his article “If Environmentalists Succeed, They Will Make Human Life Impossible” found on the website of the Ayn Rand Institute an article which he puts forth as fact regarding the fate of […]
A common problem new developers encounter is when they have an area of their website made private, how do they prevent non-logged-in users from going straight to a non-php file like a word document? There are solutions involving htaccess files but these typically can’t easily be integrated with your PHP user management system. The quick […]