Archive for July, 2009
A C-130 was lumbering along when a cocky F-16 flashed by.
The jet jockey decided to show off. The fighter jock told the C-130 pilot, ‘watch this!’ and promptly went into a barrel roll followed by a steep climb. He then finished with a sonic boom as he broke the sound barrier. The F-16 pilot asked the C-130 pilot what he thought of that?
The C-130 pilot said, ‘That was impressive, but watch this!’
The C-130 droned along for about 5 minutes and then the C-130 pilot came back on and said: ‘What did you think of that?’
Puzzled, the F-16 pilot asked, ‘What the heck did you do?’
The C-130 pilot chuckled. ‘I stood up, stretched my legs, walked to the back, went to the bathroom, then got a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun.’
When you are young & foolish – speed & flash may seem a good thing !!!
When you get older & smarter – comfort & dull is not such a bad thing !!!
The Split Stick is a double-sided USB drive that lets you enforce a digital divide between office and personal, home and away, his and hers, or whatever else you choose to separate.
Split Stick is two, two-gigabyte retractable USB drives that are built into one slim (four gigabyte) stick. Formed of an anodized aluminum body and encased in a protective rubber membrane. They’re anodized in a range of colors: orange, blue, pink, red, black, violet, grey, or green. The plastic button allows you to easily navigate between the two different sides of the drive.
The drive also comes with the option of laser etching text or icons on either side of the switch to help you distinguish between drives.
Available for $20 at Split Stick.
I’ve always had dreams of writing and publishing a novel, it’s a dream that I’ll probably never realize but it’s one that still buzzes around in the back of my mind. I ran across this article on makeuseof.com about publishing your own book through Publish America.
With Publish America you write your book, e-mail or mail it in to PublishAmerica. They review it for quality and grammar and see if it will garner some sort of market. If that’s all good, they’ll talk to you about a contract. You sign the contract. They design a cover for the book. They market the book on their website and to different booksellers such as Barnes and Noble, Ingram, Borders.com and others. They also give you some advice on promoting the book yourself. Your book sells and they send you royalty payments. You retain complete control over the intellectual property and rights to it, for say, movie deals or what have you.
You could certainly use a vanity published or hire an agent but that costs money and unless you are a superstar marketer with a genuine bestseller on your hands, your odds of recouping what you paid to self-publish are pretty slim indeed. You have to take care of getting your own ISBN, or copyrighting the book as well as the cover design and art work. Or you can pay the vanity publisher more to do that for you.
If you choose the literary agent route, then you’re looking at trying to find an agent who will take on an unknown author, and will actually work hard to get you published. Then they take a slice of what you make on the book, on top of everyone else traditionally involved in publishing taking their slice. That might work out if you sell 4 million books, yet the odds are slim on that as well.
While they don’t publish every manuscript that comes to them, supposedly they do take more risks than other traditional publishing houses. They have published over 40,000 authors since 1996. Some of those authors have gone on to make writing their career, have movie deals and receive some pretty significant critical praise.
Read the original article on makeuseof.com.
I was recently tasked to investigate CD/DVD Printer technologies as the church I attend–Dardenne Prairie Bible Church–has been considering the possibility of buying one so we can label CDs of the sermons. Right now we just use a Sharpie to write the sermon info on the face of the CDs and thought it would be nice to make them look more professional. Since I don’t really know anything about CD printers I was a little apprehensive to assume the task of recommending a printer but I figured it would be an opportunity to learn. Not only that, I selfishly recognized that my research efforts would offer some fodder for my site.
Amazon made its biggest cut yet in the Kindle lineup, bringing the six-inch, second-generation Kindle to $299 with free shipping. Since I’ve only owned my Kindle 1 for a year I’ve held off on buying a Kindle 2; it really doesn’t offer anything of interest over and above the Kindle 1 that justifies the cost. I think I’ll wait for the hefty price of $489 to drop on the Kindle DX which has a 9.7 inch screen.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,Having worked at McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing, for almost 18 years I found this time lapsed video of an F/A-18 Super Hornet being built from the ground up pretty interesting. I had been assigned to the F/A-18 during the final 10 years of my employment with Boeing. Enjoy!
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,I’ve personally only used eBay a handful of times for purchases but have friends that use eBay with fanatical enthusiasm. I ran across this article posted on makeuseof.com that shows 4 alternative ways to search and track items offered on eBay and thought I’d repost.
eBay Desktop
The official eBay Desktop is an Adobe AIR app which mirrors all the searching, tracking, and bidding functionality of the site, plus filtering features, search history, real-time updates. There’s no need to keep refreshing your browser to see updates to whatever item you’re tracking. Enter a keyword and watch the search results update by themselves.
Lastminute Auction
Lastminute Auction search features auctions that all have current prices under $1 (not including shipping), and all have less than an hour to go. Register to keep favorite categories handy, and you’ve got a good chance here to snatch up a great deal.
Typo Buddy
Typo Buddy is a site on which you can take advantage of human error and hopefully find yourself a steal. When you do an eBay smart search for “Nintendo”, you get all the results with that keyword. What you don’t get are “Nintedno”, “Nintenro”, “Nihtendo”, or many other misspellings. Typo Buddy will find all of them, with the idea that the auctions’ low profile will let you swoop in and pay a lower price for the items.
Unwired Buyer
Unwired Buyer keeps an eye on your watch list and lets you place bids by phone in the closing minutes.
Original article on makeuseof.com
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,