I used to travel quite a bit in my last job and accrued some random airline miles here and there. I couldn’t keep track of how much I had and where they were until I found out about Awardwallet.com. It’s a free site that tracks your balances in one convenient place and even alerts you if your miles are going to expire. Although you might want to manually check once in a while, because I had some Jetblue credit expire on me. You can get a free six month upgrade for first-time users if you use the following coupon code: free-yfakbw.
Tag Archives: tools
My Glass Booth
I almost titled this post: Barack, the baby killer?
But before I get into that, check me out:
There’s a little quiz at glassbooth.org that helps you find out which presidential candidate most closely aligns with you.
I don’t usually post about politics much here, probably because I’m not much of a political person. But for the presidential election, I can’t decide which is the lesser of evils. Both candidates are far from perfect. As you can see, I’m pretty evenly divided. Of course, I can’t say anything about the validity of that quiz, but it’s fun to try out all the neat election tools out there.
Practically every one around me is probably going to vote for Barack because I live on the left coast. My friend and I were watching the debate last night and we were discussing the topic of abortion as it came up between the 2 candidates. I know many of my friends are fervent Obama supporters, but I don’t know if I can hang with his stance on abortion. Of course, I don’t know if I’d go for John McCain either since my current situation would allow me to benefit more from Obama’s tax plans. Might as well call me Jen the Plumber. Check out Obama’s Tax Cut Calculator.
Anyhoo, I’ve learned that in every single vote related to the issue of abortion, Obama’s favored abortion, its legality and even the killing of children who survive abortion. (As an Illinois state senator, four times he voted “no” on the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Defined Act, which would protect babies born alive after failed abortions.)
In a 2007 speech he made for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Obama said,
We know that a woman’s right to make a decision about how many
children she wants to have and when— without government interference—is
one of the most fundamental freedoms we have in this country. . . . I have worked on this issue for decades now. I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught constitutional law. . . So, you know where I stand. . . The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing that I’d do.
So before fixing the economy, helping the poor, and protecting the environment, he’s going to make sure that abortion stays legal. He wants to allow 16 year olds to have abortions without parental consent, where these same 16 year olds can’t even be given aspirin without permission?
During the debate, my friend, who is in her 2nd year of med school, was talking about how there may be legislation requiring doctors to perform abortions. If they decline, they may lose their licensing. Wouldn’t it make a little more sense to allow doctors to refer their patients to someone else if they themselves do not agree with this procedure? What is this world coming to?
Oh, and Obama supports late-term abortions too. Infanticide or not?
“Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 18:21)
Too complex. Too many things to think about. All I know is that I would never want to run for president.
Added Lifestream Page
Don’t know why anyone else would be interested in this, but I like having this documentation of my actions all across the web in one place. It’s like the newsfeed in Facebook, but it’s my very own web lifestream page. I used David Cramer’s lifestream plugin for wordpress. You can download it here.
There’s also an entire wordpress theme designed around this whole lifestream thing called Agregado.
If you want to connect with me using some of these tools, get your hands dirty.
Picasa 3 beta (windows only)
Again, Google continues to carry out its mission: to try to take over the world.
I’ve just downloaded the Picasa 3 beta. You can now make movies, take screenshots and webcam shots, add watermarks and print captions. It also comes with a new photo viewer that looks like this:
Hey, the easter egg still works! Anyone else trying out the beta?
Google Chrome Beta Download (Windows Only)
Edit: Sept. 3, 2008
me: i miss my adblocker
joey: it has adblock
joey: doesn’t it
joey: o wait it doesn’t
joey: lol it doesnt’ block google ads
oh, and type about:internets into the address bar to get a fun little animation.
If you haven’t heard the news, Google released its own browser today. Google Chrome – Download. Anyone try it out yet? You can check out the comic book or more features in video form.
What’s this Twitter thing?
Am I the only one out of all my friends who uses Twitter? Maybe it’s because I’m the biggest internet geek I know or it’s because of my unlimited free texting that comes with my phone plan. Either way, there’s so much hype about it nowadays that I finally had to see why people like it so much. I signed up for an account a few months ago, but it wasn’t until these last couple weeks that I decided to give it a second look.
Here’s a good introductory video on what it is (from Commoncraft.com):
I’ve included my latest updates under the “What am I doing?” section in the sidebar using Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. I also use TwitterSync to make my Facebook status match my Twitter status.
People might be thinking “who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day?” but for the techie-types out there like me, here’s a good article about why twitter isn’t a waste of time.
Anyone else out there using twitter?
Headphones and Feed Readers
Look, these are only $30 on Amazon! I posted about them back in November.
I gotta stop looking at all these deals. I've been buying online too much. Online shopping is addicting!
I've also been sharing some of the deals at the bottom of this page. People have been asking me where I find them. Truth is, I don't go looking for them. They come to me. Many sites now offer their content in RSS form. You can subscribe to these feeds using an aggregator such as Bloglines or Rocket RSS Reader. I personally have been using the new Google Reader. I can choose to "read all" and scroll through all the articles as though I were reading one long webpage. There are lot of other google reader tools and neat things you can do with RSS. Is anyone into this? And if so, what reader do you use and what types of feeds do you subscribe to?
A newspaper clipping
Cool Tool: Icebox
Someone get me this so we can make igloos on our next snow trip. Yeah, right, can’t waste time off the mountain.
Geek salad
I worked a half day today, which was great cuz I got to relax. The other half was spent catching up on reading all my RSS subscriptions. I like it cuz I don’t have to visit every single website, all the news that gets published is brought to me. I use Thunderbird since I use it for email as well, but if you want to try it out, I’d suggest something like Bloglines. I also found livemarks, which is a project to show del.icio.us bookmarks live. There’s a handy dandy Firefox extension called JustBlogIt that let’s me blog about things pretty effortlessly. Firefox? What, too cool for IE? That’s right. I should put up one of those images, but I think the pop up bar I have now is good enough.
I’m a little late, Open Office 2.0 is out. Finally, I can edit my resume without it looking all weird.
And I also found a lot of cool broadband tools. While you’re there, test your line performance. Or find out your IP address. A lot of people probably already know about this stuff. See, I’m not that geeky. Wait, I just posted about it, yeah I am.
Anyways, I did almost nothing today, which was a time of much needed rest. I gotta make sure I get my stuff done. Remember the milk.
Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools
For my sister: a cool bug sucker. The bugs are sucked in good condition into a chamber on the end of the Bugzooka where they can be studied by a child (probably male) or released humanely. If you really don’t care to see the bugs up close, the kit includes a smoked-plastic version of the capture chamber. My guess is that Melissa would use the smoked capture chamber.
CSS tricks, PHP code, and online webtools
lixlpixel.org CSS tricks, PHP code, and online webtools
A few free hours
Wow, I forgot what color my car was. It’s been so long since I last washed it. It’s been brown for the last few months.
Since I have a faster computer now, I thought I’d do a little customizing with some of the lovely tools over at Stardock. I love eye candy. I can’t stop playing around with it.
And my back still hurts…a lot.
Web stuff for a living?
D: procrastinating doing some work on somebody’s website
BEEJ: it must be different when you’re not working on your own
D: yeah, it’s different when it’s a job.
D: i’m getting to do a little PHP scripting though, so that’s mildly interesting.
BEEJ: that’s cool
BEEJ: you write everything yourself?
D: i probably *should* have cribbed somebody else’s work
D: but yeah, i hacked it together myself.
D: it’s not that complicated — it does a tiny bit of checking
Not that complicated? I want to do so many things with this site. Too bad I don’t know how to code. I’ve set up certain blog tools and a couple of other web apps but that doesn’t mean I understand how it works. I wish I knew more. There’s so much more to learn out there. I wonder if I would have this same eagerness to learn if I were doing this for a living.