I just finished watching the series premier of Leave it to Beaver on the Netflix website.

It's hilarious! I remember watching the reruns when growing up, but it's so much funnier now that I'm married and have a little boy.

After Beaver lied to his teacher saying that his father just got home from the hospital, flowers arrived at the Cleaver home with a note from the principal that she hoped to see him on his feet again.

Mrs. Cleaver: "Who is this woman, and when did she see you not on your feet?!"

Talk about pushing the envelope! Today's tv has nothing over the 50s.

Got to go, I just started episode two when Wally and Beaver mail-ordered a live baby alligator from Florida! (Why can't we do that today?)

... to my own website.

I want the flexibility to be able to do more than blogger lets me do, and also maybe make it (or a separate one) a blog that my lady can post to as well.

Any objections? Comment, let me know.

Comment. I dare you. I challenge you.

You may remember when I broke down last year and bought my first cell phone.

Last week I broke down and bought my first video game.

Don't get me wrong, I've played friends' Nintendo games, and have enjoyed my fast-paced thriller games of solitaire. But this is the first game I've ever paid for.

We've played Guitar Hero on my brother-in-law's XBox, and it's a blast. When I saw there is a mac/pc port, and that it was on sale, I bought it. I've got my XBox usb guitar controller plugged in, and I'm set.

Here's a quick review if you're thinking about buying it:

• pros: Super easy setup, plays just like GH3 for game systems, you can alt+tab and switch back to your work applications, so you can play this at work without your boss knowing. The guitar might be a bit obvious, so you can play with keyboard controls if you want.
• cons: Took a long long time to get the audio and video synced up. My video card isn't that great, so while it works, having the animated CG crowd was slowing the game down. I turned off the crowd and it works great.

So, I'm brushing up so that next time we go to my in-laws' I can surprise them with my mad skills. Luckily they're not blog readers, so they don't know yet. Shhhh!

Often, even with a widescreen monitor, my desktop is too unorganized. I've got way too many programs open, and it's annoying to switch back and forth to all of them, alt+tabbing through the list to find what I need. Enter VirtuaWin.

VirtuaWin allows you to have up to 9 virtual desktops with separate windows on them. Here's how I've got mine split up right now:

1. Background (never need to see, but want these windows open and running) - a Firefox window with online streaming radio
2. Programming - Eclipse, a program I use to program web applications, and Pidgin instant messenger
3. Web - Another Firefox window with tabs for what I'm working on.
   
4. Personal - some side programs that I have open that aren't related to work.

So I program on desktop 2, then flip over to 3 to reload Firefox for my web application - both able to be full-screen, and the switch is a 2-key combination and unlike Alt+Tab, I don't have to sort through all my programs to get to the one I want.

Totally free.

Download for your computer.

Download for your thumb drive.

Here's the latest scary quote from Barak Obama:

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said. [source]

My various reactions

1. I have never heard of another country being upset with the temperature inside American home.
2. Why would citizens of one country care what another country's government thought about their choice of cars or home thermostats? Why should I even care about my own president cares about what car I drive and how hot I keep my home?
3. What happened to the idea of freedom and being pro-choice? Barak doesn't want you to be able to choose to eat what you want to eat, to choose 72 degrees for your thermostat or to choose any car you want to drive.
   
4. Yes, Americans are getting enough to eat. This is a problem? I thought not getting enough to eat was the problem.
5. Let me guess Barak, the solution is higher taxes to pay for a bigger more invasive government to ration food, dictate what care we can own, and outlaw air conditioning?

What the crap!?

You say hello, I say say goodbye. Hello Obama. Goodbye freedom.

Prediction:
Just like every time to date where Obama has been caught saying something revealing how completely socialist he is, he'll respond in the following way when confronted about this:

• I misspoke, I should have used different words.
• Stop bringing up distractions, the American people don't want to spend time on this, they want to hear about [change of topic].
• Well, if John McCain merely quotes me, that's an attack, and I'm tired that crazy right wing attack machine. How dare they quote what I myself said!

This weeks online freebie is an amazing resource for individuals, businesses and non-profits.

I periodically work with website clients who have run out of space in their email account. It seems a strange problem until I see that their web host has only given them 2MB of space for every email account. To put this in perspective, my email curently takes up 1,746 MB.

On top of that, most email programs are difficult to use, and hard to add new emails for users for your domain's email.

The options have usually been:

1. Deal with only having room for a few emails in your email address@yourdomain.com
2. Pretend to be professional while using a hotmail, yahoo, or msn account.

Thanks again to Google for their new free hosted email offering.

Now you can tweak the MX record on your domain to have gmail handle all of your email. You'll use the gmail interface, have over 6GB of space for each user, and still be sending and receiving emails @yourdomain.com.

And, yes, it's free, for up to 100 users at your domain.

Check it out at http://www.google.com/a

See all wawasan posts
Wawasan is Indonesian meaning 'insight.' Wawasan posts will be my insights into current events, politics, etc. My goal is not to be on a soap box or spread an agenda, but just to spur thought and hopefully discussion - maybe even discussion in the comments here.

1. I recently drove past a car with this bumper sticker:

2. But Bush's opponents want higher gas prices. Michael Bloomberg, who some speculate will be Obama's running mate, explained the left's view on this:

[Lowering taxes on gas is] dumbest thing I’ve heard in an awful long time from an economic point of view. I don’t understand why you think there’s any merit to it whatsoever. We’re trying to discourage people from driving ...The last thing we need to do is encourage people to drive more"

1. If you vote liberal, you are not allowed to complain about high gas prices. The people you're voting for want the gas prices high.

2. This is a display of the left's view that a major role of the government is to oppress the poor to force obedience to their political agenda.

People on the right say:

• If I can't convince you to willingly choose to do what I think is best, and if the market doesn't convince you, then you don't have to do what I want you to do.
  

People on the left say:

• If I can't convince you to willingly choose to do what I think is best, I'll just tax you until you're too poor to do anything except what I want you to do..

(Obviously these viewpoints are about legal behavior choices.)

Comcast changed where I have to sign in to view my cable internet bill. I don't remember my password. I have Firefox remember my passwords for me, and I know I've had it remember my comcast login info. With the change on comcast's web page, it's not filling it in.

Luckily, in Firefox you can see your saved usernames and passwords.

Start at the Firefox menus, and click:

Tools->Options->Security->Show Passwords->Show Passwords.

Firefox stores these alphabetically, so www.google.com is going to be much further down the list than google.com, and mail.google.com is going to be somewhere in between

View all Money Maven Monday postsHave you ever tried searching the web for store coupons? Most search results are junk pages from 'coupon websites' that don't have any coupons.

Ends up there are a lot of people who search the web for deals, and they've started forums in a few places. My favorite is Slickdeals.net , another is fatwallet.com .

Just a couple of things I've done within the last 30 days thanks to Slick Deals:

• Saved $30 on fish and supplies for my aquarium from Petsmart with printable coupons
  
• Have a rebate coupon to get 4 free movie tickets for spending $3 at Del Taco on my American Express card
• Found Lord of the Rings hardcover boxed set for $10 at Barnes & Noble online store (with coupons from the forum)
  
• Compared interest rates on dozens of banks

It's worth a shot to search the slick deals forum before making your next purchase.

View all Garden posts
2 weeks ago(ish) I transplanted and seeded:

• lettuce
• bok choy
• spinach
• leek
• onion
• green onion
  

Today I transplanted some veggies (and sunflowers) into my garden :

• 30 sunflower
  
• 9 tomato
  
• 4 bell pepper
• 3 pumpkin
• 2 watermelon
  
• 1 celery(the only one to make it)
  
• dill

I also planted seeds for:

• cucumbers
• snow peas
• green beans
• lettuce
• bok choy
• dill

Mmmm... looks to be a tasty summer.

Today's random tidbit:

How many ways do we pronounce the four letter combo: 'ough'?

1. Though - rhymes with so
2. Through - homophone with threw
3. Cough,- rhyme with off
4. Tough, enough - rhyme with buff
5. Borough and its compounds - pronounced "burr-ah"
6. Hiccough - rhymes with up. I'd normally use the spelling "hiccup", though.
7. Bough (as in "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly") - rhymes with cow
8. Fought, bought - rhyme with caught
9. and maybe even nought and ought, which some people pronounce the same way as fought and bought.
   

One that didn't make my list:

• Lough - another spelling for loch, a lake - like the Lochness monster... but it's an Irish, not an English word from what I can tell. It's not on my list because we often pronounce non-English words in non-English ways, and my point is how in normal English we pronounce 'ough'
  

Wish you could just pick up your cell phone and say "note to self - meeting with Joe on Friday at 4" or "note for Bob - will you call Steve and talk about the proposal?" or "note to blog", etc?

What if it would schedule the meeting, email Bob and post the text to your blog automatically?

Jott.com can do all of this and more. And it's free. Just call the toll-free number, and it will say "Who would you like to Jott?" you can say "myself" or "Bob" (if Bob is in your address book at Jott.com), or "google calendar" or "blogger," or many other things. It converts your speech to text, posts it where it should, and you're done!

I don't use it much anymore now that I have my Blackberry, but it's a great free service that I highly recommend.

Do you have to do repetitive tasks on your PC?

I've had to at past jobs, things like formatting multiple pages of an excel spreadsheet, or cutting and pasting things in a specific way - really monotonous work. Enter Macros.

There are several macro programs out there that can automate these mouse movements and keystrokes, often faster than you can.

Two recommendations:
First, a very simple macro program I've been using for years, WinMacro. WinMacro just records your mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes, and then you can play these recordings back at the same speed or faster, and 1 or more repetitions.

If you want more options, and want to program your macros, check out AutoHotKey. I first used AutoHotKey when I was having to do the same 10 steps for hundreds of accounts, it was all repetitive, except I had to enter account numbers and account balances for each one. AutoHotKey allows you to program in inputs, so you can have it ask for all the information you need, then it will use the mouse and keyboard to proceed through all the screens and/or multiple programs and put your information where you want it.

Today at an event for high school seniors, a slideshow was shown with photos over the last 6 years. Some of the students seem the same, some seem drastically different.

When you see years of your life flash before your eyes a lot becomes clearer. Things like...

1. That series of small decisions I made turned my life in a drastically different direction.
2. Decisions I made against that series (see #2), didn't matter in the end.

So, I think I ought to start making more consistent decisions (especially the small ones) in the direction I want my life to go, and I think I ought to start caring less about occasional decisions that go against the direction i want my life to go.

1. Create a situation bad enough for a patron to write your corporate office.
2. Have the corporate office send out 2 coupons for free drinks
3. Refuse to accept both coupons, insist you can only take 1 at a time
4. Use the coupon on the cheapest drink, charging the customer for the $6 drink instead.