Do you want to travel the world, see what landscapes look like that are thousands of miles away? The the Degree Confluence Project is for you. The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted. You can spend hours here, looking at the pictures & reading the stories of how they got to the intersections of most all of the countries of the world. Let me know what you think!

Virtually all applications you install using the default installation these days decide that they should start-up when Windows starts. If you allow these to take control, you can end up with a situation where (unless you have sufficient memory installed) every other program slows down to be unusable. A few years ago, I found a website that helps to decode what processes are running at startup, and which ones that you don't need. It gives a good tutorial on what to look for, and how to stop them so your machine will start up quicker, and run faster. The website is HERE

If you are bored this winter, you can watch a live webcam of the Old Faithful geyser. Maybe you can see buffalo or other animals that roam around Yellowstone National  Park. You will need Windows Media Player. It erupts every 60-90 minutes.....so be patient!

The other day, Barb got a call from a group called the "Childhood Leukemia Foundation" and they ask for a pledge. She plegded to them, but when she got the notice for payment she asked me about the charity. I didn't know anything about them, so I found out about them by visiting Charity Navigator. What I found out about this group, was that they spend 60% of the money that they raise on fundraising and only 32% on program expenses. So we didn't send them any money. Visit http://www.charitynavigator.org/ before you give!

Lately we have been watching the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. I have laughed so hard I had tears running down my leg. Here is a sample, but go to YouTube and watch more. He and his pals are the funniest ever!

It has become a Christmas tradition for Mom to come to our house and we also invite a few family friends. The year we had Dr. Robert Wilson, Jimmy King, and Bill Christofferson....along with Ryan & Mom & surrogate dauhter Leah Kleager. A good time was had by all, and Barb's pime rib tuned out great as usual! Pictures

The IRON KEY is described as " designed to be the world's most secure USB flash drive, locks down your sensitive files and passwords with some of today's most advanced security technologies, including hardware encryption for safeguarding your data and advanced Internet protection software and services for securing your passwords and web browsing  And even if your IronKey is lost or stolen, not only is your data still protected, but you can restore it from an encrypted backup to a new IronKey and be up and running again in no time."

The thing that I like most obout the Iron Key is that it keeps a set of portable bookmarks of your secure sites and when you click on, for example your bank site, it will fill your username and password. If you are like me and have dozens of secure sites that you log on to...this is GREAT! All you need is one password to get into the Iron Key and all the rest are stored encrypted on it. This product is a must for those people that use public computers to protect against keyloggers stealing you usernames and passwords.

I have one and I LOVE it!!!

This rates pretty high on the "Cool" scale. You can send a text message to Google and they will text back the answer quickly! You send your message to 466453 and text "pizza missouri valley ia" and it will send you back the names and addresses  & phone numbers of pizza places near Mo. Valley. You can also ask it for weather 51555 or directions, sports, stock quotes etc. See more on this web page. I can see where this could come in very handy!

Try this one.....my best is 18.9 seconds

I just found this in my Microsoft RSS feeds. It is a webcast by my cousin Chris Bertelson on advanced uses of Office 2007. I haven't had time to watch all of it yet.....but what I have watched is very good. If you ever need to know anything about any of the Office programs....Chris is the "go to" guy. Chris has been giving his "Tips and Tricks" seminars for years and is really quite good. Look at his webcast here. The is another guy who is not my cousin that does a webcast on basic Tips and Tricks for Office here.