Here is a list of all the Macros built into das Blog.

Vasanth Dharmaraj has an article here showing how to create your own macros, as well as his out creation dasBlog Extra Macros.

“Karen’s Replicator” was suggested by some site as being a good free backup utility.

I am constantly looking for something that will do a better job backing up files.  I wish there were something out there that really did it all, and didn’t cost a ton of money.

I’ll have to give this a try.

The Bears just squeeked out a win against the injury ridden Seahawks, 27-24 in overtime.

What did we learn from this game?

We learned that

• Grossman was able to play at a decent level.  i.e. He didn’t throw up all over himself.
• The defense really has fallen off.  Some suggested that the Bears defense was on auto pilot the last few games, and that is why they had such bad performances.  We can now say for sure that this defense is FAR from the unit that was shutting out opponents early in the year.  The Bears now are frequently giving up 25+ points a game, and they couldn’t stop the running game to save their life (not to mention the 8 yard passes that were available, and taken, all game long).
• Robbie Gould can come through in the clutch.
• Wesley is obviously trying to set the single season record for most obscure 15 yard penalities on punt coverage.  This week he interferred with the returner.  A few weeks back he refused to come back into the field of play (another 15 yard penality).
• Devon Hester shouldn’t be on the field.  I don’t care what up side this guy has.  His chance of dropping the ball, or making the dumbest play on earth (like touching the ball after deciding not to play it on a punt) is FAR greater that his chance for a good return.  This guy had 3 fumbles today!!!  If I were the Saints I would kick every ball to him.  He will drop at least 1.
• Bensen is not going to get much playing time.  I had hoped with the display he put on last week someone would wake up and realize that this guy needs to be on the field, but it looks like are sticking with Jones on the key plays.
• Bensen will continue to out perform Jones.  He had a higher yards/carry again this week, w/o the benefit of some of the nice big holes Jones had.  Jones can’t move the pile.  He can’t move individual players for that matter.  And in the open field, he is too slow to out run anyone, and does too much hopping around to pick up positive yards.  When given a chance, Bensen stays on his feet and pushing forward for extra yards.  Frequently Bensen would have what looked like a “poor” play.  No real hole, just running into people.  But when they spotted the ball, he had picked up 4 yards.
• The O-Line can’t protect Rex.  When the other team is sending just 3 guys, the QB should have a little time before getting hit.
• Rex can’t avoid the pressure.  Rex continues to not setup up in the pocket.  Being a short guy, you would think he would want to move up and get some better visibility of the field.
• Deuce McCalister and Reggie Bush are going to run all over this bears defense. 
• I should have bet on this game.  I thought the Seahawks +8 was a lock.  I would also take the points in the next game (+3 for the Saints).

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a way to “automate” things that computers are not quite able to do.

There really isn’t enough info out there on it yet.  It seems like it could have some pretty interesting applications, but I don’t think you can do anything realtime.

http://requester.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=15879911

SeaLand (not the one in Florida) is basically an old WWII fort that some guy claimed as his own “Country.”

Now it is up for sale.

This site is getting hammered right now, but I will really want to check back later and see all the pictures.

Here is a good article on ways to get your blog noticed by more people.

Some of the more interesting sites mentioned include:

http://www.dmoz.org/

http://megite.com/blog/?page_id=30

MyBlogLog

http://blogcarnival.com/

I really feel pretty stupid…

This weekend I read on a few tech blogs that Steve Jobs had invited his friends to attend his keynote address at MacWorld.

Obviously he was going to unveil something very cool, and obviously that “something” was probably going to be the long awaited iPhone.

It was at this point that I moved on to other things, instead of making the next “obvious” step.

Obviously this would cause Apple’s stock to go up.

APPL was trading around 85 on Monday and 97 on Wednesday, an increase of 14%.

Maybe next time I will hear news like this and make the final connection :).

I have been wanting to switch off of TMobile for a long time due to the lack of high speed data they offer.

I was looking at Verizon, who I currently have my PC card with, and Cingular, who I am currently demoing the 8525 with.

I just looked up their data coverage, and found out that Cingular has a much smaller footprint on chicagoland when compared with Verizon.

See here for Cingular and here for Verizon.

Not the biggest issue, but I do have some clients out West where Cingular would drop me to their slow network.

Update: As far as I can tell, the Cingular 3G network is terrible.  Browsing on it is no better than my 56k max connection on TMobile.  Bandwidth tests show good results, but acutally trying to get websites to show up is terrible.

This site lets you create images with text in them for fun.

They link to a ton of sites that offer these types of things…

http://www.txt2pic.com/

I don’t know anyone having the same problems I am with Outlook 2007, so it could be just my machine, but Outlook 2007 is really ticking me off.

I can deal with a program crashing every now and then, but Oulook does 2 things.

1) Simply stops getting my email from the Exchange server.  I usually notice this when I say… Jeez, I haven’t had an email in the last 3 hours?  That can’t be right.  So I check my status and it either thinks I’m Disconnected (and reconnecting doesn’t have any effect) or it is locked in a “Trying to establish a connection….”.  

But wait there’s more….

So I close down Outlook and relaunch it, only it never appears.  Sometimes I notice that it didn’t show up, but most times I am already on to the next thing and don’t realize it until minutes later when I am looking for my email and wondering… “Didn’t I already launch it (again)?”.

2) Outlook doesn’t close down properly, and these processes seem to keep new ones from working correctly.  So I go to task manager and there will be like 3-6 outlook.exe processes running.  One of them will have like 50-60MB of RAM, and the others will only have 3MB.  I have to kill them all before I can start a new process and launch outlook successfully.

Really really annoying, esp when you miss important emails… or emails you really need to have sent are found sitting in your outbox for hours.