Working in a giant corporate environment, its hard for me to imagine this gaining widespread usage among my current peers.  However, this is a tremendous example of what can be done with a web based collaborative application.  Its called Google Spreadsheets.  ZDnet has an image gallery and article that showcases many of its features.  You can find it among many other interesting offerings by clicking the 'more ' link from the Google home page.  Google Spreadsheets falls under the Google Labs link.  It obviously isn't nearly as robust as Microsoft Excel, yet still, its pretty amazing all you can do considering what it is.

Here in the Northeast, we're experiencing a wee bit of flooding.  There is talk of all of this being worse than Agnes in 1972, breaking 300 years of records.  In my attempt to make it to work this morning, I snapped a few photos of all the road blocks I encountered.  Click on a photo to see the rest of the pictures in my gallery.

There is an interesting article on Popular Science which talks about flying windmills, tidal turbines, bugs that convert sunlight into hydrogen and negawatts.  All good stuff to help ensure our energy independent future.  A topic I'm really glad to see getting more press lately.  Not only for reducing our reliance on foreign oil, but even more so, for the environmental impacts traditional energy means produce.  Its high time we start coming up with true and solid, clean and renewable energy sources.

We got out to see Nacho Libre last night.  It was all right.  Not quite as funny as we had anticipated.  Although, maybe we just weren't in a giddy enough mood.  I'm thinking that it may be one of those movies that gets funnier the more you watch it.  Having said that, it still had a lot of great moments.  And Jack Black's facial expressions are just priceless.  The movie certainly had the feel of Napoleon Dynamite.  Very similar in visuals and soundtrack.  It looks as though Jared Hess has is own style and niche already.

 If you enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite, there is a good chance you'll enjoy this as well.  And if you hate Napoleon, well, there is probably little hope you'd like this.  Its a good time, I wouldn't say rush right out though.  It's definitely a good one for watching on DVD.

I'm typing my first post here using the editormonkey plug-in for wordpress.  Seems to be a pretty nice replacement rich text editor.  The big benefit that I see is the spell check feature.  It seems to be the only way to implement a rich text editor with a spell checker.  All of the other spell checker plug-ins I've found had to be used with the plain text editor.  I did find though that there is a conflict between the implementation of TinyMCE in editormonkey and the wp-contactform plug-in.  If you have both enabled you wind up some code that shows up below your editing box.  Disabling the wp-contactform plug-in fixes this.  And best of all, the TinyMCE version packed with editormonkey seems to be compatible with the flickr photo album plug-in as well.  Where as the FCKEditor packed with it does not.

What on earth could posses a company to do something so ridiculous? Dell builds and sells personal computers for the average home PC user. Now, apparently, most if not all of their power supplies are of a proprietary design. That's just a shitty thing to do right from the get go. On top of that, they use a standard ATX connector. Which would allow the average user to attempt to save a few bucks, buy a standard replacement power supply and attempt to install it themselves. There after frying their motherboard because they fed the wrong voltages to their motherboard. Now, on top of both of those issues, they have the Dimension 8100 PC. This PC they designed apparently has a one of kind pin configuration. Why? There are companies out there trying to sell a replacement power supply ranging in price from 100 to 200 dollars. If you call dell direct, because you can't find it on their website, they will offer you a replacement for about 60 bucks plus another 12 in shipping and taxes. 72 bucks for a 300 watt power supply. <sarcasm>Sounds like a steal to me</sarcasm>. (more…)