It came out of nowhere, but it seems that Amazon.com has silently earned all of my shopping business - almost regardless of what the product is. It started a few years ago when I first became an Amazon Prime member to get free 2-day shipping on almost everything the site sells. At first I did it just because the $80 yearly cost was going to be less than ...

As I've looked and looked for a quality Twitter app to use on my Mac and PC both - I've narrowed it down to a handful of Adobe Air applications. I've been through Twirl, Tweetr, Toro, and more (there's got to be 50 of them out there). But the one I feel I'm going to stick with, despite the weird logo (see left), is Spaz. I'm not real fond of ...

Yes, I was one of the geeks waiting in line on opening day to get the new iPhone.  I was also one of the millions ticked off for the last two months about how bad the new 2.0 operating system was.  Backup/sync times would take an hour+, freezes, crashes, reformats... ugh. I'm aware that some people are still having problems after the iTunes 8 and iPhone 2.1 ...

Coming out of the busy summer, I've taken on another part-time project. This one is Becomng.com - a personal development blog, focused on publishing motivating self-help articles. I'll be posting myself, as well as posting articles written by others that are relevant to the topic. Instead of writing from the perspective of a "guru," I'm just like my readers -- trying become successful at the next thing ...

Ok, this site has been around a while, but I just really took notice over the last few days. Tumblr basically allows you to create a mini-blog quickly and easily of things you find, think of, conversations you have, quotes, and more. Why is this cool? Well for one thing, it takes some effort to get into this site for me and actually make a post as ...

While bringing back one of my websites, I had the need for a way to check to see if a username is available before the user submits the form. This provides a great user experience - as they don't have to restart the form again after they find out their selected username is already taken! Check out the DEMO. Now, I searched and searched and couldn't find one that ...

I'm not even going to mention the lag between posts here, so back off ok? :) This weekend is the 4th of almost every booked weekend this summer. After laundry, ironing and packing tonight; tomorrow morning I head up to Eau Claire with Mandi for my good friend JoDean's wedding. Mandi will finally get to meet my Mom... probably for lunch on Saturday and then we're going ...

I've thought about getting a Blackberry for a long time - but would I really use it to it's potential? It's caused me to keep putting it off... until this past week. I bought a brand new sealed Blackberry Pearl off eBay and it's already exceeding my expectations. First, what did I want it for? Well, I'm an email addict already - so I wanted to ...

I came across another cool site last weekend and Deann, Derek and I quickly found ourselves spending hours adding information to it. The site is Geni - a family tree site that allows you to build your family tree, invite your family members to help you build it, add information, pictures, and more. It's reportedly grown much faster than expected and last weekend the site was very slow ...

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about waiting for a phone call to find out when my Grandfather passes away. I use Google AdSense to automatically display advertisements on my pages that match the content of that page (Google does that automatically). Unfortunately, that particular post about waiting for death was accompanied by ads for party favors and joke-of-the-day websites. So I wrote ...