As I’ve mentioned before, I have a ton of little applications on my system. Keeping them all up to date is a pain, but another handy application from FileHippo (a file download site): the filehippo.com Update Client, which will check to see if there are updates for the software you hae installed on FileHippo’s site. It found 10 updates for me, and it’s a 108KB beta download, so give it a whirl!
Category: Cool
Boy Scout Earns All 121 Merit Badges
No word if he’s ever had a girlfriend or any sort of social life, but it’s still impressive. Full story.
New Version Of Time Killing Game
I linked to the original version of Desktop Tower Defense a couple weeks ago, and there’s a new version out that will kill even more of your day.
Florida Wins, and Scott’s Mad Dribblerz Wins The ’07 Pick ‘Em
Sorry I’m a bit late on this — was tearing apart a friend’s laptop last night and didn’t get online after the game. But Florida won the championship, which means that Scott’s Mad Dribblerz is our 2007 Tourney Pick ‘Em winner. Below is the final scoring talley:
- Scott’s Mad Dribblerz: 158
- Rusty from Portland: 153
- goldenglove7624: 151
- bend no more: 146
- bojack: 141
- #1 bracket: 141
- casual picks: 134
- shots hot: 132
- GO GATORS!!: 131
- PLU_STATS_231_2: 130
- Coz’s Bracket: 119
- monkeyinabox: 116
- whiteybarkley: 114
- Repeating Greatness: 114
- Reigning Dud: 107
- jaylee: 106
- MN Shivs: 99
- Bowser: 97
- jenB_goDucks!: 95
- Tasmanian Devils: 94
- Briar Patch Project: 86
- PAIZANO’S PIZZA: 85
- I can’t think of a name: 83
- steph: 83
- Canadian Bacon: 79
- Jake’s ’07 Pick ’em: 79
- kandray’s bracket: 75
- HEELSTAR: 70
- shlid: 48
- Bretigny: 42
Thanks to everybody who participated, and I’m already looking forward to next year.
If you have a hankering, I’ve posted an Excel spreadsheet of the day-by-day scoring here so you can see how your scores moved around (if anybody wants to turn that data into a pretty graph, by all means go ahead and I’ll host and post it here — my Excel-fu is not very strong with graphs, just with raw data).
Scott, if you’ll post something in the Yahoo! group’s message board or make your e-mail address public in the member area (so I know it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you), I’ll get in touch about your prizes, and give your e-mail to the folks who promised prizes to the winner (and anything you don’t want, Rusty has already said he’d take).
Secondly, Rusty, the bitter second-place guy (joking, Rusty), asked about second and third place prizes. I honestly didn’t think I’d get the turn out for this like we did, so next year I’ll get on the ball with prizes and see what we can round up.
Thanks again to Lyle at Jake’s Diner here in Bend for throwing in some grub into the pool, Paizono’s Pizza in Baker City for throwing in a trucker hat, and Brad (last year’s winner) for throwing in the basic will.
Stupidly Addicting Game For The Day
Don’t start playing Desktop Tower Defense if you have anything you want to accomplish today. You won’t get it done. Don’t ask me why I know that. Thanks kottke for the link.
Google Link Dump
Just some random links that were Google-related that I thought I’d share with you here:
- A couple of good Google Map Usages: hotspotr for finding WiFi hotspots and MapMyRun which I’ll be using once I start training again soon (first time since the surgery).
- Speaking of Google Maps, there are some places in the world where you can zoom in really close on Google Maps.
- Google Answers is long dead, but uclue.com has started up with nine of the 12 most prolific answerers from Google Answers (link via Waxy).
- With some creative searches in Google, you can find MP3s or passwords and other juicy info.
- Google’s doing a bunch of cool things with their custom home page but instead of linking to all of them here, I’ll just point you to Lifehacker’s good roundup.
- Google Webmaster Central is a great resource for folks trying to keep tabs on how Google indexes their site, but if you’re looking to see who links to you, you can get some really detailed answers
Speaking of Google, at tonight’s COWPU meeting we’re going to be talking with Andre Jensen of Global Strategies International about search engine optimization, so hopefully I’ll see some of you there!
Games To Kill Off Your Day
There’s bound to be something in here that will kill off the rest of your day/week/lunch-hour (if the NCAA tournament isn’t already causing you to lose productivity):
- Flash Tron
- LUV Tank (cheesy 8-bit tank game).
- Make a paper airplane, and throw it as far as you can.
- A stupidly hard line game (thanks snowbug).
- Addicting and hard little Red Ball puzzle game.
- Can you name 192 UN Member states in 10 minutes? I can’t.
- A bunch of good freeware for your kids (so you can kill off your day doing something else).
- Slowest man explodes!
Anybody else have any to share?
This Will Make My Wallet Thinner — In A Good Way
Something I’ve been meaning to mention on here for quite a while. Just One Club Card is a stupidly handy tool to consolidate several store club cards into one card with up to eight bar codes printed on it. Once I get through it, it will be replacing my Albertsons, PetCo, PetSmart, Safeway, Hallmark, OfficeMax, and a few others cards with custom bar codes (if I can get it to work with my two library cards, that’d be very nice).
However, I have no idea how well these work at the local stores. Anybody tried it?