Furniture & Room Planner

Want to move things around in your house? Do it virtually first and see if it will work. Plus, this is much easier on your back!

The View North

Snow in the mountains makes a fine view!

Some Birds

Deb and I have waited patiently for some of the local birds to even sniff at the Bird Feeder we placed in the back yard over 2 months ago! They still have not found it! They have however, found the water feature. Little do they know that just 10 feet to the left is a magical tube full of free food! Keep your fingers crossed.

Six Free Online Storage Services

Don't want to spend money and installation hassles on new storage hardware for your precious media? Whether it's for sharing memories in the form of digital photos and videos over the web—or just practical documents you want to protect against that all-too-common hard disk crash, these six services offer secure, and often free, ways to back up your files and get access to them anywhere. The services also provide a way to share your data with others without sending huge email attachments or FTPing or hosting them yourself. Most of them offer drag-and-drop for easy uploading. Though there are scores of online storage services, we focused on ones with free plans and interesting features:

- box.net
- DropBoks
- eSnips
- MediaMax
- OmniDrive
- openomy

GadgetTrak

They're expensive, small and easy to steal. Media devices such as iPods, PSP, USB flash drives, digital cameras and others are hot items for thieves. Once stolen chances are very slim that they will be recovered.

What if your device could phone home? Well now it can. With our patent-pending GadgetTrak™ system, you simply register your device and install our agent files in the root of your device. If your device is stolen you log into our interface and flag it as lost or stolen. The next time the device is accessed it will attempt to contact us and provide data regarding the system it is plugged into including:

Public IP Address, Location (Country, City, State & Zip), Username, Computer Name, Host name of ISP & Internal network IP address.

Influences

Photosynth

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

This one rates very high on the "Wow" Meter!

Google Maps with Real Time Traffic

Google Maps shows real-time information about traffic for many US cities (like Portland). To see this, switch to the map or hybrid mode and click on the new traffic tab. Google Maps will add a layer that colors the roads in green, yellow, red, or gray.

Crosswinds

An Amazing Scam!

Interesting

A Ventriloquist Act

Sirius, XM Agree To Merger Valued At $13 Billion

In the proposed $13 billion deal -- which they'd like to go down by the end of the year but which still must pass rather daunting regulatory scrutiny and opposition from such heavyweights as the National Association of Broadcasters -- investors would get 4.6 shares of Sirius stock for each share of XM, with current Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin and XM Chairman Gary Parsons retaining those roles, respectively, in the combined entity (whose name has yet to be decided). As you might imagine, the companies are already trying to spin this as a big win for everyone from Martha Stewart on down, arguing that consumers will end up benefiting from more programming choices and better hardware, manufacturers and retailers will see increased sales, and of course shareholders would gain value through the economies of scale and elimination of redundancies realized from a merger. The new pals also took an opportunity to sneak in a mention about the growing number of choices consumers have for receiving audio content, from old school AM/FM to internet radio to the the still-nascent technologies of cellphone streaming and HD radio, clearly hoping to sway public opinion on that whole anti-trust thing. Still, keep in mind that the FCC is gonna be taking a long, hard look at this one -- in fact, current regulations would need to be changed in order for the merger to gain approval -- so don't get your celebratin' started just yet.

Gearing Up For Grilling!

Bring on the sun! As we were moving into the house in July last year we noticed a plug in the garage with a label on it that said Freezer. (We're just glad it didn't say bulldozer or airplane!) We have finally made the plug happy and purchased a Chest Freezer. Our plan is to fill it will well marbled meat for the BBQ and anything else we would like to keep really cold.

Wildcard

Deep.