Words and Links

Or more accurately one of a group of dimwits calling themselves Wargod Inc.  These simpletons fashioned themselves a fugitive recovery agency who first came on police radar when they were seen walking the streets of Stroudsburg Pennsylvania recently.  They were wearing black military fatigues, empty holsters, and badges, and flashing cans of mace and handcuffs.  Appropriately this resulted in a few calls to police.

Then came the 911 call from the home for the elderly.  The manager there reported that these four  jokers were running up and down the halls and trying to enter one of the apartments.

Coincidentally, at the same time as this was going on, the Pennsylvania State Police were investigating neighbor’s complaints at the Wargod’s home base, a local home occupied by Kelly Hefferon and her two sons.  Apparently the neighbors had problems with the gunfire in the back yard, sirens ringing out at all hours, and the clown posse practicing marching in formation up and down the street.  Silly neighbors.

While the police were investigating the home, the crew returned from their night on the town.  Pulling up with a red light on the dash and a pistol grip shotgun and shells in full view in the car probably wasn’t too good of an idea.

According to police, Lawrence Colon, 39, explained that he was co-owner, with Hefferon, of Wargod. He also told police that he was licensed with the state, was training his agents, and that he was looking for a fugitive to collect the reward.

The police investigation revealed that his “license” was only a tax ID registration, and that they had no affiliation with the courts or a bail bondsman, as required by law.  Two of them were convicted felons which prohibits them from possessing firearms.

As if all of this wasn’t enough fun for these guys, The State Police had to come back to the house two days later to resolve a property dispute.  The police came upon felon Lawrence Colon (the photogenic beauty in the pic) carrying a 9 mm pistol.  Two more days after that the police had completed their investigation and returned to arrest the Wargods.

As of now, four have plead guilty and one is waiting for his trial.

We have all sat and wasted away hours at our PCs with little to come out of it other than looking at the clock and finding out we’re late for something.  Why not find some productive things to do while you are entertaining yourself on the computer?  Here is a list of ten ways to gain a little personal improvement while giving your computer a little workout.

1. Start a blog.  There is no better way to learn about yourself or a topic that might interest you than by writing about it.  There are many places to start, but two good free ones are Google’s Blogger, and WordPress.com.  You can get started in minutes and go on from there.
2. Learn how to program.  Visual Basic by Microsoft is an easy to learn high level language that will let you develop programs that can range from simple to the most complex.  Freetutes.com is just one online provider that has tutorials for VB.  The Visual Basic Express Edition program itself can be downloaded for free here.
3. Create art of your own.  Pick up a copy of a graphics creation program and go crazy with it.  A good one to work with is Gimp.  Then just search for Gimp tutorials to get started.  Some good ones can be found here.
4. Make a little money online.  Be careful of the scams (do some research, and don’t pay for any programs or services) but see what’s out there that can let you do a little computer work for a little cash.  You can try Short Task for example.
5. Become active in an online social community.  You can start with your MySpace account and then go on to other sites such as Orkut and Windows Live Spaces.
6. Learn something that you didn’t even think you were interested in.  Go over to How Stuff  Works and hit the Random Article button on top of the page and this will bring you to something you can learn very quickly.
   
7. Do some maintenance on your computer.  It is probably not running as fast as it used to so clean up your hard drive and see if there are any tricks for your operating system, either Vista or XP.
8. Play some games.  Ok, not terribly productive, but you can stretch it and claim improvement in the whole hand eye thing!   You can try some nice flash games at Addicting Games.
9. Volunteer for something.  There are many possibilities for this one, but one might be doing some work for an open source software project.  Or maybe becoming an editor for the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org).
10. Read a book online.  Haven’t got your Kindle yet?  No problem.  You can find many worthwhile reads for free online.  Start here at EduChoices for some good virtual libraries.

You have seen this button all over the internet and probably even have one at the top of your browser right now, but have you ever used it or do you even know what it is?  This is the RSS button and it lets you know that the site you are visiting supports RSS feeds.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.  What it does is allow you a convenient way to stay current with your favorite web sites, blogs, and news sites without having to go to each site individually and regularly.  When you find an interesting site and want to keep up to date with it all you have to do is click this button and subscribe to it.  Then as the site is updated with new content you are immediately shown the new article or story.

You can download a feed reader program to manage all of this.  The reader programs will work in the background retrieving your feeds and then waiting for you to view them.  Another way is to use your browser.  Internet Explorer 7 users have a reader built in.  Firefox users can install the Wizz RSS News Reader.  Another easy way is to use Google’s Reader.  You will need a Google account and then all you have to do is use the reader program from your Google desktop.

Feel free to experiment with the RSS feed buttons on this page.  RSS is a great way to stay current, so start using it today!