Words and Links

It just makes my laugh whenever I see it!  Courtesy of failblog.org.

This is a wonderful take on the traditional story of Little Red Riding Hood from an engineers perspective.  The cutaway of the VW Bus is the best part.  Either that or the nutritional summary of Grandma.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

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.

Are you ever just bored and wandering around the web looking for something new and interesting?  Maybe you have used up all of your usual sites or none have been updated lately.  Where can you go to find something else that is not spam or useless?  StumbleUpon, of course!

StumbleUpon is a social site that allows you to find new websites that other users with similar tastes to yours have discovered, categorized, and rated.

The way the process works is as follows…

• You or another user finds an interesting site.
• You find a category for the site and briefly describe or tag it.
• The site is now available to be stumbled by other users searching for sites within that category.
• As more and more users give the site a thumbs up or thumbs down it becomes more accurately rated.

The more you use the service, the more accurately your preferences and tastes will be reflected in what you are seeing.

All of this is done from a toolbar that can be installed in all of the most popular browsers.

You can also create or join a group of friends who have the same interests and share good sites with each other.  Your StumbleUpon home is the place to talk about yourself and connect with your friends.

Once you get started stumbling, you will be hooked and find it hard to stop.