Here's what I've been "up to" lately ... starting a new video series for tinfoilchef.com. Here's the first episode reviewing the George Foreman "Grand Champ" grill.

I recently found a free tool that makes finding Adwords Placements a lot easier and gives them a much better chance to be profitable.

Check out my post about AdwordsDigger on Blogdoofus.com Or skip all the talk and just grab the free tool

I've recently done a video entry into a contest and thought I'd share my creation here too.

[edit]Ok, I was going to simply embed it here but myspace doens't seem to like that idea so you can find it in this blog post: Almost Anyone Can Be A Movie Producer.

For some cool stories, be sure to check out "A Short Tail" Where you'll find some great short stories.  One of my favorites so far is "Burgers In The Dumpster".

I've been doing a bit of writing of my own in something different from my usuual style.  You can get the beginning of the story here

I stopped in here tonight because I had another couple of emails from MySpace saying that so-and-so had requested to be added to my friends list.  As usual, I go to check these alleged people for mutual friends and find that there aren't any.

I don't suppose that anyone behind such obviously spammed requests will read this but just the same, if you hit the friend request and you're not somebody I know or ther aren't people I do know in the 'mutual friends' listing, then that request is going in the bitbucket.

While I'm here, I'm also going to point out that I've just released a new version of a program I wrote called "Mixminion Message Sender".   It's a GUI that I wrote for Mixminion because I got tired of typing long, often complicated command lines in a DOS box.  MMS does the "grunt work" of creating the messages and passing the needed command lines to Mixminion.

As for exactly what Mixminion is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion is worth taking time to read.  Basically Mixminion is an anonymous remailer, a program that allows specially formatted and encypted messages to be sent through a chain of servers, each one removing a layer of encryption and then sending the message, without any headers that identify the source, on to the next hop in the chain.

While writing this I thought of something else that bugs the snot out of me.  Video or Music players that autostart.  Frankly, I think it's bloody presumptuous of people to decide that I want their idea of music to suddenly start blasting out of my speakers when I load their site.  This is especially true when I happen to be listening to MY music.  Trust me, My Mozart and Beethoven beats almost any "music" from the last twenty years or more.  And if I have my speakers turned off as I frequently do, your autostart is just taking up bandwidth and cpu power to handle something that is NOT going to be heard.

As for the autostart video thing... consider your viewers, think about the fact that you have ZERO idea if they have enough bandwidth to handle your video stream.  And then again, maybe they just don't want to watch it.

Solution?  Go ahead and embed your video and music players, but make sure that they DO NOT AUTOSTART!.  Autostart is rude, obnoxious, and just plain thoughtless.

Got another gripe (full of it I know)... This thing tells me I can't leave the subject line blank.  WTF does this think it is?  UseNet?  Hmpth!

... way past time for me to have written something here seeing that it’s been nearly a month since the last post. (I really need to get something up here a little more often)Fortunately, I can actually think of a few things my wife’s written that are well worth spreading some links to.

To start with theres "Gas Prices Too High..Too Many Problems", which is, you guessed it, about the growing crisis of extorionarily (is that a word?) high prices for fuel.  A problem that is going to hit absolutely EVERYONE if Big Oil isn’t called on the carpet and forced to amend their money worshiping, greedy ways.

Another item, "What’s A Fee Harvesting Credit Card? Do I Want One?", is a must read for anybody that’s thinking about taking up that credit card offer that came in the mail.  Odds are good that you could be getting a lot more than you bargained for.

Next up is "Home Equity Loans New Thing On The Chopping Block", is related to the mortgage / home loans mess that’s had Wall Street in a tailspin and people everywhere losing their homes because of it.

Finally, I actually got a post done on my Blogspot blog that introduces a series of articles I’ve written about A Collection of anonymity tutorials that starts with anonymous web browsing, proceeds to anonymous email and will eventually conclude with how to write an anonymous blog that cannot be traced back to your real-life identity.

Now to see if I can get another of these done before the month is out!

I've got another couple of sites that I want to introduce people to.   They're both relatively young blogs and could use all the new inbound links they can get.

The first one I'll talk about is "TwoTon Tilly", it's loaded with Tilly's opinions about litterally everything as well as a good sprinkling of Tilly's humor.. cat humor, husband humor and plenty more to boot.  TwoTon Tilly promises to be an entertaining read

The second new-ish blog I'm introducing here is called "Blog Hunting".  This is where "Ribbit" talks about interesting blogs and blog entries discovered around the Intenet.  You'll get a sense of what a reviewed blog is about in general and a post (or more, you never know) that are interesting or particularly good for whatever reason.  Anyone looking for interesting blogs to check out would do well to browse "Blog Hunting".  It *is* a new blog, but I fully expect it to become a wealth of links to interesting blogs and posts as time goes by.

Ok, that's the promotion part.  Now for the "shameless" part.  This is where I ask readers to not only visit these blogs and have a look at them, but also to ask that you put up crawlable links to them on your own sites and blogs.

That's TwoTon Tilly (http://twotontilly.com) and Blog Hunting (http://bloghunting.com).

Thanks in advance for the links and I'll be back again in a few days with a couple more interesting blogs

I just wanted to mention a blog entry I read on Off The Cuff recently that I think makes a really good point about a really bad idea that's being adopted in more and more school districts and that is the idea of paying kids to take tests at school.

I know, it sounds like a good idea when you first look at it, but the problem comes when you look a bit closer at the message that this kind of incentive is sending which is basically "pay me or I'll not produce anything".  I can understand a certian amount of this in a business world or in an employee / employer relationship but when it comes to kids going to school it's a different matter entirely.

Whatever happened to the idea of simply doing the best you're able to do becasue it's the right thing to do?  I've seen this kind of thing in elementary school classes all the way down to kindergarten.  This sort of thing never used to be even an issue, teachers didn't have to bribe students with candy, money or anything else to get them to perform.  There was no negotiation, no arguing, no nothing. you go the assignment, you did the assignemnt.  If you didn't do it, you got a zero.

That entry is worth taking the time to read as well as Stumble, Digg, Etc.