I noticed that Google introduced another new service that allows you to search for businesses by specifying some search terms and the general location (city and state or zip code). The new Local Search is just as useful as Google’s regular web search, and many times improved over other business directories/searches such as SuperPages or Anywho.com. The amusing side of this is their method of advertising the new feature. After searching for something on the web search, a little box appeared near the bottom of the screen that read, “Shameless Self-Promotion.” It’s refreshing to see a company with a good sense of humor and a great product.
Category: Great Sites
Caffeinated Fun with Food and Drugs
I followed an interesting remaindered link from Kottke.org to a page that discloses the caffeine content of everyday foods and drugs. It’s interesting to see that one dose of Excedrin has more caffeine in it than a single dose of regular-strength No-Doz. That really wasn’t that surprising to me, since I knew that caffeine has been known to help relieve (but also causes) headaches and Excedrin is primarily a headache medicine.
More useful to me, however, is the knowledge that my favorite tea happens to be the second-highest tea on the list. Bigelow Raspberry Royale Tea contains 83 milligrams of caffeine per eight-ounce serving, almost double the caffeine content of a similarly sized serving of Surge! It’s no surprise that a cup of Raspberry Royale sweetened with five or six teaspoons of sugar always provides a welcome jumpstart to my mornings.
The Sedlec Ossuary
Despite the fact that I’m feeling quite under the weather, I decided to post something anyway. Ooh, be amazed by my dedication, also known as boredom.
A long time ago, on a TV displaying something far, far away, I first learned of The Sedlec Ossuary, a small Christian chapel on the outskirts of the Czech town Kutna Hora. The church looks rather innocent from the distance, but once you step inside, it is an entirely different story. Beginning in the 1500s, bones from the older graves in the graveyard were moved to the crypt of the ossuary to make room for the many people that wanted to be buried in the cemetery. In the 1870s, the bones of approximately 40,000 people had been accumulated. A local artisan was put in charge of decorating the inside of the church with the bones. Dozens of great pictures and more information can be found on XibalbA. Happy Samhain!
BlogShares and Toasters
I didn’t have much work to do over the weekend besides some web design so I finally signed up for BlogShares. For those of you not familiar with BlogShares, it is a fantasy stocks website that enables each member to buy and sell stocks in various weblogs. I wanted to include this blog in their list of stocks, but unfortunately their code only works with XML and SOAP formats, whereas my blog is MySQL. I’ve only been trading for less than twelve hours, but I’ve already nearly doubled my net worth! I only wish my portfolio was real.
I also found an amusing photo from IBM;s Archives on Jase Wells‘ blog which I’ve been reading for some time now. I didn’t realize that toasters were a component for personal computing in the 1980s.
Nothing Nice to Say is Back!
In June, I was bummed to find out that Nothing Nice to Say, my favorite web comic, was going the way of the dodo. However, I noticed that The Offset linked to Mitch Clem’s comic recently. Thinking that they were a little behind on their linkage, I checked it out and it was true: Mitch has un-quit NN2S! The comic will no longer be a regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday staple, but the author promises to upload at least one comic per week. NN2S is billed as the “World’s First Online Punk Comic” but it is definitely one of the best online comics in general. Intelligently written and nicely drawn, it’s definitely worth a look.
It’s Payback Time
They can’t say that it’s unfair. For years, spammers have been hated by just about everyone who comes near a computer. With the exception of the spammers themselves, most people would be happy to watch the little devils devoured by vermin, or perhaps just beaten with keyboards by an angry group of server administrators. Too bad there’s nothing equally vicious that the average user can do to a spammer.
But now you can kill them with kindness. All spam wants you to visit a web site, so why not visit it a million times? That’s the premise behind FriedSPAM, a great web site I found listed on Idle Type. All you have to do is type in the spam site’s URL and FriedSPAM will visit that site as many times as you specify. “That’s what the spammers want, isn’t it? After all, why else would they stuff your mailbox with such tempting invitations?”