If you’re looking for a new dentist in the Camarillo, CA area, the consider giving my dentist, Dr. Page Mansourian, a shot. Great doctor, friendly staff, modern office. One of my favorite things - my appointments are always on time, no hanging out in a crowded waiting room.
More info at Best Camarillo Dentists site. They’re also running a free teeth whitening offer.
If you use Skype, then you should do yourself a huge favor and lock down your privacy settings asap. This will prevent you from receiving calls and notes/messages from spammers, phishers and malware vendors.
Just today I received a rather legitimate looking e-mail that could easily be misunderstood to be from Skype. If I had clicked on the embedded link, and installed any of the software I would have been in for a world of hurt. It was one of those malware writers that makes you believe you have a virus/malware and says you need their software to clean your computer. Their ’software’ in turn ends up being garbage that costs lots of money.
Here’s how to lock down your Skype settings:
Here’s a screenshot of what that dialog box looks like. Click for a larger version.
There is just one minor drawback. You will need to manually add new contacts before they are allowed to call/message you. A small price to pay for a lot more security.
For the past few months, I’ve been using one of those recipe planning sites (MealMixer.com) to help me plan out a week of meals and then the shopping list. The latter is really the best part of the service - saves me a lot of time in trying to figure out it.
However, I’ve found that sometimes I don’t have time to either cook an extensive meal, go shopping and/or plan the week’s meals, or just want something different and/or simpler. So I went searching for some alternative recipe sources and found these. I was also specifically looking for ‘healthy’ dishes as it’s totally easy to get fast food or nuke a frozen dinner. I’ll bet that there are lot of these recipes that don’t qualify as ‘healthy’, but there are lots to choose from so you don’t need to depend on all of them.
I’m yet to try any of the recipes here, but my goal wasn’t to necessarily find the best recipes, but more to find ideas. And after all, I’m yet to find a recipe that I ever followed to a ‘T’!
So I was just talking to one of my friends who was excited, gleeful even, that they were able to screw over some of their colleagues to get their way at the same company.
Any company that gets big enough where they have so many products/projects and/or groups and/or diversity such that infighting starts needs to split up and/or downsize. Pronto.
When a company starts reflecting the human race in the clannish aspect, the one group vs another, the zero-sum game that everyone thinks it is, they need to step back and take a good look at themselves, because this is not a way for any company to succeed.
Ironically, there was a great deal of pride taken in the action. This is not something to be proud of. This is symbolic of a dysfunctional company.
So you’ve decided to buy a house, eh? Good for you! But now, the hard question is who to borrow that money from, which lender? Well not all lenders are created equally; they charge different amounts. Don’t pay attention only to the interest rate, otherwise you can miss out on $1000s in savings.
I’ve attached an Excel spreadsheet w/ formulae that I used to compare
mortgages. Just punch in the value of the house you want to buy, the downpayment you plan to make, and the various fees that your potential lender is going to charge you. You can adjust this to suit
you.
Today’s presidential inauguration has been covered thousands, possibly even millions of times in various ways, my own entry is but a blip in the media coverage. This blog entry is mostly for my own benefit, for my future self, the one that will look back and remember how much of a historic day this was in my lifetime. Our lifetimes.
If you haven’t seen President Obama’s inauguration acceptance speech, then thanks to YouTube and citizen journalists, here is but one version.
The lines that resonated with me the most were:
Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.
We will restore science to its rightful place.
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth;
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.
Google has apparently just started testing for bots against their search engine. Take a look at this screen shot of what I got when I searched for “wired brock pierce” from the search box in the upper right of Firefox 3. Wonder if my co-workers are searching for ‘bad’ things.
PS> Interesting article on Brock Pierce of IGE (which was a company that used low-paid workers to farm virtual gold and re-sold it at huge profits).
My e-mail service since 1999: 