Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Tiki! The Tiki Room - for drink recipes and restaurant reviews

I admit it...I have a weakness for all things Tiki. Perhaps it's my love of the Adventurers' Club, or just memories of warm tropical breezes while I sip rum drinks seated next to a flaming torch in the sand. Whatever the reason, if you are like me, you might enjoy the Tiki Room. The Tiki room has wonderful discussion forums giving tips on Tiki bars and restaurants, Tiki travel, collecting Tikibilia (is that a word?) and, of course, how to make the perfect Tiki drink. When I'm venturing into a new drink (this weekend it was Singapore Slings) I like to check a resource like this where knowledgeable people share the ups and downs of different ingredients and proportions in your drinks. Check this out before your next Tiki party and your friends will wonder at your amazing depth of Tiki know-how!

www.tikiroom.com

Friday, May 25, 2007

Ezinearticles.com - getting your writing out

If you write a lot - and I do - you've probably written a bunch of articles that went into a newsletter or blog and haven't really seen the light of day since. On great place to get additional readers for your articles is ezinearticles.com. Why? Well...from another perspective...that of someone putting together a newsletter, ezine or magazine...ezinearticles.com is a wonderful source of thousands of articles on almost any subject. Put the two together and you have a win-win for writers who want more exposure and editors who need more content.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Winestillsoldout- another great wine site

Winestilsoldout is a bit different from wine.woot.com. Instead of a single wine deal for a week, winestillsoldout tends to have 2-3 or sometimes more wines each day, listing the current deal until it is (of course) sold out. The wines are different, too - more foreign labels and proportionately less domestic, and a tendency towards the very expensive ("Reduced from $189 to $99 a bottle!") and, paradoxically, the inexpensive (more sub $10 bottles than wine.woot, certainly). I've tended to buy the cheap ones, and they are good, even if they aren't the rockstar wines I've gotten from wine.woot. Of course, they've been $10 a bottle or so cheaper, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised!

http://www.happyhourspro.com/store/wtso/html/store/index.htm

Saturday, May 19, 2007

What time is it EXACTLY?

As some of you know, I do a lot of teleseminars and teleconferences with my clients and employees. Since I value punctuality - and it's a big value for my clients - I've taken to checking the EXACT official time on the National Standard Clock (which I think is an atomic clock in Colorado somewhere). To find out the EXACT time, you can always check the government's official time site...and know that YOU have the absolute correct time!

www.time.gov

Friday, May 18, 2007

Wine.woot.com - awesome wines, super prices

If you are already familiar with Woot.com, you may have taken a peek at their wine website, wine.woot.com. It's a very similar set up - there is one deal offered at a great price, and when it's gone, it's gone. The big difference, of course, is that all of the wine.woot deals are wine. Another difference is that wine.woot offerings are changed once a week, so you have a week to buy the wine that's being offered.

I've purchased several of the wine offers from this site. I can easily say that I'm a bit of a wine snob, since I have a good friend who used to write for wine magazines and a modest cellar full of excellent wine. I didn't really expect to see wonderful wines coming out of a bargain site, but these are AWESOME. Of the dozen or so wines I've ordered from wine.woot, I've liked every one...and several have been absolutely dynamite. The main drawback (if you can call it that) is that some of the wines I really enjoyed turned out to cost $50-$75 a bottle at retail when I went looking for them. Still, this site is a wonderful way to get your hands on some superb wine from small, relatively unknown vineyards at ridiculously low prices. My friends always look forward to having me bring the wine these days because it's always different - and it's always good.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Cnet - one of the great geek resources.

In the very early days of the internet, there were quite a few websites that just had big collections of geekish stuff. You know what I mean - stuff like video card reviews, and shareware downloads, stuff that makes a geek a priceless fountain of technical trivia and tools.

One of the oldest sites devoted to this kind of great information is Cnet. Although it has morphed over the years to have a lot more gadget reviews (after all, that's where the money is), it's still a priceless trove of downloadable files, especially programs. If I'm looking for something obscure, like a game that will run on my Blackberry, or a shareware app that will convert a Powerpoint presentation into a PDF file, this is one of the first places I look.

You'll also find wonderful Q&A stuff in Cnet's forums. My assumption has always been that the devoted users of this site know far more about what's wrong with my computer or gadget than the underpaid, undertrained person on the company's support site - and they will usually answer my questions a lot faster. Next time you need an answer, check out the Cnet forums!

www.cnet.com

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Twtter - what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

Twitter is a blog - sort of. It's designed for short, short entries, with an excellent interface for mobile posting. As a general rule, this leads to lots of "I'm here doing this" postings, which read like a minute blow-by-blow account of the bloggers' days. I have my friends' twitters sent to my mobile phone, which means I get little bits of random, daily activities popping up all the time. It's not as insightful or well-written as a blog, but then, it's not meant to be.

As with a lot of blogs, the idea behind twitter is that somehow, people will be interested in reading short little snippets about your life. And...as with blogs, the more interesting the person, the more interesting the twitter. If you have interesting friends, you will probably be entertained!

www.twitter.com

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Body Mass Index Calculator at the Center for Disease Control

One of the interesting statistics you can use to manage your weight is something called Body Mass Index. While calculating this number precisely involves knowing things like your bone density, you can get a reasonable approximation of BMI using just your height and weight. Doctors define a BMI of over 25 as overweight and over 30 as obese, and both of these categories correlate with increased risk of certain health problems and diseases. You can check out your own BMI at the Center for Disease Control's BMI calculator page:
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/