So you want to start your own blog. One of the first things you’ll have to do is decide which blogging application you want to use. There are a ton of options, ranging from the incredibly simple (LiveJournal), to the infinitely customizable and Hiddenpcmaster’s choice (WordPress). But one of the easiest blogging clients around is Google’s Blogger.

Blogger is not as easy to customize as WordPress, but Blogger’s simplicity also makes the process of setting up a blog a lot less daunting. You can literally start blogging within minutes of signing up for a Blogger account. Google will also host your blog for free, which means you don’t need to pay for domain registration or web hosting. WordPress does also offer free hosting, but WordPress doesn’t allow free account holders to include advertising. Blogger does. So if you have dreams of quitting your day job, but don’t want to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting, Blogger provides a good way to test the waters.

Here is a screen shot of what I setup while typing this post…

Now it’s your turn.

Get started now…..

Once you have finished, leave a comment with your new blog homepage address.

Sorry about the commercial, but this is really pretty interesting!

Story Link

Enjoy this Life of Brian interlude on this joyous day.

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FIRST PLACE TEAM.

After steadfast game play throughout the season, this team was nearly unbeatable and made for some of the best basketball I have seen on a youth team thus far! Way to go buddy! We are very proud of you Justin. Love, Mom and Dad

Jack writes:

Here is a great tutorial, with many simple videos and downloadable files for self training.

http://www.microsoft-office-excel.com

I believe “jackgopher” is the creator of this website which shows an easy to understand approach to learning Microsoft Excel.

I pulled this from the About Section of the site:

My purpose in building this website is to give all students the opportunity to learn Excel easily by themselves. I placed special emphasis on using plain and easy language (you will be spared spooky terms such as “function arguments”, “operators” etc.)
Every issue is dealt separately, step by step, with annotations and demonstrations.

I hope I succeed in showing you that the most common tasks in Excel, are accomplished by very few mouse clicks or keystrokes. Even the more difficult tasks, after cutting them down into few well defined steps, can be quickly learned.

I decided to make this self-study Excel site, after I understood that Excel is not difficult, its just that many teachers find difficult and “educated” ways for teaching it. It is so easy for those who master it (and teach it), and sometimes they find it hard to understand “what is there not to understand?”…

http://www.microsoft-office-excel.com/

“Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.”- George Burns

When performing a clean windows installation on a pc without any driver disk included, windows leaves you with certain unknown device drivers in device manager. Normally, tracking down the right driver can be a huge annoyance, especially when your devices are showing up with generic names like PCI Device, Video Controller, System Device, or Unknown Device. But with the help of a little utility, I was able to find all of the drivers that I needed saving me lots of time and frustration.

This little utility is called Unknown Devices and it works with Windows 95, 98, 98se, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. It’s also a portable application so it requires no installation.

When you run it, Unknown Devices immediately lists out all of the devices that Windows cannot find a driver for and tells you what each one is.

In this example I have a modem that I cannot locate the driver for because I don’t know who the manufacturer is.

When I run Unknown Devices, it tells me that the device is made by Context Systems.

I am now able to use this information to download the appropriate driver from the computer manufacturer’s website.

Description

Unknown Devices helps you find what those unknown devices in Device Manager really are.

By checking Device Manager for unknown devices and extracting information from it, this program attempts to figure out what the device is. You might not have to open your case or look up random numbers off of PCI cards to figure out what they are.

Program supports Win95, 98, 98se, Me, 2k, XP and 2003 but not NT. It also attempts to support future OSes.
It runs fine from a CD or floppy. It’s free for personal and (especially) business use. The program contains no adware, spyware, malware, popups, or whatever is the latest name for junk software.

Just in case you really missed winter around the NY area this year, this was filmed at McMurdo Station, where it is relatively sheltered by the surrounding hills. The weather in Antartica is classified as being Condition 3 (nice weather), Condition 2 (not so nice), or Condition 1…

Having recently been forced into using Outlook 2003 for work, I found myself suffering from a Microsoft induced coma! I have been a huge fan of Thunderbird for years and felt I was taking a huge step backwards until I realized what was missing.

A simple Button!

Open source to the rescue! Enter this neat little piece of FREE software. SpamBayes Outlook Plugin for Outlook 2003.

SpamBayes is a tool used to segregate unwanted mail (spam) from the mail you want (ham). Before SpamBayes can be your spam filter of choice you need to train it on representative samples of email you receive. After it’s been trained, you use SpamBayes to classify new mail according to its spamminess and hamminess qualities. It’s best to train on recent email, because your interests and the nature of what spam looks like change over time.

When SpamBayes filters your email, it compares each unclassified message against the information it saved from training and makes a decision about whether it thinks the message qualifies as ham or spam, or if it’s unsure about how to classify the message. It then adds its classification to the message, either by adding a header (X-Spambayes-Classification: spam|ham|unsure), modifying the To: or Subject: headers, or adding a “Spam” field to the message. Depending on which SpamBayes application you are using, it may then filter this message for you, or you can set up your own filters (to file away suspected spam into its own mail folder, for example).

Everyone knows Outlook 2003 has been lagging behind the SPAM handling department for quite some time and apparently continues to do so. SpamBayes actually levels the playing field for microsoft.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE YOU TRY INSTALLING!

The installation went without a hitch until I started Outlook for the first time after the SpamBayes install. I encountered an error saying “Cannot start microsoft office outlook. MAPI32.dll is corrupt …. ” don’t panic!

The simple fix was to have office rewrite a file by renaming it. Just rename the MSMAPI32.DLL to MSMAPI32.DLL.old found below

Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\MSMAPI32.DLL

Start outlook2003 and it reinstalls the DLL. All is well again.