I had another blog on which I held an essay contest and the prize was a surprise object of undisclosed value. I pretended that it was a great success, but in reality, I only got one entry.

The contestant was a nice young Texan and I mailed her a piece of hand made lace. I have to say I probably would have gotten a lot more entries if the prize was cash, even just a small amount. I might actually consider doing that sometime, but I will have to check out laws and such first.

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I bought my daughters an audio book last year. It was an unabridged reading of The Witch, The Lion and The Wardrobe.

I thought it would be a good way to impress upon them the fact that movies leave important parts out when they make a movie based on a book. I haven’t actually seen the movie version. I watched some kids play the video game. It was much different than the book.

I am not very entertained by the radio these days, I am thinking I might get an audio book for those times when I am stuck waiting for someone in my car.

Audio books are even better when they are read by someone famous. At the Simply Audiobooks blog there is an entry reviewing books by George Carlin and Steve Martin that are read by the authors.

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When we first found out that all of the past papers that my son needed for preparing for his exams were on the school website, I thought that was great. I realized shortly after that the school was essentially off-loading the printing expense to the parents. I know that I am going to have to go and buy an expensive ink cartridge
pretty soon so he can start studying. Well so we can start suggesting that he study and he can start avoiding it in earnest.

I just found out that buying printer supplies online is a cost effective option. I am taking note of the information on OfficeSupplyOutfitters.com. They are a premier online provider of laser toner cartridges, MICR toner, inkjet cartridge, fax supplies, and cash register and printer ink ribbon as well. They specialize in HP, Dell, Lexmark, IBM and Samsung.
They appear to have very low prices and they are saying that they have superior customer service, with customer service is unmatched in the imaging supplies industry. Their knowledgeable customer care reps are trained professionals and can answer all your questions about laser toner cartridges and inkjet cartridges. Call them at 800-848-7232.

I called them for you, mostly just to see if they were as good as they say.  I also had a question about a less common printer.  The woman I talked to was great.  She asked if I had been able to find my printer on the website.  She checked for me and no the didn’t carry the cartridges.  In their defense it a very odd make.  She was able to tell me the part numbers for my black and colr cartridges and suggested search methods to find the supplies elsewhere.  Good communication, good attitude, good knowledge.

FuelMyBlog.com is quite new and I got word about it on a forum yesterday. I am not cutting edge enough to have a linked 40×40 pixel image above the jump. I am 9 across and 15 down. Perez Hilton is my neighbor. Close the blinds dude.

I am just 5 blocks away from US presidential hopeful John Edwards. It is free to get on the wall. There are as of right…now…about 150 blocks left on the front page. I believe there are category pages as well, yep, a second page simply called MORE, then BUSINESS, LIFE and ALL SORTS.

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I think of all the characters on The Simpsons, Moe is my favorite. He is a transparent enigma. Sometimes he is a transparent GIF, but I am avoiding copyright infringement as much as is humanly possible. Moe’s heritage is disputed, although I think maybe he had Italian parents who lived in Libya. Or Libyan parents who lived in Italy. They aren’t actually that far apart from one another.

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Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Yes this blog has a default template. If you were around several months ago you would know that it was not always the case. Hey, I’m between templates.

I do know a little bit about osCommerce templates, but not much. This is what I got clarification n just now, osCommerce is an e-commerce and online store-management software program. You can use it on any web server that has both PHP and MySQL installed. osCommerce is available as free software. Something I do know is that a bajillion websites use osCommerce and it is going to continue that way. Anybody who is building osCommerce into sites for themselves or for clients wants a working trouble free store but they also want to stand out a bit. They want to look just as original as everybody else.

This is were osCommerceCafe.com comes into the picture. They are the largest osCommerce template membership site on the internet. With the big catalog of osCommerce templates, you are likely to find a design that suits your needs.

If you become a member of the osCommerceCafe.com website, then you will get to have full access to all of the templates.

Presently they have 70 templates. I know people who build sites with osCommerce for a variety of clients. 70 is more than enough to choose from. My advice is DO NOT show a client 70 templates. That is too much choice. Anyway, some templates are not all purpose.

Of the nine new templates on the front page of the site, I can tell what maga successful sites three of them are modelled after. Original is good, but net surfers get comfortable with a certain look and functionality and you can use that to your advantage.

Check this one out, its called Utility Shop. Visitors certainly know they are at a store when they arrive on a page like that. This template works great for the things that people buy in a methodical way, music, DVDs, moderately priced electronics anything like that.

Here is a template that is obviously designed to sell something that has a sensual appeal, like art or photography.

They actually have the templates categorized into about 20 categories to make choosing simpler.

I just finished taking apart my son’s laptop because the fan was making a sound kind of like a cow and a squirrel making sweet love. As intriguing as that sound was, I felt it was important to do some maintenance on the thing before it calved.

It turns out that the main culprit, besides the half a teaspoon of dust bunnies, was a hair. My last day job was at a place where the idea of hair nets was brought up. The idea met up with a great deal of reluctance on the part of all the cool kids. The place was almost entirely staffed by cool kids and eventually the guy who was on the hair net mission moved on.

Anyway, I don’t ever want to be that guy in a real bricks and mortar day job. People just don’t like to admit, or compensate for the fact, that we shed stuff all over the place, all day every day. If you are not working for Gerber or Pfizer or NASA or McDonald’s, no stick in the mud is going to make you wear a hair net.

As far as IT, I think that equipment gets outdated or crashes long before it succumbs to hair and dander in most reasonably tidy workspaces. I have a shaved head, so whenever I am dealing with electronics or plumbing or dusting around the home I am always grumpier about hairs because I know that they are not mine.

Online Bulletin sponsored this post. They wanted people to make DIY imitations of big event targeted television commercials. We could pick any web business to promote. I chose this one.

It really doesn’t need any extra promotion, it recieved a lot of incoming links when it made a popular list of poorly chosen URLs. I really don’t see that ther is anything wrong with it though.
Funny story…I did the title credits wrong the first time, with .com instead of .net

Oops, that was up on YouTube for a couple of minutes.

I am one step closer to buying some real audio visual equipment. I went to ad a soundtrack to the upcoming commercial that I laboriously animated and…nothing.

Luckily I had a few decent recording already in the can. I feel a bit odd using an actual serious musical composition of mine in a commercial. I heard this anecdote about Bob Seger, when he is with his grandson the child begs him to sing THE TRUCK SONG. I think the money helps soothe the damaged artistic soul.

I met Jane Goodall at a conference once. I was quite impressed with her as both a person and as an academic. Now I was looking at Wikipedia and I come to find that many of her findings are being dismissed because scientists are saying that the presence of feeding stations altered the behavior of her chimpanzee subjects to an unnatural degree.

Another interesting thing is that her Wikipedia entry is locked. This makes me think that a group of people thought it was funny to edit the content in an unprofessional way.

Thinking about the issue of animals having vastly altered behavior because of a human related food source reminded me of two experiences. In Canada when I was growing up we had Dump Bears. Black bears that had decided that the local dump was a good source of food. This was bad, it caused them to become habituated to the presence of humans and it gave them a taste for store bought foods.

The other story is more innocuous. I once met a starling that had learned to beg for french fries from the cars at the McDonald’s drive-thru. It would wait until your car stopped where everybody stops to check their order and it would land on the driver’s side mirror and peck at the window. This restaurant was about a block from a network television newsroom. I always expected to see the bird as the last story on a slow day.

photo credit: NPS