The New York Times is reporting that Google now wants to keep track of your credit card numbers.

“The goal here is to make it be one nanosecond from the time the customer decides to buy to the time the transaction is complete and the product is on the way.”

You can check it out for yourself at checkout.google.com or check out the video tour

Find it with Google.  Buy it with Google Checkout.

Want a faster, safer and more convenient way to shop online? You got it.

• Stop creating multiple accounts and passwords.
  With Google Checkout™ you can quickly and easily buy from stores across the web and track all your orders and shipping in one place.
• Shop with confidence.
  Our fraud protection policy covers you against unauthorized purchases made through Google Checkout, and we don’t share your purchase history or full credit card number with sellers.
• Control commercial spam.
  You can keep your email address confidential, and easily turn off unwanted emails from stores where you use Google Checkout.

Foxnews reported this morning that the “Flag burning” Constitutional amendment failed by just one vote. Freedom wins … just barely … one vote. Sixty-six Senators (out of 100) voted to amendment the Constitution, which is designed to limit the governments power, to instead limit our freedoms.

The amendment did not seek to ban flag burning. It sought to give Congress the constitutional authority to define flag desecration and ban that behavior in the future. The careful language was an attempt to get around two Supreme Court rulings in 1989 and 1990 that called flag burning and other desecration protected free speech under the First Amendment.

Why do politicians keep bringing this issue to a vote? Because the people want it! Americans are more defined today by what we are against than what we support. I don’t know what the candidate stands for, but I know he is against XYZ. In our desire to not be offended, we have lost our love of true freedom. And politicians are always looking for a cheap and easy way to make it look like they’re doing something.

What is it that makes conservatives think that if they outlaw something that offends them, the world will be a better place? Freedom is a precious commodity. Laws should protect citizens from crimes. Just because someone does not like something does not mean it should be against the law.

As Russ Feingold, D-Wis, asked so well:

“Whether the threat to our country from those who burn the flag is so great, is so great that we must sacrifice the power and the majesty of the First Amendment to the Constitution in order to prosecute them.”

Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, a World War II veteran who lost an arm in the war and was decorated with the Medal of Honor:

“Our country is unique because our dissidents have a voice. While I take offense at disrespect to the flag, I nonetheless believe it is my continued duty as a veteran, as an American citizen, and as a United States senator to defend the constitutional right of protesters to use the flag in nonviolent speech,” he said.

Passing a law against flag burning is far more insulting to what the flag stands for than act itself. The thought of burning the American flag is repugnant to me. I love my country and cannot comprehend the why someone who would desecrate the very symbol of the very freedom they are exercising. But, as long as some jerk can burn the flag, it is a sign that our personal liberties are still intact.

What I really don’t understand is the hypocrisy of the people who support this attack on the First Amendment yet think that Congress should not touch the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment!

There are many things that offend us, but we should not try to make them illegal on that basis alone. I, personally, find pro-choice protesters and white supremacist marches more detestable than burning the flag, but would not even consider supporting a law that would stop them from having their say. As much as I might not always like what people say, free speech means free speech. If I do not stand up for another guy’s freedom, then I should not be surprised when my freedom is taken away and there is no one left to protest.

Scott at Fucoder.com has updated his Table of Contents Generator plugin for WordPress. The plugin scans through your post and builds a “Table of Contents” from the HTML headings (h1,h2,…) within the post. It also creates an anchor link for each heading so your readers can jump right to that section from the TOC.

You can place the TOC in your posts in one of two ways. You can place inside individual posts that you want to have the TOC or you can place some php code in the template and then the TOC will be placed in each post that uses that template.

We use WordPress for our office Content Management System and the posts in 2 categories should always have a TOC. I am going to set up special templates for those 2 categories using the php code so I do not have to manually add to each post in those categories.

I also use Markdown plugin which does not play well with this plugin but another user already has figured out a hack by changing one line of the plugin from:

add_filter(‘the_posts’, array(new YLSY_TableOfContents, ‘the_posts’));

to:

add_filter(‘the_content’, array(new YLSY_TableOfContents, ‘the_content’));

Finally, the TOC is all coded and ready for some css magic that you can modify to work as you see fit.

The Pythagorean theorem deals with the lengths of the sides of a right triangle.

It is often written in the form of the equation:

a² + b² = c²

The theorem states that:

The sum of the squares of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle (‘a’ and ‘b’ in the triangle shown below) is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse (‘c’).

I saw this the other day and could not stop snickering… I swear it is something that at least one of my kids would try.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-27-2006

• Permalink Redirect for WordPress
  A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
  (tags: Google, plugins, wordpress)
• Custom Rewrite Rules for WordPress
  When changing the structure of your website, you’ll often come across the need to set up some redirects, so that established links to your content remains functional.
  (tags: Google, plugin, wordpress)
• WordPress Redirection
  A 301 redirection plugin for WordPress giving you the ability to define redirections for any WordPress page, or any file inside the WordPress directory.
  (tags: Google, plugin, wordpress)

Business Week Online has an interesting story on whether the ID theft scare is actually hype by the media rather than an actual threat with harm being done.

The conclusion of the article is what caught my attention:

Perhaps the most spooky thing about the ID-theft scare is that chances are high the data weren’t stolen by some shadowy hacker in Estonia, after all, but someone very close to you. Fully one-fourth of the respondents in the 2003 FTC study who had been the victim of a financial fraud said they knew who had committed the crime, and in half those instances the perpetrator turned out to be a friend, relative, or neighbor.

So, like many crimes, the perpetrator is most likely to be known my the victim. As I told my wife this morning, she is more likely to kill me than anyone else is!

Lifehack.com brings up an interesting question. What if you could tag yourself? Tagging blog posts (technorati.com) and web sites (del.icio.us) is common. But how about yourself?

What capabilities would you put out there for people to search on? Which do you think are most useful? How would tagging yourself change the way people saw your “value?” Do people in your organization know what you’re capable of, and if so, do they try to make use of it?

How would you come up with your own tags? Which ones would be most useful for you?

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-21-2006

• OpenWrt – Wikipedia
  OpenWrt is a GNU/Linux distribution for devices based on boards made by Broadcom, such as WLAN routers made by, among others, Asus, Belkin, Dell, Linksys, US Robotics and Viewsonic. The most popular routers among OpenWRT users seem to be the Linksys WRT54
  (tags: 2Do, Hack, WRT54G, firewall, linksys, router, utils, wifi, wireless)
• OpenWrt
  OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for wireless routers. Instead of trying to cram every possible feature into one firmware, OpenWrt provides only a minimal firmware with support for add-on packages. For users this means the ability to custom tune features,
  (tags: 2Do, Hack, WRT54G, firewall, linksys, router, utils, wifi, wireless)

I just came across these Nogin Sox online and got a kick out of the idea. Bike helmets can be so boring and uncool, but these could make wearing a protective helmet fun! They are a soft-foam helmet cover that easily attaches to a regular protective helmet using Velcro patches.

Nogin Sox are currently available in six models, including include the Spiked Mohawk, Screamin’ Frog, T-Rex, Nail Head, Lady Bug and the Human Brain.
Several of the models are lighted versions; the T-Rex’s eyes and teeth glare, the Human Brain’s synapses flash in sequence, Lady Bug’s LEDs light her flight, and the lighted Spiked Mohawk has four different sequences to choose from.
The lights not only provide additional fun, but also afford the wearer added visibility for nighttime use.

The Humain Brain Nogin Sox gives a new definition to wearing a brain bucket!

I have a scheduled task on my office computer that pulls up Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) each morning. The pictures are always interesting and usually educational. Today their site celebrates the first APOD appearing eleven years ago.

Although garnering only 14 page views on that day, we are proud to estimate that APOD has now served over 400 million space-related images over the last eleven years. That early beginning, along with a nearly unchanging format, has allowed APOD to be a consistent and familiar site on a web frequently filled with change. Many people don’t know, though, that APOD is now translated daily into many major languages.

The spectacular collage of a fantasy sky above Mars submitted by an enthusiastic APOD reader skilled in digital image manipulation is today’s image.

The new Google Browser Sync extension for FireFox looks interesting. Moving from the office computer to my home computer should be much easier if my cookies and history are sync’d up.

Google Browser Sync for FireFox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

Our back yard was torn up 3 years ago when we went from a failing septic tank to being hooked up to city sewer. The landscapers were in last week and set up our patio area and this week they should be back to lay out the sod. Then it will be my dear wife’s turn to expend cash on plants to trim the yard. We also plan on putting a basalt column water feature in the corner of the yard to jazz it up a bit.

I saw this article on The Pond Crashers: Owners Love Backyard Oasis, as Do Wildlife at RealEstateJournal.com has and had to laugh.

It is often a losing battle. When Melissa White of Lakewood, Wash., dug a 4,200-gallon pond last summer, she set off a chain of events that led to an invasion of winged wildlife. After spotting mosquito eggs in her pond, the psychotherapist tossed in a few larvae-eating mosquito fish. The insects disappeared but the fish multiplied, and she soon had hundreds of them darting between the comets and shubunkin.

Since then, Ms. White has been dive-bombed by a kingfisher that repeatedly stopped by for dinner and fought with a pair of mallards. “When I first saw them, I thought, ‘How pastoral,’ ” she says. But when she saw duck droppings all over the yard, she took to chasing them while screaming, “You have other places to nest!”

Luckily we won’t have a pond, just splashing water, so will not be feeding the local animal population.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-10-2006

• Little Money Bags – Kids Money Management
  After signing up for a family account you simply set up piggy bank accounts for each of your kids. You are then able to make ‘virtual deposits’ into the accounts for things like allowances and chores. A ‘virtual deposit’ involves no real money; it is akin
  (tags: finance, kids, money)

I ran across this post about kids & growing up, You can’t protect them from time, and thought how it captured being a parent.

“That’s right. It’s your job to take care of me.” She said it as if it was an immutable law of the universe, with the same confidence she has in the sun rising tomorrow.

In my mind my three girls will never grow up. My 9 year old daughter still promises to alway be our “baby” and never leave us, my 18 year old daughter is taking charge of her own life, having successfully passed through no-mans-land of the teenage years, and my 24 year old daughter now has a family of her own –

“When I’m eleven, will you still help me sometimes?” I smiled. “Of course. I’ll help you even when you’re my age, sweetie, if you’ll let me.” And then she laughed, the sound of it like the sudden shattering of crystal into a thousand musical notes that somehow play in perfect harmony. “I’ll never be your age, Daddy!” I rolled my eyes and sent her skipping inside.

– Yet they are all still, and forever will be, my little girls. . .

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-09-2006

• fd’s Flickr Toys
  Helping you do fun things with your digital camera since 2005.- Hockeyizer, Motivational Poster Maker, Captioner, Magazine Cover, Mosaic Maker, all kinds of fun.
  (tags: Photo, flickr, utils)
• TrueCrypt
  On-the-fly encryption software, which can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mount it as a real disk. It can also encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB memory stick. TrueCrypt supports plausible deniability.
  (tags: encryption, linux, security, windows)

Maybe I am just trolling, but when I read Coding Horror about the new Apple machines, this set of statements made me snicker.

Today’s modern Macs are powered by Intel Core Duo CPUs. And according to Apple, they run nearly five times faster than the G4 models they replace.

That’s gotta sting a little.

But no matter. Forget the reality distortion field advertising. Forget the fact that Apple just obsoleted their entire PC line overnight. Again. The important thing is that the new Apple models really are as fast as PCs– because they are PCs.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-08-2006

• 20 ways to save on a shoestring
  How much you save has little to do with how much you make, a study suggests. So forget the excuses; here’s a roadmap for finding money you didn’t know you had.
  (tags: finance, money, savings)
• Pear Budget
  PearBudget is a FREE budgeting program, written in Excel. It can be used by almost any spread- sheet program (Excel, Word, OpenOffice, etc.). Setting it up is a snap, and it takes less than half an hour a month to maintain it and see how you’re doing. (
  (tags: budget, money)
• Can you afford to retire?: changing world: what you need to set aside for retirement
  What do people need to put aside to have a decent retirement that will enable them to live at roughly the same standard of living that they were living at when they were working? To begin with, it’s age-intensive. If you start early, it can be a much s
  (tags: finance, investing, retirement)

David Bach gives the third of his secrets to financial security in this chapter of The Automatic Millionaire. The first two were 1) Pay Yourself First 10% of your pretax income and 2) Make it Automatic. The third secret is to Buy a Home and Pay It Off Automatically. Bach gives reasons you should buy a home, reasons you should pay it off, and reasons you should do it automatically.

He begins by saying that the first landlord you should become is your own. Turning some statistics on their head to say what he wants, he points out that since homeowners are 31 times richer than renters you should become a homeowner so you can be richer. He gives 6 reasons why your first step should be to buy a home: forced savings, leverage, OPM – Other People’s Money, tax breaks, pride of ownership, and real estate has been a great investment.

He then discusses paying the mortgage off early either by using a biweekly payment plan or by sending in extra money with each payment. I have never understood the biweekly plan. Unless the homeowner is paid biweekly, where are they going to get the money to make the extra payment and how do you budget for it? Much more reasonable to pay extra with each payment. Also, earlier in the chapter Bach talks about the advantage of using leverage and OPM as positive reasons for buying a home, why is he now advocating paying the home off early rather than investing in more real estate?

And finally he advocates setting up your mortgage payment to be paid automatically by your bank each month so that you don’t have to think about it and you won’t be tempted to send in just the regular payment instead of the extra.

Looking for the ultimate way to save money on your food costs? Adam Scott has. “Monkey Chow” is a processed feed for zoo monkeys and great apes. A 25 lb bag only costs $25, averaging out to $1 a meal. Adam calculates that he could save $600 a month on this diet, not counting the $4000 he would save if he had not needed to purchase all the appliances. But best of all, you never have to clean the kitchen or wash dishes.

Imagine going to the grocery store only once every 6 months. Imagine paying less than a dollar per meal. Imagine never washing dishes, chopping vegetables or setting the table ever again. It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

But can a human subsist on a constant diet of pelletized, nutritionally complete food like puppies and monkeys do? For the good of human kind, I’m about to find out. On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: “a complete and balanced diet for the nutrition of primates, including the great apes.”

Maybe I’ll lose weight. Maybe I’ll gain superhuman monkey strength. Maybe I’ll go crazy. Maybe it’s too late. Check back here every day to follow along with the Monkey Chow Diaries. Comments, criticisms, questions and advice can be left on the blog.

I’m tired of cooking. I hate scrubbing pots and pans. I’ve wasted too much time in the checkout line. It’s time to eat chow.

Just in case you are tempted to try this diet – watch the videos.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-07-2006

• JungleDisk – Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3
  Jungle Disk is an multi-platform application that lets users easily store and backup their data online via Amazon.com’s S3 storage service. S3 has a usage based pricing model that pretty much blows away all of the other online storage sites.
  (tags: backup, storage)

As I was typing today at the office I once again wrote a sentence with the word alot, as in “He has alot of books”. I looked at it and knew it was wrong, and began to change it to allot, but hesitated. Which was right? I was about ready to call my dear wife (who would know) and then realized I could save myself the embarrassment (if she doesn’t read this post) by just searching on Google.

I, of course, found out that neither was correct.

1. Allot is a verb that means to distribute, to assign a portion, or to divide.
   Example: The instructor allotted me 20 minutes to take the test.
   Example: They allotted six square feet per family.

2. Alot means nothing because it is not a word in the English language and therefore should not to be used.

3. A lot (two words) is an informal phrase meaning a large portion or large quantity of something. According to what I read it is proper to use “a lot” when describing non-countable quantities such as water, sand, ice, or time. The word “many” should be used when describing countable items such as hours, people, or books. I doubt I will be able to change my usage, “He has many books” does not carry the same meaning to me as “He has a lot of books”.
   Example: A lot of water has passed under the bridge.
   Example: I don’t have a lot of time to make amends.

Luckily I have a ‘search and replace’ plugin installed on this website and so was able to search for the two dozen occurrences of “allot” and “alot” on the various pages and replace them all with “a lot”. Now to see if I can put this in my mental rolodex of words I consistently misspell and must watch for.

Sources:

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-06-2006

• A simpler way to save: the 60% solution
  Spending is easy, saving is hard. Budgeting sometimes work for people, sometimes it just bears time. Richard Jenkins had experience, and by analyzing his spending pattern, he sees a solution. He determines to keep his comitted expenses at or below 60%. Th
  (tags: debt, finance, investment, savings)
• Anatomy of a Credit Score
  Your credit score plays an increasingly important role in your financial health. But what is it? And how does it affect what you pay for loans and credit cards?
  (tags: credit)
• Hillbilly Housewife
  The focus here is on low-cost, home-cooking from scratch. The recipes are all tested in a real kitchen with hungry children, stalking cats, begging puppies and a playful husband underfoot. The ingredients are affordable and readily available in most areas
  (tags: Cooking, Recipes, budget, tips)

Saturday we had a great time celebrating the birthdays of both my oldest daughter and her youngest son. I do wonder if they toys are wasted on 1 year olds. Jaeger enjoyed the packaging the toys came in as much as the toys themselves, although I think his older brother is glad that Jaeger will be sharing his toys.

My shared del.icio.us bookmarks from 06-04-2006

• Paul B. Farrell – The Millionaire Meditation
  Do what you love. Anything. Anywhere. Forget sitting. Research says it doesn’t work for most. You tried, you know. And no gurus, you decide. This is a totally new approach to meditating: manage stress, get healthier, focus and increase productivity, sha
  (tags: investing)
• WordPress: Creating landing sites for search engines
  Landing sites are well known from the eCommerce world – ever experience you searched google for »cheap colgate toothpaste« and found an online reseller, and the site you landed on from google was exactly about colgate toothpaste? What if we grabbed the
  (tags: 2Do, plugin, wordpress)
• Nmap – Free Security Scanner For Network Exploration & Security Audits.
  Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts
  (tags: network, utilities, windows)