NORAD Tracks Santa (North American Air Defense Command) - In 1955 Sears in Colorado Springs ran an advertisement for a special hotline that kids could call to track where Santa Claus is. In a strange twist, they misprinted the phone number, and the misprinted number turned out to be the Commander in Chief’s operations hotline for NORAD (at the time it was known as CONAD). Read the full story here. NORAD has been using their sophisticated mistle Missile tracking equipment to track Santa ever since. This year NORAD is using Google Maps, and you can even track Santa using Google Earth in 3d.

Google Earth’s Santa Tracker Page - The Google side of the NORAD / Google partnership. Evidently, Santa wants Google to implement naughty and nice data layers into Google earth.

Santa’s GPS - A Downloadable Application for Windows, written by Santa’s Elves to avoid all of those pesky Internet bottlenecks.

If you’re going to be up all night, these will give you a good idea of when you should jump into bed. You know Santa won’t come if your awake, right?

Posted in Christmas, WebServices, WebSites 3 Comments »

Pearl posted about the social networking Sites that she belongs to, and I figured I would give it a shot too. Here are the links to my profile pages, join if you would like, or ignore it, it’s your call.

Pownce - I still think they need to add a notification when someone replies to something you have replied to, but otherwise, this is one of my favorites.

My Blog Log - This one has stuck. I really like sending private messages with other bloggers, it’s an easy way to tell them something is broken without posting it on their site. Love the stats and the widget.

Del.icio.us - Constantly use this Del.icio.us, love it. I don’t use regular bookmarks anymore. I can’t say that I use the social networking features of it though.

Digg - I subscribe to my friends submissions, so that I can digg them too. That’s about the most I use it for. I don’t generally “digg” my own stories, but you’re welcome too.

Last.FM - I use this one sporadically. I use Pandora more than Last.FM.

Flickr - I haven’t posted anything here since I found out you can only display 200 (?) pictures at a time. Bummer. I meant to set up my own photo site, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Blog Catalog - Their widget looks exactly like My Blog Log’s widget, but their site is much nicer looking, although painfully slow to load. I stick to My Blog Log, but I still belong to this one too.

Feel free to post any sites you really like.

Posted in Social Networks, WebSites No Comments »

One of the really neat things about the Internet is how much data is available right at your fingertips. Zip Skinny takes some of this data, and shows you some demographic information for your neck of the woods.

You enter your zip code (hence the name), and shows you some basic information about your zip code, compared to your state average and the national average.

The basics include Education Level, Marital Status, Income levels, and Occupation, all represented with a graph like the one pictured here.

The statistics are compared with zip codes close by, and clicking on them drills down even farther.

The data is based on Census data, and of course may be a little out of date. You can also see some of the top zip codes for various population attributes, such as population density, median age youngest or oldest.

It’s really neat to see how your zip code stacks up compared to the national average, as well as some of your other neighbors. You should check Zip Skinny out.

Posted in WebServices, Web Tools, WebSites, Distractions No Comments »

This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

Well, Art has been going a little crazy with his blog, but it looks like he’s finally done. While he was gone on vacation, his router at home decided it was going on vacation too. Which made all of his web sites inaccessible.

What’s worse is that the web sites didn’t know this, and they just thought no one was visiting. Their anxiety over this caused many long term effects. Don’t worry, Art arranged therapy for them, went out and put a new theme on them, and everyone is feeling much better now. I think the final product is very nice indeed.

Unfortunately, I don’t see my beloved tag cloud.

Speaking of tag clouds, I noticed it when first launched, but Phil placed the new  Amazon “Product Cloud” over on Tech Fires. Amazon introduced a number of new widgets recently, and the product cloud is one of them. Of course, you have to be an affiliate, Amazon uses the term associate, to use them.

If you are an affiliate, you should check them out though, some of them look pretty neat. I joined Amazon just so I could recommend books when I write about them, but these new widgets are so snazzy that I may just have to put one up.

Of course, adding widgets isn’t the only thing that Phil has been doing, Scott from My Thermos has joined him in writing his “Rapid Fire Reviews of Hot Technology. Between the two of them, they did 23 posts just in the past 5 weekdays. That’s pretty impressive, especially considering they both have their own blogs, and hold down day jobs.

Hooray! It looks like Pearl is back to her regular posting habits over at Interesting Observations. I didn’t realize it, but it was the Smiley faces anniversary Monday. At least the emoticon smiley face.

Personally, I have been pretty busy this week, so I haven’t had that much time to read my RSS feeds, and less time to leave comments. To make matters worse, Scott sent me an invite to Jango, which is pretty cool. He also sent me an invite to Rescue Time, which has been pretty stable. Once I have more time to play with them, I’ll write something up.

Posted in Affiliate, Random, WebServices, widgets, WebSites, Add-Ons, LinkLove 38 Comments »