John Lamansky

According to this PCWorld staff blog post, Opera is offering free registration codes for its browser as part of its tenth anniversary up until midnight today (August 31). Just visit this Opera page, type in your email address, and then copy/paste the generated registration codes.

At the moment, my “John’s Choice” in the web browser area is Mozilla Firefox, but access to this free no-ads version could give me a chance to try out and possibly review the Opera browser.

Microsoft seems to be on a roll – first they released Windows Vista Beta 1, and now shortly after they’ve released their first WinFS (Windows File System) Beta a year before schedule! (They were supposed to have a beta ready when the final version of Windows Vista was released.) WinFS won’t be part of Windows Vista when it’s released, but will available as an add-on sometime in 2007. For more information on the beta release and WinFS in general, visit this PCWorld article.

My dad is a carpenter who does marvelous construction work, and one day he got a sticky note from one of his customers that read:

I sure am pretty!!!! Thanks

I kid you not.

Who knew you could search for Google AdWords advertisements? Just go to http://www.google.com/sponsoredlinks and type in your query. This could be useful for finding out how many affiliate ads there are for a company/product, or for checking out your AdWords competition.

I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but you can never be told enough: when you’re blogging, emailing, or using other Internet forms of communication, you need to be careful about how you present things, because you no longer have inflections, body language, etc., at your disposal. One way to “replace” these is to use emotions (but then of course there are those people who say that a well-structured sentence shouldn’t need emotions, yada yada yada…). But once upon a time I was new to email, and I learned this “be careful what you say” lesson the hard way.

I once had a “email penpal” named Nicky who lived in Australia; he was my very first penpal. After we had been writing for some time, I decided that I wanted to tell him about the funny things that had happened to us recently.

Like the time our fireplace blew up and sent glass shards flying across the living room, leaving burn marks on the carpet? (On the more serious side, it was definitely a miracle that about 15 seconds before the explosion I felt a sudden impulse to get myself and my baby brother out of the living room.)

And remember that one early morning many years ago when the house filled up with smoke because the pop-up-timer mechanism on the toaster had broken? I proudly remembered my fire drill techniques and crawled across the kitchen floor, then quickly jumped up into standing position and yanked the toaster’s power plug out. (And then my parents wake up and say something like, “Why does the house smell like smoke?”) That piece of toast was in a sorry state… (to be more specific, the slice of bread looked like greasy charcoal and had probably shrunk about 25% due to extreme moisture loss).

I never heard from Nicky again. Perhaps I gave a slight impression of pyromania…

Occasionally, you’ll notice that the logo on the Google homepage has changed to celebrate a certain occassion. After some browsing around on the Google website, I’ve compiled this list of the various logos Google has had over the years.

All Logos By Year (FYI, some of these pages have links to more logo pages):

• 2005
• 2004
• 2003
• 2002
• 2001
• 2000
• 1999

What happens when you cross Google and Dilbert? You get a Google/Dilbert logo/cartoon, which you can find at the Google and Dilbert Doodle page.

You can also visit this page for another interesting read on the person who designs all of these Google doodles and logos.

And finally, the Google Fan Logos page contains more logos compiled by Google fans.

As some readers will know, Pope John Paul II had given “themes” to certain years. The “Year of the Rosary” was October 2003 to October 2004, and the “Year of the Eucharist” is October 2004 to October 2005. I think it’s highly possible that Benedict XVI will continue this tradition. If so, I’m going to make a wild guess as to the theme… I’ll say, “Year of the Priesthood.” I’ll find out if I’m right or wrong in two months . I haven’t seen or read any other predictions for the October 2005-2006 theme yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people have made this or other guesses. Do you have a theme prediction? If so, what is it?

According to this blog post from the Young and Catholic blog, the location for World Youth Day 2008 is “semi-official”: Sydney, Australia. According to the blog post:

The “official”, official announcement won’t be made until the end of the Mass and activities taking place at Marienfeld on August 21.

For World Youth Day 2005 coverage, I suggest you check out the Catholic Insider podcast, which is a member of Disciples with Microphones.

Although I’m not sure if this would succeed, is is a very interesting possibility: Japanese scientists using mammoth DNA from preserved mammoth carcasses to create a half-mammoth baby inside of a female elephant. 50 years of careful breeding could result in an animal that’s 88% mammoth. However, my Future Problem Solving thought processes tell me that if this were feasible, bringing an extinct species back to life could possibly present some unforseen challenges. But for more information, see this National Geographic article.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the link on the sidebar under the “Sites I Designed” category. Perhaps you’ve visited the site when searching for Catholic podcasts. If you haven’t visited the site, you should check it out. If you’re a Catholic podcaster who’s not already a member, you should definately check it out. Disciples with Microphones is a group consisting of a good majority of the Catholic podcasters out there, plus many other wonderful people who don’t podcast. Here’s a quote from the “About Us” page:

Disciples with Microphones is a loose gathering of Catholics who want to bring NPR-style broadcast standards to Catholic radio. We started in late 2004 after Carlos Briceno wrote a column for the National Catholic Register, articulating the vision for this form of evangelization. He asked interested parties to contact him; some people did, a Yahoo! discussion group was started, and we were off and running.

I have had the pleasure of designing a website for the group at discipleswithmicrophones.org. The site is still a work in progress, although it does contain a podcast episode and series directory plus an RSS parser, a member center, and a forum. Be sure to visit the site’s “Podcast Series” page for a list of podcasts that are part of Disciples with Microphones.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have a podcast to contribute to the site. I’m working on it, though. I have ideas for two podcasts actually, and I have ideas for (what I think are) two awesome podcast names!