…Same as the Old Word. Sudoku, DVR, smackdown and ginormous. These are some of the recent additions to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, according to a Fox News story. The story also says that ginormous can be traced back to 1948. DVR and smackdown have certainly been in common usage for quite a while.

Merriam-Webster’s website offers a sampling of the new words that are available in the 2007 Collegiate Dictionary, adding hardscape and perfect storm to article’s list.

Time to send out those 4th invitations? Well, maybe a little too late, but there’s a great collection of old postcards that could liven up what you’re going to send. It’s really a history site but I prefer the postcard page.

I met Tom Kelley through my girlfriend. You probably don’t know, but she knows, that I’m not often impressed by photographers’ materials. Because of that, she was very surprised when I said “Wow” about Tom’s site.

Tom is a highly-acclaimed advertising photographer whose work has appeared in numerous books, magazines and exhibitions and, of course, advertising media. His images are available as Limited edition fine art photographs at a number of galleries.

My credentials, to help you decide if my opinion makes any difference: I’ve been taking pictures for 25 years and have a photo degree. I’ve been doing artwork since I was 10 (probably younger, but does it really count then?) and I was even displayed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for a couple of days (kid work, I’m not good enough to be on display there as a pro).

Check out Tom’s work. He’s probably pricey, but as you can see, you get what you pay for. I know where I’m going when I need to get my picture taken.

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits.

I customized it once, then couldn’t remember the name of it to figure out how to do it again. It took an hour to figure the name out. What is the Places Bar, you ask?

When you save or open a file in an application that uses Windows XP’s common dialog box, chances are that you use the Places bar on the left side of the dialog box to speed up your navigation. It shows up to five places, such as “My Documents” or “My Computer”, that you can to quickly go by clicking on them.

As explained in this mvps.org article, you can customize the Places bar three ways: by editing the local group policy with the Group Policy Editor, by editing the registry entry “HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar”, or by using TweakUI. The easiest and best way is to use the MS Powertoys program TweakUI. Go to its Common Dialogs, select custom places bar and change at will.

TweakUI is a must-have with so many features that I sometimes forget they exist, as in this case. If you don’t have it, go to Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP and get it. The “ClearType Tuner” available on the same page is also a nice addition, especially on LCD displays.

Internet Radio Stations around the country are protesting a proposed increases of over 300% to royalty rates on streaming audio broadcasts by partaking in the Internet Radio Day of Silence. Read about it more in either the LATimes article or Washington Post. (LA times articles are available at no cost for only one week.)

There is a lot more information at SaveNetRadio.org. The short story is that many of them say that the fees are higher than their revenue and they will have to shut down; they want the same fees as satellite radio.

A five-acre glacial lake disappeared between March and May. It is now a 100 foot deep crater in Chile’s southern Andes. There have been no earthquakes in the area that could have caused cracks in lake bottom.

I’ve got nothing, so here’s some stuff that’s isn’t deserving of its own post.

Trivia: Named after the British “Unemployment Benefits, Form 40”, pop-reggae band UB40 was formed in a welfare line in 1978.

Brian Eno has an new “DVD/Art Software Package” named “77 Million Paintings“. It consists of an interview DVD, a 52 page illustrated book, and a software disk, which is really what the package is about. The software creates a constantly evolving painting on your screen, and creates music to go along with it.

Gizmodo loves Frankie Flood’s pizza cutters. Me too. Their article doesn’t have, but here is, the link to his exhibit at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design’s MFA Thesis Exhbition 2004

Brian Eno and David Byrne are offering for download all the multitracks from two of the songs on their album “Bush of Ghosts”. The 24-track session of the songs, “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody”, are available in MP3 and wav formats, with all tracks available individually or with all tracks from the song in a single zip file. You are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like.

SEO | XFN | SOIC | xFolk | RSS | RDF | XML | PHP | XSL | xPath | XMLT | OWL | WDSL | UDDI.
Social Engines | Joomla | semantic mark up | Web 2.0 | keyword density | Atom feed | folksonomy | Tag Cloud | Feedburner | Technorati | Pingerati | digg | de.licio.us.

And many more.

So many TLAs and ETLAs*. So many people and websites creating and propagating terminology. Far too many acronyms and concepts for me to bother worrying about knowing them all, especially since this is just one little corner of the knowledge.

I’m getting to know more of it than I planned on by helping out on a project. If you know what half of the above jargon is about, you might be interested in my xFolk Cloud and Tag Generator. The page it’s on might move later, so get there by the Tech Projects page.

I mentioned disposable email a long time ago. I don’t use the service I wrote about then very often any more; it wasn’t working for a while, so I found a different one: SpamGourmet.

Sizlopedia‘s list of the Top 20 Temporary and Disposable Email Services doesn’t include SpamGourmet. Disposable addresses really are useful to keep the spam away, and you should have one for when you need to provide an email to sign up for something, but want to avoid another mailing list.

Here’s the way the story starts:

WANTS PAWN TERM DARE WORSTED LADLE GULL HOE LIFT wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry Putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset.

“Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainersi”

There are a lot more stories written by Howard L. Chace at Kevin Rice’s ANGUISH LANGUISH PAGE. If you’re confused by what what’s quoted above, start with THE ANGUISH LANGUISH.

I discovered Chace because of an design book that used the text from Ladle Rat Rotten Hut in its examples. It took a while to find out who actually wrote it. Rice’s site is the only place I found any more writings than LRRH.

Forest guards in western India are using cell phones with ringtones of cows mooing, goats bleating and roosters crowing to lure curious leopards that are looking for an easy meal into a cage. I’m sure the live goats they used to use as bait heartily approve.

I just discovered Pentago at ThinkGeek. Not wanting to just buy it without at least trying it, I looked around for one to play online. I haven’t found an English version, but this Swedish version, which lets you play against a computer, will do just fine.

The rules are simple: Place a ball on the board, rotate one of the four nine-hole squares. The first one to get five in a row wins.

I’ve been drawing for years and have a pretty good understanding of perspective. I had a hard time finding the answer questions like: when is it really a cube instead of having one side longer than the other. Sure, I could eyeball it fairly well and that’s usually good enough. But sometimes I really wanted it to look right.

The answer finally came in a Project Gutenberg eBook named “The Theory and Practice of Perspective”, by George Adolphus Storey, which was originally written in 1910. It’s free to download and seems to have the answer to all perspective questions. Get it at www.gutenberg.org/files/20165/20165-h/20165-h.htm.

Most of you won’t need access to an old, obsolete browser. Sometimes people still want them supported on their web sites. Doing that is a pain, and hardly worth the effort since so few people still use them. For quite a while, I didn’t know where to find any of the older stuff.

Evolt.org has a browser page with more browsers than I’ve ever heard of. I must admit, I’m scared to install them because of incompatibilities, but if you need them they’re still available.

Christopher DeLaurenti has been recording the intermissions at orchestral concerts for seven years. He now has a CD, titled “Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven, Stravinsky, Holst”.

There’s an article at the NY Times. More on the CD can be found at GD Stereo, including where to buy it.

You may not have noticed but, on and off, a lot of computers have not been getting the time from the internet ever since the change in Daylight Savings Time. There’s a lot of speculation that something in Microsoft’s patch did it. See FYI To Microsoft: Windows Time Synchronization Completely Broken (Vista, 2003, XP are all broken) if you want one of the discussions.

I had been having the problem and only noticed it because I occasionally look at the Event Log to see if any errors have happened. I kept trying to reconfigure my firewall, thinking that was the issue. But, at least for me, changing the time server to ntp-uw.usno.navy.mil fixed it. Both time.windows.com and time.nist.gov no longer worked after the DST change. Here is a list of some available servers:

• ntp-uw.usno.navy.mil
• north-america.pool.ntp.org
• nist1.aol-va.truetime.com … DC/Virginia
• utcnist.colorado.edu …….. Colorado
• nist1.aol-ca.truetime.com … California
• nist1.columbiacountyga.gov .. Georgia
• nist1.symmetricom.com ……. California
• nist1-ny.WiTime.net ……… NYC
• nist1-sj.WiTime.net ……… California
• nist.expertsmi.com ………. Michigan
• nist1-dc.WiTime.net ……… DC/Virginia

Just do a copy and paste of the server you want to use into your time server selection. You can get there by double-clicking on the time display in Window’s taskbar Notification Area (probably the bottom right corner of your screen). MSFT has more info if you need it.

Microsoft has a brief article about time servers that includes a list of some that are available at article kb262680.

Since 1993 Project Censored has published an annual trade paperback review of the “Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year.” Their website has the top 25 for this year on their home page, and a few of the previous year in their archive.

According to Walter Cronkite, who wrote the introduction to the 1996 version of the book, “Project Censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to, to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcasting outlets are practicing thorough and ethical journalism.”

It seemed like a good idea: grab one of the old items I keep on hand for later blog fodder. It should only take a couple of minutes to add some text and post it. Instead I got a reminder of just how transitory the web really is.

Often I’ll make a snip of part of an article, including key links, and save it for later when I can write something around it. The snip has just enough to show what the original article was about. It’s saved, instead of only saving a link to the article, to cover those cases where the original article goes away so I might be able to find it or something like it. I can write and post the subject at my leisure without being concerned with losing the information.

The snippet in question had two links. One of them was incomplete. That was my fault for being lazy and not looking at the link when I saved it, because it was only a relative link (no www.wherever.com portion). Easy enough: Google the subject and find the new link. It almost worked because the website was still there but the page names had changed. Still, that fixed it. Upon finding and re-reading it, it was just a reference to a Rolling Stone article.

The RS article was gone, too. I knew the subject, and Googled again to find the new location for the 100 “greatest” guitarists of all time

That link was only intended as a backup from the original story, which I finally found: 50 “Worst” Guitar Solos Of All Time. What I was interested in was the article it talks about; really it was just another snip. Unfortunately, the story is all that remains because the article it talks about, originally at http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/solos/, has been deleted. (Remember, that’s why I saved the snippet in the first place — so I could find it again.)

Task finally completed thanks to Google and the Wayback Machine, because I finally found the Worst Solo article there.

Rates for “First Class” postage went up again today. Didn’t this just happen? I looked back a little and found that postal rates for a one ounce letter have been fairly consistent since 1970, going up about one cent per year.