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March 17, 2008

RAGE173 2008 Season

sFIRSTOVERDRIVE_medRGB_300(1) The 2008 FIRST FRC competition season has begun. Our team, RAGE 173, competed in Hartford this past weekend in a field of 62 teams and made it into the semifinals. The Hartford Courant had a nice writeup about it. Note that the team referenced in the first three paragraphs of the article is ours. Next is Boston in two weeks followed by the international championship in Atlanta in April. As all the FIRST e-mails end, Go Teams!

March 9, 2008

Satanic Bush Part 2?

r340993575 Good old Reuters. I found this first photo a little over a year ago, but it was the AP that passed it through. Here's another one with the presidential seal perfectly behind George's head. Does anybody even look at these things before publishing them?

March 6, 2008

Israeli man builds missile to fire back at Gaza

SatelliteRead here and here. After the police stopped him at the last minute, he remarked that he "wished there were more 'crazies' like me in Israel." Me, too.

Google Calendar Sync

outlooksyncoptions As most people with busy families, I rely on my calendar to try to make sense of all of our daily activities. I used to keep everything in a single Outlook calendar on my work laptop, but if I wanted to quickly check a date while at home and the computer was off, it was most inconvenient, to say the least.

Then I changed jobs and the laptop went away. That's when I started using Google Calendar in a big way. Now I use it for everything, and create separate calendars for different types of activities. For example, I've created public calendars for the UConn men's and women's basketball schedules, the upcoming Stafford Motor Speedway racing season, and even my son's Boy Scout troop and daughter's Venturing crew. Since they are public, others can benefit by including them in their own calendar display.

So it was with mixed feelings that I saw the announcement that Google Calendar could finally be synced with Outlook. It's something I would have killed for about six months ago, but now that I've weaned off Outlook, it's something I'm not particularly excited about. I toyed around with using Plaxo to sync Google Calendar, Outlook, and Thunderbird, but as the various pieces have evolved over the past few months, Plaxo has been getting more and more broken.

I'll probably give it a shot, because I'm now using Outlook 2007 on my new laptop, but I'm not straying far from the basic Google Calendar interface. What I really want is two-way syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. Oh well...

March 5, 2008

Phun Fun

You have to check out this video. Lots of fun when you have nothing better to do. Down the program (it's free) from here.

March 4, 2008

7-Zip Archiver

7ziplogo I love finding free tools that work better than commercial versions. I have always tried to keep a pair of file archiving utilities on all my PCs: WinZip and WinRAR. However, I was reading some comments where people were talking about WinRAR, and someone mentioned 7-Zip. I quickly discovered that it's a SourceForge-hosted open-source project that handles more file formats than WinZip and WinRAR put together, integrates into the Explorer shell, and is just as easy to use. I've already deleted WinRAR and plan to use this one almost exclusively.