Today, I was buying some airline tickets to give as a wedding gift to some friends who are getting married next month so they can come visit us after their honeymoon. My choices of airline were RyanAir or easyJet, the two main budget airlines in Europe. After recovering from the seizure and cleaning [...]

Recently I’ve been playing around with a pretty cool software package called Apple Motion. Follow that link and check out the intro video to see the kind of professional graphics it can produce. One really impressive trick that it can do is to stabilize shaky video. That’s what we’re going to be [...]

During the recent Twitter outages, I checked the Twitter Status Blog a few times. I noticed that it was running on a platform called Tumblr, so I investigated a little further. Here, I plan to explain what Tumblr is, why its creators think it’s useful, what you can do with it, and what [...]

Yesterday, Hubbers recommended a website called Geni.com to me. It’s a family tree management application. But it can be useful for so much more, because it allows quite a lot of information, such as birthdays, addresses, etc., to be entered about each person, which is only visible to the rest of the family. [...]

My latest blog toy is from Feedjit.com. I noticed it on the blog of my fellow Iberian immigrant, Theresa. It will display a tiny map with dots showing where my visitors are coming from, as well as a timeline of recent visitors, and the pages they came from to get here. There [...]

Last night, I felt like watching a movie. I had four or five to choose from. I wasn’t familiar with any of them by name, so I looked the first one up on IMDB to get a plot synopsis, see the actors, and get a feel for the general quality of the film. [...]

My mate, Hubbers, pointed me towards an interesting new Web 2.0 startup the other day. TubeMogul attempts to solve the problem of getting your videos out to as many video sharing websites as possible. YouTube is the big daddy, and I’m still fond of Revver, but there are plenty more that should not [...]

First, a quick follow-up on my previous post in the “What’s the point?” series about Facebook. I’ve ceased to log into Facebook on any sort of regular basis. The same “you gotta sign up to see it” philosophy that I praised as clever now strikes me as the most repulsive element of its [...]

One of my favorite songs has got to be John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery. I’ve mentioned it once before here when there was, well, a fly in the kitchen. It never ceases to amaze me how songwriters and novelists can write about someone else in the first person, to become someone else and [...]

I miss Altoids. I didn’t really use them much when I was living in the US, but I bought a couple tins one time when leaving the States, and got kinda hooked on ‘em. I’ve never seen Altoids for sale in Europe. What they do have here are Fisherman’s Friends, which I [...]