Net Sieve

Guest post of the week by Moises Henderson

When my husband told me his company was transferring him, I was apprehensive at first. I loved living in Virginia, and I was worried about moving the kids anywhere because they were doing so well in school. My husband didn’t have any choice in the matter according to his boss, so he had to move, or find another job. When he told me we would be moving to Florida, I started to feel a little bit better. I had never heard of Cape Coral, but I knew if it was in Florida it would be warm, and I hoped it would be close to the beach. I also knew the kids would be excited to be closer to their cousins who live in Fort Lauderdale.

When my husband and I started getting ready for the move I was tasked with hiring movers and trying to get direct tv in Cape Coral. I knew his company was going to reimburse us for our moving expenses, so I went with the best movers I could find. We have some expensive furniture and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t get damaged.

I’m painting some signs for the upcoming Lone Star Round Up car show in Austin and wanted to mix up my stable of fonts. Found some great free ones at DaFont.com. Favorites are Sparkly, Brewsky and Dick Van Dyke. Search “retro” to get more classic styles.

Of course the most fun you can have with fonts is to modify them into your own style. I print out a sheet with the full alphabet, then paint or draw my modifications.

Thanks to Darwin Barton

The “Father of the Bride” series are some of my all time favorite movies. The other day it was raining and the first movie came on my direct tv. It is always so great. It reminded me of when I got married and everything started to get out of control with the wedding planner and what not. I could just imagine that my dad felt exactly like Steve Martin did in the movie: totally overwhelmed.

The movie always makes me cry. My husband thinks that it is ridiculous that I cried during the movie, but the truth is, I usually end up crying at movies. Anything that tuggs on your heart strings if guaranteed to me to make me cry. I don’t know why I have always been a movie crier, but I remember crying at the “Little Mermaid” when I was a kid. I mean who cries at that movie?! I wish I just wasn’t so much of a movie crier, but I don’t know what it will take to make me stop. I know that my husband would love for me to!

Quick quote from Dave Navarro – just because I’m feeling it today. Hopefully you will too.

“When you believe strongly enough that you will succeed at something, success is practically guaranteed – not because your belief creates the result, but because you don’t give up taking action on a massive level until you get what you want.”

Go on. Do it.

I have too many fonts on my computer. No really. Creatively this is a good thing except when I’m trying to find the perfect font for a project but can’t recognize them by name. It’s frustrating to highlight a word in my document and keep changing the font manually to decide which one is right. Wish all programs showed the font’s name in the font itself.

But no point wishing… gotta head to the freeware. I found two interesting programs at Freeware Home – FontPage and FontViewOK. From the makers:

FontPage lets you examine and compare all of the fonts on your system. You can view any typeface in bold, italic, underline and also 3D. In addition, you can also compare two selected fonts and preview fonts that are not yet installed on your system. FontPage can also print a sample page for selected fonts or print a list of all installed fonts.

FontViewOK – It’s a well known problem, you remember what a font looks like but its name is forgotten. FontViewOK creates a quick visual overview of all installed fonts. Dual font preview for quick comparisons and you can also customize the right font preview text, text-type, size and color. Printing with print preview function; Changeable font size, style and color; Installation of FontViewOK is not required, can be run from a USB stick.

Guest post!

I am so excited to have this week off with my family! Yesterday we ventured to Costco and became members! I love it. We spent about three hours walking around, shopping, and eating all the yummy samples.

Of course my husband wanted to spend most of the time in the electronics section. He found this 55 inch TV that he basically fell in love with. The funny thing is now we have this huge TV hanging on the wall in our living room and we don’t even have cable. I have been looking at all the Direct tv deals and am thinking about signing up. I mean, you don’t just buy a TV and a 55 inch one at that for the occasional movie that you watch on the Xbox.

I just found out that Costco sells travel deals, boats, and so much more. Basically, I have figured out that I can’t let my husband go to Costco by himself! I am actually excited about the TV though. With young kids at home it is nice sometimes to be able to turn on a show for them when I want to get something done like clean the kitchen or actually take a shower in silence so I can hear my own thoughts!

So about that Touchpad…

Oddly enough, since the bizarre fire sale of HP’s line of tablet PCs happened, I’ve been looking more seriously at the BlackBerry PlayBook. I’m a BlackBerry user already – my smartphone is a BlackBerry and since I’m more of a texter than a talker – the phone is everything I need. So does the PlayBook’s full price beat out the TouchPad? Opinions welcome…

I don’t know what the fallout of HP’s lack of support for the TouchPad OS will be. I certainly don’t see BlackBerry pulling the rug out from under their products.

Does this mean I wouldn’t buy a TouchPad for less than $100 if I found one? No, it certainly doesn’t.

Sick of aggressive advertising that takes over your computer and bogs you down with crap? Worried that spyware is tracking your every move and worse?

Then it’s time to download Ad-Aware Free, a tool that scans your memory, registry, hard, removable and optical drives for known adware and spyware data-mining, tracking components and much more. When the tool finds malware it lists the results and lets you choose to remove or quarantine the components. It’s a lot more powerful than this review suggests, but the free version has limited real-time protection, only processes are scanned and scans can’t be scheduled

Download Ad-Aware Free

If you’re selling online you probably are familiar with PayPal – and the gouge they take out of your incoming income. With the PayPal Fee Calculator you can avoid the aftershock by knowing what your fees will be in advance. That way, you can adjust your price to have the buyer absorb some of the cost. Cool.

This is a free tool – so enjoy freely.

Since MySpace is drowning in a sea of spam and no relief seems to be in sight, now would be a good time to start looking for a new online meeting place. If you want to get in on the ground floor of a social networking site that offers chat, photo albums and mp3 downloads (that’s very cool), join 3gb community www.3gb.biz.

3gb is so new in fact, their TOS reads: “This is the terms of service agreement.” OK. I can deal with that. Expect the usual bumps in the road as the platform develops. This is the best time to become part of a new community.