Net Sieve

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!

Guest written by our friend Clara Castro

My husband and I bought a new house in Gaithersburg, Maryland a few weeks ago. I am so psyched about moving into it. I’ve lived in Washington, DC for a long time. This move is going to mean a lot of changes for us. We’re going to have a lot more space, and a whole driveway to park in. Sometimes I can’t even believe it! I am so tired of living in a small apartment and can’t wait to have a nice big house and some storage space.

My husband and I both want to set up separate home offices so that should be pretty convenient too. Both of our offices are flexible and since the commute to DC is going to be long, we both plan on working from home sometimes. I hope this arrangement works out. I’m almost done with planning the move and only have a few more chores left. I do have to search wireless internet Gaithersburg so I can see which internet provider we should go with. I’m sure this won’t be much work compared to finding reputable movers. I’m so relieved to have almost everything done for the move. Now I’m just starting to get really excited about our new place.

Guest post written by Hope Schuster

I recently realized that my daughter has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns on TV. Well, I used to actually watch the show back years ago. So as soon as I heard that Sarah Michelle Gellar had that new show, The Ringer, coming on TV I wanted to make sure that we would watch the show together. Granted the show is very different from Buffy and the reasons that I watched Buffy. But I really grew to love Sarah Michelle Gellar as an actress from watching that show and have tried to follow her career since then.

I also tried to make sure that I looked up all kinds of info on the show before watching it with my wireless internet Seattle. It seems to have gotten some really good reviews and I look forward to watching it for the rest of the season.

I think that The Ringer pilot started off a little bit slow, but the second episode seemed to really pick up at the speed that I’m expecting for the show to have for the rest of the season.

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.

Thanks for the article from Robin Woodard

Before I moved, I made sure to do a lot of research on the utility providers where my new apartment would be. I got some wireless internet information from a local company, and it didn’t take long to realize that was the solution for all my Internet troubles. I found a really good electric provider that didn’t seem to be quite as high at the others in my area, so that was a relief for me. I decided I didn’t need a landline phone, so I just upped my cell service to include more minutes, and while I was at it I contacted my water! and sewer provider to shut off service at the old place once I moved. I had my mail forwarded and made sure to get my renters insurance up to date, and once moving day rolled around I felt totally prepared to leave my home. I only been at the new place for two days, but so far there haven’t been any major issues, I should knock on wood!

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.

Relax a little, will you? Get on your computer and kill something.

Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game project, created online by a team of developers called Alientrap. It is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all the same archive). The game is meant to bring death match back to the basics, with fast paced action, perfect weapon balancing, and very excessive battles.

Version 2 of Nexuiz includes a single-player campaign with completely new advanced bot AI, five new maps, new particle effect system, weapon changes, and complete precompiled bumpmapping with GLSL shaders. The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.4 and new releases being developed.

Download Nexuiz freeware.

Decent web directories that you can submit your sites to are getting pretty rare. Either they want a couple hundred dollars for each submission or what they have to offer for free is worthless. Sometimes listing your links at these sites can actually be harmful to your rankings instead of helpful. If you’re looking for a free web directory, you should look at Dirmania.

DirMania is a business web directory that provides free website advertising. The site has a PR 3, if you care about that kind of stuff and offers a direct link to your small or medium sized business/website. The directory is organized by categories and is very search engine friendly. Your listing can go live in less than 24 hours if you meet the listing requirements. (Not hard to do if you don’t try keyword stuffing or other lame 2002 tricks.) Be sure and provide a good, human friendly description of your site with appropriate keywords and a catchy title and you’re in.

The submission form has all the instructions and advice you need to determine if your submission is quality or not. Think common sense. Make sure you are submitting your link in the most relevant category to its content and make sure that the content is offering something useful to the visitor. It is, isn’t it? Then you’re good – otherwise, anything that is submitted to a blatantly wrong category or is nothing but spam will be removed from the directory.

Play by the rules and scoop up some link love. We all need it.