Net Sieve

After my craigslist post, Nathan from Craig’s Little Helper wrote to let me know about another, better site. Well, I checked it out. It is better, but since he opened it up, he has to hear my opinions.

The helper would be even helpier (Of course that’s a word. You don’t think they’d let me have a blog if I just made words up all willy-nilly, do ya?) if it had an option for “All States” instead of requiring me to click each one. O’ the agony. And there could be a note near the keyword form saying that the CL post had to match all keywords. It doesn’t say that until the search results.

Otherwise, right on Nathan. The help section is muy well done. And here’s what the site says about itself:

“At Craig’s Little Helper , we strive to improve your search experience without compromising craigslist’s spirit of local community. Rather than parsing a pile of craigslist cities and showing you some formatted version, we send you to the authentic craigslist results pages for your search. That way you get to view your results in the format that Craig intended.”

Time to talk up one of my favorite free tools – XE.com’s Universal currency converter. This thing has been online at least as long as I have (too damn long) and rightfully bills itself as the world’s most popular currency tool.

The UCC is fast, up-to-date and has currency rates for about 100 countries. No shit. This thing is priceless. I wouldn’t suggest buying an MP3 player from Hong Kong without running your shipping charges through UCC.

Tired of driving alone? Are you afraid of pulling up to a stoplight in the dead of night in an otherwise empty car to touch up your lipstick, but are too tired of wiping dog spit off the windows to bring him with you all the time? Insurance company Sheilas’ Wheels has the answer – an inflatable male passenger brought to life by the flip of a switch. It’s called the “Buddy on Demand” and I’m thinking seriously of getting one to put in my cube at work for those after meeting naps.

Anyway, this tip is from CarInsurance.com who provides automobile insurance quotes for all 50 states, an easy comparison service and the possibility of proof of insurance in your hot little hands in under 15 minutes. Sweet.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s “A List Apart” is a very pointed, opinionated and often hilarious look at what makes up this whole sphere we’re living in … whatever name it’s going by at the moment.

His article “Web 3.0” offers an entertaining and informative poke in the guts of Web 2.0 and what it is. With headers like “A Taste of Ass” and quotes like “Web 1.0 was not disruptive. You understand? Web 2.0 is totally disruptive. You know what XML is? You’ve heard about well-formedness? Okay. So anyway—” you know this is not going to be the Wall Street Journal’s view.

Enjoy!

People Search and Public Record Toolbar Version 1.0 of our popular free people search and public record menu for Firefox contains dozens of the web’s most popular and powerful free people search and public record sites.
(Note – ignore the comments and mud-slinging on this page. Someone has it in for this developer. I’ve had the tool on for about a week now and haven’t had a single issue. It’s a great resource.)

This Firefox extension is a handy menu tool for investigators, reporters, legal professionals, real estate agents, online researchers
and anyone interested in doing their own basic people searches and public record lookups as well as background research.

Find past friends, relatives, classmates, coworkers, military buddies or do background research on people and businesses.

This useful extension offers you the following free people and public record searches at the click of a mouse –

- Free People Searches: White Pages, 411, DA Plus, Zaba Search, Zoom Info, Google, International Phone Directories, Google Image Search and
Riya photo search.

- Reverse Phone Numbers: White Pages, DA Plus, Google, Land Line or Cell Phone? Search, Reverse Payphone and Do Not Call List.

- Reverse Addresses: White Pages, DA Plus, Google, Mail Drop Search and Whois Lookup.

- Area Code, Zip Code and International Calling Code Searches.

- Yellow Pages & Local Searches: White Pages Yellow, DA Plus Yellow, Google Local and Yahoo Local.

- Public Record Searches: Skipease Public Record Directory, Search Systems Public Record Directory, Social Security Number Searches, NETRonline Property Records, Zillow Property Values, Trulia Real Estate Search, Yahoo Real Estate and NACO US County Information.

- Criminal Searches: Inmate Locators and National Sex Offender Registry.

- Maps & Satellites: Google Maps, Map Quest, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth, Terra Server.

- Government Phone Directories: US Blue Pages, Canada GEDS.

- US Government Search Engines: FirstGov and Google Government Search.

- News & Blog Searches: Google News, Yahoo News, Technorati, IceRocket and Google Blog Search.

- Business & Finance: Alibaba, Business.com, Thomas Registry, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance.

- Jobs & Classifieds: Indeed Meta Job Search, Simply Hired Meta Job Search, Dice Jobs, Hot Jobs, Monster Jobs, Craigslist Classifieds.

- Social Network Sites: Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Tribe, Xanga.

I’m a freeware junkie. I admit it. I’ll download stuff I never use just ’cause it’s so clever. And free.

But I’ve had no luck when it comes to freeware for creating PDFs. It’s all crap as far as I can tell. And if it’s not crap, it’s worse than crap.

Pdf995 has got to be the suck of the vacuum. I downloaded this – and all the milllion components it needs to “work properly” and all it did was muck up my system. I can’t get its stupid macros off my stupid Word. (Or am I just stupid?) I uninstalled Pdf995 about 35 seconds after it failed to do anything useful and now I get an error message every time I open Word because the macros aren’t there but the crap won’t delete from my toolbar. Months later and I’m still finding Pdf995 files in random places.

I give this worse than a thumbs-down. One finger up.

Crazy Shoemoney Man… I had to laugh/share/poke fun at his list of My Top 10 Worst Ideas To Make Money. In a way, I don’t feel so stupid. In another way, I feel more stupid because some of my ideas aren’t even this good.

Best quote from the comments: “I used to hate you, just because I was jealous of your money making schemes, but all that has changed after reading this post.”

HA!

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). All features are optional and easily configured from the options menu. View a short introduction movie at www.customizegoogle.com