Not quite sure how I ran across Fitness Hacks for Geeks but it’s a very nice article about some of the options for making it easier to exercise. I’m lucky enough to live a few blocks away from Mt. Tabor Park. It’s notable for being the only extinct volcano within city limits in the US. It’s a bit silly to call it a mountain, given that the mountain blew up many thousands of years ago. But the little (I assume) that’s left still makes for a challenging walk or run. ...

Bill Burnham has a nice summary of what Google Base in general and the real estate section in particular might mean for vertical web sites like Trulia. It’s not a lot of fun competing in a section where Google is competing. I can vouch for that first hand.

David Pogue of the New York Times writes about how images are manipulated with Photoshop. As a dad with 2 young daughters, I find this kind of thing appalling. The images in magazines are what some women (and men) compare themselves to. How in the world can they justify this? Put me down for requiring a “altered by Photoshop” logo. Or just prohibiting this altogether.

The City Council of Portland was very interested in buying Portland General Electric from what was left of Enron. Rate cuts of 10% or more were talked about. With amazing 20-20 hindsight, it’s now obvious what the City should have done: Keep PGE’s rates the same! Keeping them the same would have let them . Give rebates to other cities. Here, Gresham & Beaverton, here’s 10% of the electric bills of everyone in your city boundaries. Now be quiet. . Give money to Portland Public Schools. . Fund the tram . Stop people wondering what would happen when well-paid, unionized private sector workers became well-paid, unionized public sector workers. Did anybody expect there to be fewer people? Less pay?

TechCrunch has a nice summary of online music services. I’ve been pretty happy with the Yahoo Music service. I’ve got boxes of CDs that I need to rip some day so I often find myself using the Yahoo service to listen to songs that I have already … somewhere in a box in the attic. Using a streaming service is perfect for me, since I have no intention of buying those songs at $.99/each.

Ran across a reference to libraries using Open Source programs like Linux and Open Office. Neat. Useful, the program that the library uses, sounds neat but it has the lame “we won’t tell you the price” approach typical of many companies. At least Fonality sort of tells you a price. I really like the idea of locked-down Linux running sessions with keyboard and monitor rather than individual machines. One machine to maintain per location, hopefully. Have another couple of machines at the central library for relatively immediate replacement if a machine melts down. ...

I’ve been looking at re-arranging the partitions on my Sony VAIO desktop. They gave me a 15GB C: and a 100GB D: and even with installing everything I could to D:, it was still getting tighter and tighter. Looked at some fairly scary Linux-based partition shrinking software. Problem is that all of my partitions are NTFS, not the older FAT file system. Nothing (easy( and free that I could find would downsize D: and then increase C: ...

Bill Gross is the legendary bond analyst/trader at PIMCO. He has strong words about the Economic Report of the President and the state of the US economy. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be anyone out there who’s much interested in trying to solve the problem. We can’t keep spending the way that we have. All the big screen TVs and clothing that we’re buying from overseas is growing their economies as fast as it depletes our resources. It’d be different if we were graduating more scientists and engineers … if we were graduating more people period. ...

I downloaded something written in Word for my wife, who’s a Mac user, and printed it for her. Now, every time I open Microsoft Word, I get an unintelligble message about “The function you are attempting to run contains macros or content that requires macro language support. When this software was installed you (or your administrator) chose not to install support for macros or controls.” OK. What function that I am trying to run? Where is it? Microsoft.com is totally unhelpful. In searching Google, I ran across a pretty good screech about Microsoft’s Scripting Addiction ...

I’ve never really understood the differences between “pingback” and “trackback”. Google likes to display older articles, which has interesting effects The first thing that I found that tried to explain the differences was published more than 3 years ago and has way more detail than I want. But this whitepaper led me to more resources on pingback and trackback. If I can summarize: Pingback Just ping a blog (or whatever) with your own blogging software No detail about what you said about them Receiver doesn’t link back to you Trackback ...