Do you ever read a newspaper and skip over several boring articles and advertisments? What if you could know the lastest scoop on things that interest you without having to look for it. They come to you. I was reading a post about how everyone should use Google Alerts. I started doing it and it is pretty helpful. I made an alert for my hometown, school, political party, favorite bands, companies that I’m interested in, my religion, my favorite sports teams and athletes, even myself. Anytime google’s webcrawler finds a new article on any of my alerts it emails me a link to the article. Some of them are web alerts and whenever a new site makes it into the top 20 for that search I’m sent a link to the new site. The guy that told me about it said he has about 250 alerts and he has them sent to his blackberry so he is always ‘updated and in the know’. You can have them sent daily or weekly, you choose for each alert. I must say it is pretty neat. Some of my alerts that are in the news a lot get annoying so I think I’ll delete those. Gmail is nice though to because I can tag all emails from Google Alerts and file them away for when I feel like reading them.

In other news; I got a new digital camera yesterday for my birthday. I asked my wife if I could get one and after convincing her that the vacation time that I didn’t take this summer would pay for it she said it was okay. The camera is awesome! It is a Canon Powershot S2 IS. It takes great pictures and video. I like the lcd screen that can be stored away when not in use. I’ll post a picture of one and you’ll all be jealous. I figure with a baby on the way we need a good camera to take billions of pictures. I plan to make photography a hobbie and maybe one day do engagement pictures or family pictures on the side, who knows.

Big news for us. We’re having a baby! The due date is late March and we’re excited/nervous to be parents.

I just read an article obout tiny flexible solar panels. This is the second summer that I have lived in Arizona. Arizona has to be one of the hottest places on earth. The area is called the valley of the sun. I live in a one-bedroom apartment and our AC has trouble keeping the apartment at 79 degrees. Our electric bill is HUGE, especially for such a small living space. I get thinking sometimes, there has got to be a better/cheaper way to keep cool. I decided that if I’m going to live here for a long time I’m going to find a way to save some money on the electric bills. I thought, why don’t I invest in the developement of better solar panels. I know the power plants around here use solar panels but they’re huge and I could never have my own. I mean really, the sun is shining non-stop here there are a handful of rainy days. Heat and Light = Energy. Well, somebody needs to capitalize on all this energy. I have access to the sun just as much as the Electric Company does so I think I should use it myself to power my appliances. I really am going to take a look at nano-solar technology and see if I can’t invest in it to make more solar power more commonplace. You name it, it will be solar powered.

Hard at work

I’m back! I’ve been working long hours and kept really busy and was no where near a computer over 4th of July weekend. Sorry for those faithful visitors for slacking off. I haven’t had much time to surf the web for strange and fun things. One thought I was having was about poor customer service. I don’t know about you but I’ve had several bad experiences with a few companies lately. Bad products, bad service, slow, you name it. What has this world come to? Everyone is out there for the money and no one cares about doing something just because it is the right thing to do. Just one small example; my wife bought a chess set online for me. It looked really nice and had a good price. She figured she could find something cheaper online. We get the set and the box it came in was all torn up. Not just the shipping box but the chess set box was torn and ugly. The board is a mirror where the white squares are frosted and the black squares are mirrors. The felt on the bottom of the pieces was starting to come of and the glue was sticky from being in the heat. I start to play chess and every time I set a piece on a white square and take it takes some of the frost with it leaving a circle on the square. Then I find that even if I just touch the frost with my finger it comes off. After a year of playing chess, all the white will be gone and It will be a mirror with chess pieces on it. How much money do you think this company saved by using a crappy process?! Just make a quality product and go to sleep knowing you made something good and didn’t scam someone out of $10!!!!! Here’s a list of companies that I feel they or their employees have cheated or mistreated me recently; Toshiba, Kmart, Allen Patch Ford Mazda, Sundevil Auto, Orbitz.com