I just had to try Chicken Fried Bacon at Wurstfest, and it really is as good as it sounds. My, how the grease glistens in the sun!

BladeArt.com

The one OS to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

I love the fact that information on the Internet is constantly being updated, but wait, dictionary.com thinks that the Hermitage museum is in LENINGRAD. The city wasn’t called Leningrad when it was built, and its official name was changed back to St. Petersburg 18 years ago. On top of that, I doubt that Ask.com, which owns dictionary.com, will ever actually process my report that their data is bad.

Very rarely do I see such a good idea implemented so well. The site, www.livemocha.com, starts off with some basic language lessons similar to software you would purchase on CD-ROM, but then it takes your writing or recorded audio in a foreign language and asks native speakers to evaluate your work. In return, you are asked to evaluate the work of others in your own native language. The site is heavily dependent on Flash, but it worked flawlessly for me. Did I mention that it was free? It may not be as good as tutorial session over skype, but those cost $20 to $40 per hour.

Back when I was using Netscape Navigator (or Communicator) 4.75 or so, I used mod_roaming to sync bookmarks between my various home and work computers. It appears that mod_roaming worked up until Mozilla 1.8. I don’t know what led to its demise, but I started using sitebar at the time. It didn’t really sync your bookmarks, but it made it fairly easy to store bookmarks in its database rather than your browsers. Fortunately, Google Browser Sync came along to satisfy my need for real syncing. It worked great in Firefox 2.0, but Google has abandoned it. Maybe, it would be still around if it had embedded adds making them billions of dollars. Now, I am using Foxmarks, which has been around for a while and works with the Firefox 3, so I’m happy again. At least bookmark syncing tools are free as opposed to the rediculous modem upgrade cycle: 1200 baud, 2400 baud, 4800 bps, 9600 bps, 14.4 kbps, 28.8kbps, 33.6 kbps, and the unrealistic 55.6 kbps. Fortunately, I never had to suffer using a 300 baud modem.

But I digress. After setting up Foxmarks, I realized that I still had my sitebar server up and running, which surely has many unpatched security holes by now. Before I shut it down, I decided to go through that list of several hundred bookmarks, to see if there was something interesting that never made it back over to my browser’s bookmarks. As you can imagine, most of the bookmarks could be scrapped. Bookmarks definitely aren’t as important anymore now that Google can find almost anything quicker than you can find an old bookmark. I’ve started using bookmarks as a to-do list for things I want to blog about, and I will continue to collect hundreds of them as if they were scrapbook photos. It’s hard to imagine that before search engines and before yahoo’s index, you had to wait for the trickle of new content that showed up on NCSA Mosaic’s What’s New page. Here are the measly few links that I collected that I think are worth sharing:

• MocoLoco: The Mondern & Contemporary Design Blog. Hmm, I doubt they used the term “blog” when I bookmarked that page.
• JONGL: The Juggling Simulator. I’m probably the only person that thinks this is cool.
  
• The Easter Egg Archive. I totally forgot that this site existed.
  
• Isometric Screenshots. So this guy is interested in assassinations, riots, and The Sound of Music? Huh?
• GRAFICA Obscura. Be sure to check out the Geometric Paper Folding. It’s so cool, but how did he get a Ph.D.?