Wikis, like ry4an.org, are websites meant to be easily edited. One simply clicks the edit button, changes the content, and poof the page is changed. One of the most famous wikis is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's a wonderful resource and chocked full of information. Unfortunately, due to its anyone-can-change-it-at-any-time freedom, some folks are hesitant to consider it a reliable reference.

Wikipedia's documented accuracy is largely due to careful edit policing by interested persons. I could go change the date of Abraham Lincoln's birthday right now, but someone monitoring the changes would detect the "vandalism" and revert the change in minutes. Sadly, anyone viewing the Abraham_Lincoln page between my edit and the repair would see the wrong birthday.

At the haloween party we got a keg of New Castle, but most folks went for the mixed drinks or the bottled beer. We kept trying to steer folks toward the keg, but it's hard to get people behind a project that's not providing good status reports.

That got me thinking that one could make a simple scale showing a gas-tank style empty to full scale for a keg of liquid. Googling for keg scale turned up some products for bar owners, but nothing consumer focused:

I really need to sleep in once a week, and I actually get to once a month. When I do sleep in I want the ringers off on all the phones in the house, but that's three phones to go find and then to remember to un-silence in the "morning". This past weekend I figured out that by using the call-forwarding feature on my home phone line to route all calls to my cell phone I can keep all the extensions from ringing. What's more by using the timed profiles feature on my cell phone I can have it muted until a pre-set time (say, 2pm) at which time the ringer re-enables itself. Finally I've got a good way to sleep in uninterrupted without forgetting to turn the ringers back on for the next three days.

I'm a happy Netflix user. Before I used Netflix I used to maintain a list of movies I wanted to see. Now I just use my Netflix queue for the same purpose. The only problem with my new system is by the time a recommended movie goes from the back of the queue to the front, about a year, I've long since forgotten who recommended it.

If Netflix offered a way for me to put a little note next to my own queue entries, I'd better be able to track who recommended movies or just why they made it on to my queue in the first place. Netflix does offer a feature they call their two cents system wherein you can write reviews of movies, which other members on your friends list can view. That's not really what I'm looking for though. I just want some space I can make notes to myself -- not for others.

There's a ton of poker time software out there and even some nifty looking dedicated hardware. At the games I attend we'll usually use a computer for the timing, but often there isn't one in the room and no one wants to bring over a laptop. However, there is almost always a TV with DVD player in whatever room gets temporarily re-purposed as the game room.

That got me thinking that a DVD that could serve as a poker timer would work in all the rooms in which we play poker and would offer these other benefits:

Foreign cell phone services have had a feature for awhile called Ringback Tones which allows you replace the normal ringing sound that callers hear while they're waiting for you to answer with a short audio clip. This isn't the annoying ring that the people near you hear until you answer your phone, but the even more annoying ring that the people calling you will hear directly in their ear. The feature has come to the US recently, and my cell phone provider, T-Mobile, calls its offering Caller Tunes.

I've repeatedly encountered the statement, always presented as fact, that if you chill beer, let it return to room temperature, and then chill it again you will have affected in it a degradation of quality. This has always seemed like nonsense to me for a few different reasons, chief among them that surely this chill/warm cycle happened repeatedly during transport and retail.

As a beer snob, I generally drink beers imported from Europe. These are shipped to the US in huge container ships across the icy North Atlantic. They're then shipped in semi trucks to Minnesota. Next they're stored at distribution centers, in retail warehouses, and on the sales floor (or in the beer cooler) Surely in one season or another the temperature variance during those many legs and stops constitutes at least one cooling/warming cycle.

On Tuesday some friends and I were talking about how we immaturely approached alcohol back in the dorms, and I was thinking it would be fun to take out a full (or half) page ad in the student paper, The Minnesota Daily, like this:

WE LIVED IN THE DORMS. WE DRANK.

WE COULDN'T HOLD OUR LIQUOR.

Thank you, Resident Hall Facilities Staff, for your

service above and beyond the call of duty. We're sorry.

I've been rolling this one around in my head for a few years now, and I think it's finally coming closer to fruition: I'd like to start an old style social club.

In his book The Great Good Place Ray Oldenburg, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of West Florida, says:

"Most needed are those 'third places' which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase 'third places' derives from considering our homes to be the 'first' places in our lives, and our work places the 'second.'"

Working from home I distinctly feel the need for at least a second place. Each day I head to the local coffee shop and drink more coffee than I should around semi-familiar faces. It's a pleasant time, but it's not community. Similarly in the evenings I frequently find myself wanting to get out of the house and amongst friends, without incurring the organizational and monetary expenses of an organized restaurant or bar outing.

I get a lot of email, and a good percentage of it is spam. To help filter the spam from the ham I use software called SpamAssassin (http://useast.spamassassin.org/). SpamAssassin applies hundreds of tests to each incoming email and increases or decreases the mail's spam score depending on the result. If the total spam score for a message is above a pre-set threshold (4.0 for me) it gets put aside.