While looking for 17" LCD monitors today I came across a questionable deal on Buy.com. Sure the $30 discount for using your Buy.com Visa card is nice, but even at $1,104,941.99 it doesn't seem like much of a deal! No wonder it's only #29,463 in their sales rank!

Both of my boys are in Cub Scouts. Each year we have the Pinewood Derby (racing wooden cars), and the Raingutter Regatta (racing wooden boats). Both are great character-building activities whereby the parents try to cajole the kids into sanding, painting, or some other token effort so it's not just the parents' work. This year for the Raingutter Regatta we decided to see if we could find any neat ideas on the internet. We had done this with the Pinewood Derby and gotten some great ideas for cutting and decorating. Well, Google served us well,...

Well I recently ranted about how much pain blog spam can be. My problem isn't feedback spam as many people report. I tried a CAPTCHA control but it (a) didn't work, and (b) didn't seem necessary. The real issue for me is trackbacks.  Well, in response to a comment by Michael Campbell I installed a tool called ReverseDOS This effectively stalls any network connections trying to send pingbacks. It was a snap to install and it really works! Bottom line, if you are having problems with blog spam -- install ReverseDOS!

This isn't news anymore (came out in June), but I'm not sure how many people know about it. Microsoft release an unsupported plugin for Windows to view Canon and Nikon RAW images directly in Windows Explorer. You get thumbnailing and double-click view functionality without opening Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or the proprietary vendor viewers. I've been using it since it came out and I'm very pleased with it. It's no help for editing, but if you are tired of seeing generic icons in Windows Explorer thumbnail view when you have RAW images mixed with JPEG's in...

Well it's about time! Microsoft has finally released a tool for synchronizing folders between computers. This can be used to keep folders on a laptop and a desktop in sync. It's an unsupported PowerToy at this point, but it could well be functionality to be merged into Longhorn/Vista if it's well-received. It's definitely a product that has been needed for awhile. I used Groove for file sync and I just hated it. Groove was a pretty industrial strength network application and overkill for most people (not to mention absolutely horrible resource utilization). I...

Well July was an interesting month for the Kulp's. I attended a church music conference in central PA, visited relatives in Pittsburgh, and spent a week in Mexico (Cancun). I plan on writing a little bit on each of these things soon. I took over 700 pictures between the trips and some of them are even good! I'll be posting some this week. I did no email during any of the travel, so it was a pretty disconnected month. I did have some work days in-between trips though so I didn't get too far...