From time to time I get an idea... what if I created a little web site that does X? I often register what I think is a really neat domain name for it, and put a little web page up. Now sometimes it doesn't amount to much, and other times it gets quite involved. But the biggest pain for me has always been hosting.

This site is hosted by some friends of mine, and I am very grateful for their generousity. If you are a small or medium sized business and need a really cool web site done, head over to Cardinal Factor at http://www.cardinalfactor.net/ for web development. Check out their portfolio - I am really impressed at the work they have done.

But for me, I want something really cheap and easy for my http://www.scottsnextstupididea.com/ site. So I found a nice little host, called HostMonster.

Basically, HostMonster offers 2000 GB a month of transfer and unlimited domains and subdomains against your account. I could register 100 domain names and create 100 little 5 page web sites and they are all hosted under the one account, and for rock bottom prices. $6 a month cannot be beat.

Anyways, I've had a couple of friends ask about hosting, and so this is what I'd recommend. If you use the above link when signing up, I get a little cut and I will happily meet you for coffee or lunch (I'll pay) to find out what cool things you have been doing recently.

The hot new thing in blogging is this thing called Twitter. Twitter allows you to enter one sentence to let people know what you're up to. It's like a blog, without having to come up with a lot of witty things to say and form them into proper paragraphs.

After the success of my Office 2007 upgrade, I had been itching to upgrade to Vista.

Vista has an Upgrade Advisor Tool and it is well recommended. The Upgrade Advisor told me my system would be able to run Vista. It did point out a couple of issues, one of which stopped me from installing right away.

The computer I wanted to install Vista on has two physical drives, a C: drive with 15GB total space, and an E: drive with 250GB total space. The Upgrade Advisor said I did not have enough space on my C: Drive to run Vista. That worried me, because what was I going to do?

The other issue UA warned me about was that my video card did not support Aero Glass. I was disappointed.

Those two issues stopped me from installing Vista for a little bit, but one night I was listening to the Windows Weekly Podcast with Paul Thurrott. This Podcast had me so excited to try Vista that I said I would install it anyways, Upgrade Advisor be damned.

Now during the actual install, I thought I had the disk space problem licked. Vista asked me which drive I wanted to install it to, and I picked E:. Whooo!

Except, during the install, Vista started filling up my remaining free space on C:. It uses C: as its temp drive! Argh! Basically, I needed 5-6GB free space on C: just to install on E:. Good thing I had some free space.

After the install was done, Vista was looking great. I updated a few drivers, including my audio and video drivers to the latest version. And swapped in a newer video card I had from another computer, so now I can run Aero.

Basically, Vista is a prettier Operating System. I can see how the Mac-zealots say that Microsoft copied the look from OSX, although somehow I like Vista and not OSX. Microsoft has done it right, and the pretty graphics grew on me.

There's not much reason to upgrade except for the prettier UI. XP was pretty good, but Vista is a bit better.

I received a box of DVDs from Microsoft as part of my Microsoft Partner subscription, and one of them was the latest version of Office. I'm a sucker for upgrading for no reason, so I popped in the DVD and let it work its magic on my computer.

Now I don't use every component of Office in my everyday work, but the three programs I do use (Word, Excel and Outlook) got complete face lifts.

The big innovation in this release is the ribbon. The ribbon has been getting a lot of press and deservedly so. It seems to have been designed with significant thought and intention. It's like a group of usability experts got into a room and said, we're going to design an intelligent toolbar. Things the user is most likely to do should be prominent and hard to miss. Things should also be grouped together logically. And when the user does something, it should intuitively change.

This is the new ribbon toolbar for sending an email in Outlook:

Compare this to the old way Outlook used to look:

Its a vast improvement, not only from an asthetic perspective, but also in usability.

I highly recommend upgrading to Office 2007. And NO, Vista is not required for the upgrade.

There is a great service called DailyLit that will email you small parts of a book every day. For those of us who don't have time to sit down and read a book, having 3-4 paragraphs show up in your email makes it easy to fit it into your day. After all, some of us spend 2-3 hours a day in email... why not spend 5-10 minutes reading something truly useful.

http://www.dailylit.com/index

Right now I am reading P.T. Barnum's book, "The Art of Money Getting". The title alone makes it worth reading, and the fact its by Mr. "There's a sucker born every minute" P.T. Barnum.

This may or may not be new, but VMWare has a product that can turn a physical PC into a virtual machine:

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

What this means is that I can take my old PC that I've had for 5 years or more, and turn it into a virtual machine. Then install that onto my brand new machine and get rid of the old one.

The major thing stopping me from switching 100% to my new PC is all of the little applications and data I have accumulated over the years. For instance, I do my taxes using QuickTax or similar computer programs. I have 7 or 8 years of this tax software installed (1 per year). To switch to a new machine, should I bother reinstalling all past years of tax software? Can I even find the CD's and the license keys?

I'd like to start over. But I'd like to have the old PC on standby, in case I have a need for some little used application. This is perfect.

Rented the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth last night, PVR'd it, and watched it today. Overall its a well done movie showing Gore's myth-busting presentation on the environment, interspersed with a candid interview with him on the subject.

First, I think everyone in the industrialized world should be required to watch this movie once.

Now since Gore was at one time the Vice President of the United States, and by some counts should have been President in 2000, there is obviously some reference to politics in the movie. He of course has to point out the fact that Bush at one time appointed a former oil-lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency. And when that man was caught hand-editing a press release before it was sent out, removing a lot of the scariest facts from it... he was forced to resign and went right back working for the oil industry the next day.

But the political aspects can be easily ignored whatever your political stripe. The meatiest parts of this movie involve startling facts that lead the viewer to an unarguable conclusion --- we need to reduce our CO2 emissions dramatically. We must - the consequences of inaction would be disasterous.

Perhaps you think that is not the type of movie for you. You'd rather see some great action movie, or a light-hearted comedy. I urge you to see it regardless. My wife started watching it with me, and got really into it as well. This movie is that riveting.

Gore has given this presentation "well over 1000 times" he says. So the presentation itself is extremely well polished. The graphs, pictures, film clips and animations all do an excellent job at getting the point across. A short clip on green house gases done by the folks from Futurama was funny yet disturbing. I cannot say enough good things about this movie - rent it. Buy it. However you can get it, get it and watch it.

The hardest hitting part for me, was when he showed 750,000 years of CO2 levels and Earth temperatures. The graph was cyclical, going up and down, sometimes straight up in a dramatic fashion. Over 750,000 years though, the highs and the lows were mostly uniform. I was all ready to shout at the TV screen - "You see, we're just in another period of Earth warming! It happens every 20,000 years or so!"

After showing the graph and describing its history, Gore added the 2005 numbers to it. Whoa! The CO2 number was double the previous high. The 2005 number hit the top of the projection screen. And then Gore said, here's what the number will probably be in 2055, 50 years from now. He picked the "low number", not even the medium or high. And oh. my. god. it was double still! He used a self-operated crane to lift himself to way above the projection screen. That for me hit the point home solid. There is no debating now. Humans are destroying the planet with reckless CO2 use.

This is a similar graph, with today's figure on it. 50 years from now, the number is expected to be in the 700 range.