That Smith

Laura is sick which means she’s been sleeping all day and I’ve had plenty of time to explore Digg and various blogs to see what’s going on outside Emporia, The Wall Street Journal, and Kansas City Star. (That’s all I can use to entertain myself when she’s awake and complaining she’s bored.) I found several interesting things that I am going to share and I suppose you can either 1) not care any less, or 2) pretend to care since you seem to be bored enough to read this anyhow.

First thing, the article I found which relates to this entry’s title (which I suppose also relates to Prince or ☥ or whatever his name is…) – The Phantom Time Hypothesis.

Could we really be suckers to some brilliantly clever Middle Age monks, or is this scientist guy just plain nuts? I don’t really care, but I sure got a kick out of reading it and trying to find an elaboration of the hypothesis. No luck there.

The next few things that caught my interest might actually be useful to some of you..

12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations
If you are in any of my classes and have to give a presentation, please go here. If you aren’t in any of my classes, check it out anyway because there are some useful tips to make your PowerPoint (or Impress if you use OpenOffice) presentations better. I am sick of sitting through crappy presentations. Either present it well or give me something nice to look at.

GrandCentral Communications – One Number…for Life(TM)
This is a fairly new company which I think I saw a link for on Life Hacker and another site. The whole concept here is if you’re on the go a lot, you get a new phone number (currently in a limited number of area codes) and if someone calls that number all of your other phones (cell, office, home, …) will ring and you can talk, switch lines, and all that and the caller will be none the wiser. Brilliant! I don’t usually post entries to give free publicity to start-ups, but thought they deserve recognition because of their idea. They will probably go bankrupt in a year or two anyways in addition to seeing competition from existing phone companies.

rentometer
As some of you know, I am pretty good at coming up with websites that don’t make money. This is one I found (on Life Hacker or Digg or somewhere) that is similar to the instant domain searcher I came across a while back. It has you type in your monthly rent, zip code, and number of rooms and tells you if you are paying too much for rent. I’m paying the median for Emporia and can look forward to about $400 a month once we move to Wichita.

Unthirsty
This is another site that probably will never make any money, which also is a Google Map mash-up. You type in your zip code and it tells you about the drink specials around you. As of right now no one has added anything for Emporia, Overland Park, or Wichita, but there are a few places listed for Lawrence. It runs off of user submissions. Again I am mentioning this because I think it is interesting.

Elevator Hacking
Possibly the coolest thing I found, I heard about a few years back but forgot about until I saw it on Life Hacker (very helpful site). If you get on an elevator you can go directly to the floor you desire by pressing Door Close + The Floor Number to which you are traveling. I saw something about this back when I was in high school and hopefully will remember to try it next time I go to the hospital or on a cruise.

If you are bored like me and don’t want to do homework hopefully this will entertain you for a short while. If you have any cool things to share or have an idea where I can find a copy of the Heim-Dröscher quantum theories in English let me know.