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These are my daily “Good to Know” links for 07/31/08 … please enjoy:

Attack Canada! | The Beacon

War Plan Red envisioned primarily U.S. attacks on and occupation of various Canadian cities, including Halifax (to be subjected to a poison-gas first strike), Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria.

Who Built the Pyramids? | Harvard Magazine

Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Burger King uses Spider-man ad for Dark Knight burger | Den of Geek

Burger King’s got a new burger out, inspired by The Dark Knight. Except last summer, it was inspired by Spider-man 3. What’s going on? Marketing is just getting lazy now.

Baby’s First Internet | The Morning News

The best “book” out there on how to teach your children how to use the internet!

Canada Defiles an Astronomical Treasure | Fanboy

That man you see in the photograph above is an international treasure. Under that rejected humble facade is none other than Charles Thomas Bolton who will one day be seen as one of the great astronomers of all time.

Halo 3’s ‘Enemies KIA’ Body Count Officially Passes Earth’s Population | OhGizmo!

The game’s official ‘Enemies KIA’ body count surpassed the Earth’s population sometime late on June 20 or early on June 21. At that point the Halo 3 Campaign Kill Count numbered 6,719,996,560, while the estimated world population was 6,705,066,871

IE 8 Beta 2 out by September 2008 | The Industry Standard

This is a prediction that Microsoft will meet or beat that self-assigned deadline and will publicly release IE 8 beta 2 on or before August 31st, 2008.

This.Film.Is.Not.Yet.Rated. | Google Video

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is an independent documentary film about the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system and its effect on American culture, directed by Kirby Dick and produced by Eddie Schmidt.

Army Shoots Live Pigs, PETA Squeals | ABC News

Army to Shoot Live Pigs in Hawaii in Trauma Training Drill for Soldiers Heading to Iraq. The Army says it’s critical to saving the lives of wounded soldiers. Animal-rights activists call the training cruel and outdated.

Scientists find why we need to re-read a page | Telegraph

Scientists have discovered why people sometimes need to re-read a page. According to a study the brain needs a specific chemical in order to concentrate properly.

Spore Creatures Now Outnumber Known Earth Species | Slashdot

As of a week ago, the number of creatures in the “Spore” database exceeded the number of known species on Earth. They are created using ‘Creature Creator,’ which is available in a free (with limited parts) or paid download at the Spore website.

John Wiley Price: “I don’t even know what blog means” | Grits for Breakfast

As far as an elected official in 2007 declaring he doesn’t know what the word “blog” means – Good God! I don’t know where to begin.

‘Shawshank’ in a Minute | Radar Online

The Shawshank Redemption in one minute… rapped. It’s awesome, trust me on this!

S.F. officials locked out of computer network | San Francisco Chronicle

A disgruntled city computer engineer has virtually commandeered San Francisco’s new multimillion-dollar computer network, altering it to deny access to top administrators even as he sits in jail on $5 million bail, authorities said Monday.

Zombie Garden Gnome | Gizmodo

Design Toscano wants you to “expect the extraordinary from your home and garden,” and that includes the walking dead. Take this 13-lb. resin undead garden zombie, for example.

Come back for more links tomorrow!!

Today I thought I’d show you how to remove formatting marks from Outlook 2007 and 2003.  You may never need to use this, but judging from the amount of people in my office who do, it may come in handy.

If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Help!  I have all sorts of funny symbols and backwards Ps in my e-mail,”  you’re not alone. I can’t tell you how many times I get a question that sounds like that.  When I get to the users’s computer, it usually looks like this:

Look familiar?  So, how does one fix this problem? Read the rest of this entry →

These are my daily “Good to Know” links for 07/30/08 … please enjoy:

Attack Canada! | The Beacon

War Plan Red envisioned primarily U.S. attacks on and occupation of various Canadian cities, including Halifax (to be subjected to a poison-gas first strike), Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria.

Who Built the Pyramids? | Harvard Magazine

Egyptologist Mark Lehner, an associate of Harvard’s Semitic Museum, is beginning to fashion an answer. He has found the city of the pyramid builders. They were not slaves.

Burger King uses Spider-man ad for Dark Knight burger | Den of Geek

Burger King's got a new burger out, inspired by The Dark Knight. Except last summer, it was inspired by Spider-man 3. What's going on? Marketing is just getting lazy now.

Baby?s First Internet | The Morning News

The best "book" out there on how to teach your children how to use the internet!

Canada Defiles an Astronomical Treasure | Fanboy

That man you see in the photograph above is an international treasure. Under that rejected humble facade is none other than Charles Thomas Bolton who will one day be seen as one of the great astronomers of all time.

Come back for more links tomorrow!!

Meet Windows Mojave:

The “Mojave Experiment”

It’s fast, it’s sleek, it’s cool, it’s hip, it’s… really Windows Vista?

This is the best marketing idea Microsoft has come up with in a long time.  Dealing, as I do, with many novice computer users, getting them to switch to Vista has been an uphill fight.  Most of them haven’t tried the OS or even seen it.  They’re getting all their info from word of mouth and aren’t sitting down to try it.  In this “experiment,” Microsoft has taken many different users and after listening to them bash Windows Vista, ask them to try the newest OS, Windows Mojave.  Upon trying it, everyone is loving it and wanting it, and then comes the reveal… it’s actually Windows Vista.

It’s a great watch… I love the responses some of the people give (for real hilarity, click the link that says “You can’t please everyone.”) and how honest they are.

Seriously people, give Vista a try.  Yes, it had issues… but so did XP… and 2000… and ME… and 98… and 95… ad infinitum.  It’s not like Microsoft is the only company to have issues with new products (let us not forget the MobileMe mess) and if you never try anything new, you’ll be left behind.

Some information about the experiment via the Windows Vista Blog:

• The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
• All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer’s database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
• The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson – geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
• We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.

There you have it.  If you’re using an older version of Windows… go give Vista a chance!