I got a kick out of a flyer that came in the mail the other day. The Alberta Cancer Foundation has launched its annual “Cash and Cars” lottery. The flyer starts with a display of the cars, some 26 in all, starting with the SLR McLaren. Following is a page for the cash prizes (valued between five and fifty thousand dollars), showing a pile of cash and the tagline “Consider it cab fare”. I guess everyone wins a “car”, even if it’s a taxi ($50,000 will give you quite the taxi ride!). It cracked me up.

I’ve decided to formalize some of my thoughts and launch a new series: Social Commentary. Just like the many interesting things I find on the net, every so often I come across something in the “real world” that I want to address - this will create an easy way to centralize (and then find) these thoughts. Enjoy!

If you missed it in the news, the bridge that takes I-35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis fell into the river last night. If you want a full report, you’ll have to look elsewhere (I can point you to CBC); some highlights:

I’ve had this little presence on the web for just over a year now, and thought I would make a list of the few things that I’ve learnt along the way, some from reading, and some from doing.

In case you took a weekend away from the computer, which I apparently didn’t, Google has just bought out Feedburner. I’m not sure what this will mean for me, although they have promised to keep the service up and running. I imagine there will be some re-branding, and I’m hoping for better integration with my other Google services, like Blogger, Analytics, and AdSense. I’ll keep my eyes open, and let you know if something really crazy happens.

Although Nexodyne continues to work well, I came across another site that allows me to add the nifity envelope to the image, so I decided to change my little “Email me” picture. The site gives you three options, but the downside is you have to host the image yourself (Nexodyne would host it for you) and it only works for GMail. If you have another email provider, check out Nexodyne, but if you like the envelope and have a Gmail account, get your own image here! (The only downside is figuring out how to get a transparent background - Photoshop doesn’t seem to like me today).

A service I’ve known about for a while that I finally decided to check out is FeedBurner. It seems to be the ideal set of tool for dealing with your RSS and Atom feeds from your site. For those unfamiliar, RSS and Atom are a simple way for people to see if your site has updated recently. Bloggers and news web sites are among the most common users, but its use has spread a lot further than that. You can either view the feeds through a desktop program, often your email client, or through an online reader, like Google (that’s what I use).

A couple months ago I came across a bill marked with the website www.WheresWilly.com so I looked into it. I discovered the site was set up by the same guy that set up www.WheresGeorge.com. Where’s George is for American bills and Willy for Canadian.

I recently switched to the new version of Blogger. From your end, I’m sure it looks very much the same. On my end, that is for the most part true as well, but there are a few subtle changes. Most that I have come across are in the post editing options. I can edit the posting date, and individually set whether to allow your comments and backlinks, and to edit the post time. Another option that I quite like is the ability to add labels. Because it’s so new I don’t think I’ve really got the hang of it, but for now, I’ll explain the series I’ve started:

Back when the internet started and you wanted to find something, websites had simple names. As more and more people have moved onto the internet, most of the simple names were snapped up and now sell for a small fortune. Adding to the confusion is that is that many websites will pass information back to their server using what appears to be random gibberish to the rest of us (check out the URL next time you do a search at Google or the like). Someone got smart and came up with a solution! Enter tinyurl.com. Enter your long, convoluted URL in and they spit out a much shorter. For example, start with MinchinWeb.BlogSpot.com and end up with tinyURL.com/y6xxef, which granted isn’t a ton shorter, but it shows up a lot better is we go with something longer, like http:// minchinweb.blogspot.com/ 2006/12/ tinyurlcom-on-line-wonders-iii.html, the perment link for this post, and you get tinyURL.com/y3lvrh. Not so shabby! Give it a try for yourself: