Vonage vs. VOIPo

November 11, 2009
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A few months ago I compared my three-year experience with Vonage to my 6 month experience with Skype.  After my Skype phone died, I decided to try VOIPo, the new VOIP service from HostGator, and wanted to share my experience with them. VOIPo customer service can't be beat.  Though it's not available 24/7 (only 9-7 [...]

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How to change OpenOffice chart colors

October 23, 2009
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As a frequent user of the OpenOffice apps, including the Calc spreadsheet (oo's version of Excel), I occasionally need to create a chart from some of my data.  Typically, I'll create a pie or bar chart in Calc, then copy and paste it into Writer (oo's version of MS Word).  Recently I created two pie [...]

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Book Review – The Drunkard’s Walk

October 8, 2009
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Just wanted to send a quick shout out for The Drunkard's Walk, a really neat book on "how randomness rules our lives," written by Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist at Caltech and a collaborator with Stephen Hawking on the book A Briefer History of Time. When I write a review of a math-related book, I generally [...]

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Hubspot data suggest blogging is good for business

September 8, 2009
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The online marketing and web analytics company Hubspot recently reviewed some data that they collected from some of their customers, and the data provide some pretty interesting numbers for people who wonder if blogging is really all that useful as a business marketing tool. Hubspot looked at website traffic and other stats for approximately 1500 [...]

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My Ubuntu-Windows dual boot disappeared!

August 20, 2009
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I've been thoroughly pleased with Ubuntu, the open-source operating system I've been using for the past several months.  I installed it on both my home and work computers, keeping my original Windows XP installations on both machines so I could easily boot into either system at startup, and the whole process has been mostly painless. [...]

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A simple tweak for the WordPress YARPP plugin

August 16, 2009
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Someone recently asked me to make a small change to the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) which she had recently added to her WordPress site.  (For each of your published posts, YARPP will display a list of related posts, the idea being that if readers enjoyed the post they just read, they might want [...]

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Teen drivers and teen passengers

August 2, 2009
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My first son is currently 14 and a half, and while he's not driving yet he has a few older friends who are.  Until recently, one of our house rules was: no riding in a car with a teen driver.  Though it was inconvenient at times (like when I had to drop off The First [...]

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Skype vs. Vonage

July 31, 2009
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We used Vonage as our home phone service for about 3 years, and for the most part were pretty pleased.  I initially decided to try Vonage because they offered a phone line with unlimited local and long distance calling for about half what I was paying my previous phone provider, BellSouth ($30/mo vs. $50-60/mo).  While [...]

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How to add clickable icons to your WordPress sidebar

July 28, 2009
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You know how a lot of WordPress blogs have nifty icons in one of the sidebars, ones you can click on to go to, say, that blogger's twitter or facebook page?  They're really simple to add. It's essentially a 2-step process: Upload the icon image(s) to your media library.  You can find a ton of [...]

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Merging WordPress blogs

July 20, 2009
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Merging two or more WordPress blogs is a fairly straightforward task.  The exporting and importing steps, which actually copy all of your blog posts from your source blog(s) and move them into your target blog, are handled with just a few clicks of the mouse button.  The planning beforehand and the cleanup afterward take a [...]

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