Hugh's Worthless Blog

I have enjoyed listening to a number of great new Christian pop/rock albums this year, with my favorite one of 2008 still being Downhere's Ending is Beginning . The final album of the year I am awaiting is Jeremy Camp's Speaking Louder Than Before , which is released next week, on November 25. I already have my copy pre-ordered through FamilyChristian.com , and I have been listening to both the single "There Will Be A Day" and the title track "Speaking Louder Than Before", which was available as a free download when I pre-ordered. Anyone can listen to both of these tracks on Jeremy's MySpace site . I am still trying to figure out all the lyrics he is singing! This sounds like it will be a good album, probably better than "Beyond Measure" which I still liked. You can see a video preview of the album on Vimeo .

I read in my latest copy of PC World about a really neat financial application you can download and use (now for free) called Financial Fate . It runs under any Windows platform and analyzes all your accounts and expenses and projects how you will end up in a long term scenario. It is quite comprehensive and allows you to change numbers for various "what if" scenarios to project your net worth for years to come. The company used to sell it for $69.95 but now it is completely free. So now the only question is how this company will make any money from this very useful software.

There are a lot of great free sites and software out there, with many that everybody knows (sites like Google, Yahoo, etc and software like Firefox, iTunes and RealPlayer), but also a lot of more hidden jewels that most people do not know. One really important thing people need to do is backup their documents, and most people do not do much of it or else they use one of my very easy techniques, e-mailing documents as attachments between your GMail , Yahoo! mail and other assorted free mail services. That works but it really is not the most effective way of doing it. One mail service that I like that lets you also organize up to 5GB of storage space online is Inbox.com . They display your files in a very easy to follow hierarchy and you can upload and download everything very easily using a browser. Another free e-mail service that provides a similar storage is GMX , which actually has a snazzier interface, but I find a little more confusing to use. Plus it's storage limit is only...

Well, it has been two weeks now since the election, and I am glad the political ads are no longer filling the airwaves, the mail box and the voice mail (darn robo-calls!). Now the broadcast TV stations can go back to what they had been advertising non-stop for the past year - DTV transition messages. Now we get to have a daily countdown until the day that analog transmissions end. Is this exciting, or what? We already purchased out two converter boxes, but we are wondering if we can get two more $40 coupons since we have a new house and a new address where we could receive them. We actually could use them since we are a cable-free, satellite free household. The release of Ubuntu 8.10 arrived without much fanfare, and I have left all our systems at 8.04.1 since it is a long term release. I did not see any reason to upgrade when 8.04.1 seems so stable and will be supported for 3 years until 4/2011(whereas 8.10 will only be supported for 18 months until 4/2010.) We have more and more U...