Hugh's Worthless Blog

You know me, I love free stuff. Here is a free song you can download from Everyday Sunday , a band who sounds a lot like Relient K , but is still different in its own way. And they are giving away a free MP3 for the title track of their new album, "Best Night of Our Lives" (which is released June 16). And this is a DRM free MP3 you can put on any media player or computer. If you download and don't like it, just delete it. Hey, it was free! Another neat freebie I used the other day is a free software utility to merge PDF files together into one big PDF without having to use Adobe Acrobat. It is called "PDF Split and Merge" or pdfsam for short. It is not fancy, but it does the job, and once again it is free! You can then merge multiple scanned PDF's into one if you want to use something like FaxZero.com (another neat freebie favorite) for sending a free FAX to anywhere in the US. And since we are talking free, I always love to point out when Geeks.com is ...

A friend of mine is teaching an on-line course this fall here at Wash U on Climate Change. I have never taken an on-line course so I may try it out since it is a University College course which is free for all employees. I think you start out by watching Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and I always loved watching movies in class. That seems like what they do a lot of in May at our local public middle and high schools, so it must be a good idea! The course is " PoliSci 3040: A Political and Economic Analysis of Climate Change " being taught by David Pollack , a fellow with a bachelors degree from Columbia and a masters from Oxford, so hopefully he learned something at those prestigious universities. I just know he is one of the few men on campus actually shorter than I am, and for that I am thankful. Take his course, it should be fun, and for any other Wash U employees it is even free!

When I talked about browsers last month, I said that Google Chrome was not available under Linux. Well, I was happy to see that I was only half correct. Google does not have a native version of Chrome for Linux yet, but the Win32 version runs fine under Linux using the Wine libraries and is available packaged as the open source Chromium project by CodeWeavers.com . You have to manually download a .deb file and then run dpkg -i filename.deb which takes at least 20 or 30 seconds. Whew! Installing software under Linux is so hard and complicated! Remember, only computer geeks are capable of typing three words at a command line to install software under Linux. I had thought that Ubuntu had Chromium available as an installable package in its universal repository since I tried doing an apt-get install chromium command and it worked. But when I typed chromium after that, what came up was some shooting spaceship game which I was really bad at playing! That sure does not look like a browse...

Well, the transfer is complete and my HughChou.org domain name resolves once again to my own dedicated little computer! All those people trying to refinance their mortgages can again hit my calculator site as can people looking for lyrics to my favorite music . Now I am hosting the domain at GoDaddy , whose control panel makes it very easy to tweak just about anything. Now I can even change my WhoIs data to correctly reflect my new address. The stock market is up, the predicted rain is not falling and my domain name is working again. Life is good.

Well, my lovely domain name of hughchou.org was supposed to automatically renew yesterday, but my old trusty registrar did something so that it is not working! Therefore I am throwing in the towel and moving my domain to one of the "big boys" in the domain registrar world, namely GoDaddy which I have used quite a bit in the past for other peoples sites. I initially hosted my site with WebCow which is no longer around and who was acquired by T3West/VXN (whichever it is) who has been hosting my domain name ever since then. Since it only cost $7 to switch over to GoDaddy and t3west seems to be a one or two person operation, I am switching. I hate to be like everyone else moving from the mom and pop operations to huge corporate behemoths (can you say Wal-Mart?), but GoDaddy makes everything so easy. And for any of my faithful users of my site at HughChou.org , you can currently reach my site at hughchou.wustl.edu for the time being.