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© St. Petersburg Times, published October 14, 2002
Webbed feat
www.CelebriDucks.com
This brings a whole new thought to hopping in the tub and washing one's cares away. If brand-name fragrance soap and salon exclusive shampoo isn't doing it for your baby's boudoir, why not say it with a raft of ducks? What tells your significant other you care more than, say, a likeness of James Brown, Babe Ruth, Betty Boop or Mr. T? Personally, I think the Babe Ruth model is a likeness of John Goodman, masked up and about to go into surgery, but there's no accounting for my taste.
www.CapnWacky.com/cards/
Every couple of years, I'm dragged into a card store and forced to select some horrible, sanitized greeting card for a relative whose distance is measured in light years rather than kin. Depressing as it is, that's perhaps the easiest task. The hard part is picking out something genuinely funny that doesn't cater, TV script-like, to the most stupidly unimaginative person likely to receive said card. My wish is for Cap'n Wacky to open a card store like this Web site in my neighborhood. People would flip the card over and I guarantee there wouldn't be any kind of mark on the back that the dull would recognize.
hoodlum-welding.com/hoods.htm
No, that's not a Web address to a criminal chop shop. It's a Halloween-esqe range of masks for welders with more cash than taste. Why spend your money on other work-oriented frivolities when the Patriotic Gorilla, Gold Android, Bulldog and Black Skull await? Here's hoping the box doesn't open in transit or during an IRS audit. You'd have to explain why such a purchase is "reasonable and customary."
BuddyRetriever.sf.net/
I now reminisce about the life I never had with people I don't know. It makes for a fun time. It's largely because the Minister of Interior Finance has approved my purchase of a rather groovy espresso machine, and my caffeine intake is way up. Part of the life I never had was a trusty yellow dog that would bring me a newspaper and slippers. Leisurely reading springs to mind. The reality is wolfing down a toaster pastry while carrying a wireless laptop around trying to read some news lest I have to appear worldly and knowledgeable later on in the day. And my latest gatherer of information is the somewhat nifty and free Buddy Retriever for Mac OS X. It's a news aggregator for humans and doesn't have all the twiddly parts that AmphetaDesk does. A Windows version is in the works as soon as the author can find somebody up for the task of converting it.
www.StuffIt.com/
At some point, if you're a Mac or PC user, you're going to need to exchange files with somebody on the other platform. And the de facto standard for compression on the Mac is Aladdin's StuffIt. Compatible with both OS X and older versions of Mac OS, this must-have program for users on either platform allows you to create and manipulate compressed files from all popular operating systems (including the two of you out there using Solaris as your desktop). The updated version works very well on OS X 10.2, and the integration with the desktop is back -- I really missed that -- because it was broken in previous versions. If you're a PC or Unix type and already have compression software, there's a free expander that will do the business on your computer, too. It's five cents shy of $80 for the full version or $30 for an upgrade.