I’ve been reading up on Ben Saunders today, who is going to attempt to set a new world record for the time it takes him to get from Ward Hunt Island to the Geographic North Pole. The island of origin is one of the northernmost points of land in Canada, and over the next 30 days Ben is going to be traveling solo on skis to the North Pole. He has done it three times before, but this time he wants to break the record of 36 days 22 minutes that was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and numerous re-supplies. In addition to breaking the record, Ben also wants to do it unsupported, meaning that everything he will need for the trip must be carried with him.

The list of equipment is quite impressive. Among the list of items are electronics that are going to allow him to update his journal along the way. I will definitely be following along over the next month or so and hope that he will reach his goal with no problems. There is an RSS Feed for the journal if you’d like to follow along as well.

First of all, happy Pi Day to all of the fellow nerds out there. March 14th, 3.14, get it?!?!

For another geeky site to keep you occupied for a bit on this Friday, head on over to Google Sky, and check out our entire universe. It’s a little slow to navigate, but can be entertaining for a few minutes. I think the constellation mapping is particularly cool (click Constellations at the bottom of the page). Just don’t expect to see the North Star, as it appears to be out of this world!

Another client of TrustEd Designs is nearly complete! I’ve been working on creating a website for a friend of Amy’s who does historic restoration in and around Cincinnati. His company is called The Acanthus Group, and as of today we have the basis for their site online at www.theacanthusgroup.com. He pretty much knew what he wanted, and even had drawings of what the site should look like. This made it very easy for me to create exactly what he wanted. Check it out!

Recently I’ve begun using a couple of sites to help me with my internet addiction. These aren’t going to keep me off of the net completely, but make my browsing more efficient.

First up is mint.com, which allows you to monitor all of your various bank accounts and credit cards all in one place. “Mint connects nightly to the…[accounts]…you choose to keep your transactions and account balances automatically up-to-date. Mint even auto-balances your checkbook and auto-categorizes your transactions. Set it up once and you’re done.” The expense categorization isn’t perfect, but you can create rules to help the process in the future. The cool part is that once it’s right, you can view your expenses broken into various categories over a user defined time period, and see where all of your money is going. I haven’t figured out how mint.com will balance my checkbook yet, but I’m just staring to use the site.

The second site is spokeo.com and I just started using it today. This site allows you to monitor all of those social networking sites (myspace, facebook, etc) along with various photo sharing sites and blogs all in one place. I doubt I’ll use it to keep track on blogs, since I already use bloglines for that, but I do like the auto monitoring of the social network sites that work blocks. This allows you to keep up even if you can’t connect to the sites directly yourself. Plus, it will also find your friends on various sites that you didn’t even know they had accounts on. All you do is enter your email address and password and it does the dirty work for you. So far I’m really impressed by the site, but we’ll see how long it stays in my rotation.

I’ve got better things to do on Friday than head for the stores at the crack of dawn to save a few bucks, but if that’s your thing, you may want to check out TGI Black Friday. This site lists loads of deals for tons of stores, and even lets you know if the deal isn’t really that good and can be beaten online. I hope everyone has a nice turkey day, and if you do head out to the stores on Friday I hope you have lots of success. I’m outta here until Monday…

Well, the World Series hasn’t been going as well as those of us in Denver were hoping. The Rockies are now down two games to the Red Socks Sox, and are in a travel day back to Denver. Game three is tomorrow night, four on Sunday, and hopefully game five on Monday. Unfortunately, I won’t be going to any of the games, after a major ticketing debacle earlier in the week. Tickets went on sale through the net on Monday, but the servers crashed, and they were forced to try again on Tuesday. I guess Tuesday was a little better, but it still took hours to sell all of the tickets, and there were still lots of hanging servers. I wasted hours and hours trying to get tickets, along with many others, including this guy who is venting his frustration via eBay. I feel his pain. Stupid Paciolan!

Today is yet another woot-off. I just bought an iRobot Roomba Discovery SE, the intelligent floorvac robotic vacuum. Kim and I are often too busy to clean the house thoroughly, plus we really hate cleaning, so hopefully this little device will help us out with the floors. We’ll see. There will definitely be a ton of other products on woot.com today, so keep your eyes on the site.

I’ve been streaming so much music lately that I finally decided to go public with a streaming player I created for oarsa.org. Essentially we had all of these songs available for download but no good way to play them all at once (unless you already downloaded them all). Enter the XSPF Web Music Player, which is a simple flash based player that takes an xspf playlist. Once I wrote the code to automatically generate and update the playlist, displaying the flash player was a piece of cake. I’m not sure how much bandwidth this is going to eat up, so check it out now or you may never be able to. Just follow the oarsa.org link above and click the link on the left menu.

Take this quiz to find out whether you speak like a northerner or a southerner. The higher the percentage of your score, the more southern you are. My results were 61% (Dixie). A definitive Southern score! I guess I still haven’t kicked my southern roots from spending ten years in Alabama. I must have a little bit of Ohio in me and I know that I answered a couple of questions like a Missourian. I don’t think I’ve had any impact from my short time in Colorado, but I think we’re just a mix of everything here. Post your own results in the comments.

I just Simpsonized myself:

Let’s see yours…