One of the RSS feeds I have on my Google homepage is LifeHacker, and there were a couple of posts I saw on that site today that seemed very useful.
First of all, they posted about a program named WinFontsView that displays all the fonts on your Windows system. This is incredibly helpful when I’m trying to design a website or flyer, and I’m looking for the perfect font to use for a heading. Until now I’ve had to fire up OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word and look at all the fonts on the dropdown menu, but that’s a rather inconvenient way to view all my fonts. This should be very handy.
Here’s one for Comcast customers: Have you ever experienced periods where there’s nothing wrong with your cable modem’s signal, and yet when you try to pull up websites it says, “Looking up www.website.com…” for an eternity before informing you that it could not locate the site. This is usually a sign that Comcast’s DNS server is screwed up. DNS is the service that looks up a website’s name (like paulryburn.com) and connects it to an IP address (like 63.36.122.205 – not my real IP address by the way, I just made that up). As an alternative to your Internet provider’s DNS, you can point to Google’s new Public DNS instead. More info here. If you’re a complete novice you should probably leave this one alone, but if you’re somewhat familiar with network settings this is worth a try.
Main Street Hound Dogs, the hot dog vendor at the corner of Main and Union at lunchtime on good weather weekdays, has come up with a couple of new innovations recently. Last week they started serving “U Dirty Dog,” which is their take on a chili dog. Well, today, they realized that they already have chili, and they already have Fritos, so why not add chili Fritos to the menu. Fritos with a scoop of chili for $2.50. Follow them on Twitter at @mainsthounddogs to keep up with their latest menu items.
The South Main Association is looking for members and friends to march in the holiday parade this Saturday. If interested meet them at Main and Georgia between 3:30 and 4. The parade starts at 5. The SMA is one of the first to march down the street, so you can be a part of it and still be done in time to see the rest of the parade.
And finally, this Monday, December 7 is the Beale Street Merchants Association fundraiser, a Casino Night benefiting the Church Health Center and Variety, the Children’s Charity. See flyer below for details (click to view in a larger size).
That’ll do it for this evening. I have a couple of rants saved to Drafts that I’ll probably publish morning and noontime tomorrow, plus whatever news comes along.