links

Blogrolls are boring because they're just names. They don't tell me why you like those websites, intriguing me to click on them. So here's an old-fashioned link page:

What I used to click to wake up in the morning, before I bought my first little laptop in Spring 2009:

jkOnTheRun
Their tagline: "using mobile devices since they weighed 30 lbs"
Fell in love with UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) here.

UMPCPortal
All the UMPCs are here with their own spec page (very useful when I only care which one weighs the lightest) also featuring the latest reviews for that particular UMPC, not to mention their "Latest Five UMPCs" and "Top 5 UMPCs" sections.

International Forecaster Weekly
Gets updated every Wednesday and Saturday. I don't always like his tone, but I appreciate his other side to things.

Stay home and have tons of fun with your husband or kids or homeschooling:

Making Home
Domestic Felicity
Boundless Magazine
Ladies Against Feminism
Woman and Marriage

Blogging and Hacking Sites

Skelliewag
Bloggerbuster
BlogU
NxE weekly articles about blogging
Smashing Magazine
Vandelay Design
Color Schemer

I get all my "free software/application" reviews and geek news from Lifehacker (and sometimes Cybernet). It's why I now use Crunchbang Linux (outside link) on my EeePC.

Twice a Year Click Fests

NYmag.com/Fashion (runway slideshows)
Warning: Girls only! Wardrobe Malfunctions do occur.

I wouldn't go to a runway show even if someone paid all my expenses, because it would waste days of time, trouble, and airplane travel. At nymag.com I can click through an entire collection in minutes, saving my favorites to the computer. Being able to do this is fantastic if you sew your own clothes, or merely want to figure out what it is you like before trying to put together an outfit at the local thrift store.

Besides, building a database of favorite outfits often assauges my desire to buy the actual clothes, hence my fashion blog Ozmatique. Collecting clothes digitally instead of physically is just as fun and a lot easier on the pocketbook, in addition to helping you shop smarter.

If you're new to NYmag, prepare to spend week(s) catching up on their runway archives. Hint: Go to "Designer Guide", pick a name and work your way through the years using the drop-down menu, NOT the two most recent shows already posted to the side. If you don't like a collection don't write off the designer, try a different season/year as the colors and styles of a designer can differ from year to year.

Another good source of photos for an outfit database is online catalogs. I can't tell if I like an outfit until I see it on a person, so I skip sites without catalogs. My favorite sites with catalogs are:

J. Jill, Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Barrie Pace, Soft Surroundings, Newport-News, La Redoute, and ever more rarely Boston Proper and Anthropologie.

If you know of a great online catalog not on this list, please leave a comment.

Other Links

Bible Crosswalk (English) and O-Bible (Chinese)

Worldwide Directory of the churches of Christ
You can look up a website a week, to get to know congregations around the world, and explore their links, and to get ideas for your own church website. I also use the contact info on this website to do up Google Maps for traveling church members.

Otherwise, it bugs me that this site requires a donation to update your church info. They used to be free, and then when I went to update our church information and ran into the donation requirement, I was without a credit card for a few years, and couldn't update our info.

This is an age of free blogs, free Wikipedia and free Google Maps. Now that I do have access to a credit card, I'd still rather just spend the time to do up our own church blog (still in pre-production), or a free Google Maps listing, or put it all on free Wikipedia. I suspect that eventually all the churches on that website will get done up that way.

Screenit.com or Plugged-In Movies

Before you decide to rent that movie or get stuck in a movie theater where you can't fast forward, check out the profanity/violence/sex/nudity of the film online.

Reading through all the reviews though, you too will begin to feel that making a better movie might be as easy as shooting ducks in a bucket. Most movies waste story time on lame filler - the same old dirty jokes, innuendos and promiscuous relationships. When they get stuck for interesting conversation, they just have the characters swear. When they can't advance the story anymore, they have the characters undress or get in bed. If you were forced to create an interesting movie without resorting to a cheatsheet of sex and profanity, you'd be more than halfway to a masterpiece. That's why I'm intrigued by the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival which set up their Jubilee Awards to compete with the Oscars. See their Ten Commandments guidelines for submitting films.