The World of Stuff .com

Here we go again

Living in Florida is good except for those pesky hurricanes we keep getting. The past few decades were very quiet in hurricane activity, but things are starting to pick up again, as we saw last year. And today I found out that a Tropical Storm (now Depression) Cindy just hit the panhandle of the state and another tropical storm, Dennis, is looming in the Caribbean (though by the time you read this, it may be a full-fledged hurricane). Although it seems like Dennis will follow Cindy’s path and generally stay out of our way, come on! It’s only July. Often we don’t see a hurricane till August.

I was thinking that Dennis, which is an inherently funny name, might be a problem with my birthday dinner, which is on Sunday night. According to forecasts, the hurricane should be far past us by Sunday morning even, but you never can tell with those kinds of things. We’ll just have to hope for the best.

I’d like to go somewhere devoid of natural hazards. Does such a place exist?

Speaking of places, it was announced today that London will host the 2012 Olympics. I posted about this in March 2004. At that time there were nine cities in the running: Havana, Istanbul, Leipzig, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. Up until today, the race had been narrowed down to London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, and Paris. Paris was expected to win, but London narrowly beat it out in the end. Congratulations, Britannia, but don’t let it go to your head.

The other day I stumbled upon a thing called StumbleUpon. It’s a toolbar (no, wait, keep listening) that allows you to mark the web sites you visit as “I like it” (thumbs up) or “Not for me” (thumbs down). Based on your ratings and a preselected list of interests, you can click the “Stumble” button, which loads a page that others with similar interests liked. Consider it channel surfing for the Internet, except you’re far more likely to find interesting things. Basically it’s what I Like (now known as Spurl.net) should have been.

Oh, and best of all, there’s no spyware or anything, as scans by multiple programs have proven. The only minor annoyance is that (on Firefox, at least) it installs a StumbleUpon search plugin, and I’m not exactly sure what it does. I’ve tried deleting it, but it just comes back. Also, it apparently set my Esperanto Wikipedia and English Wikipedia plugins to have the same icon (previously the English icon had an old version of the logo). I fixed that by making my own icon for the Esperanto Wikipedia (the green star, an Esperanto symbol).