Cowgirl's Dream® Trading Post Catalog... Hey! Wanna buy a horse? Cowgirl's Dream is a small mother-daughter business out of Colorado that has been on the web since March 1995. They try to find items of interest to western folks that are not that easy to find either locally or on the internet.

Feng Shui For Dummies... I've been thinking of trying to use Feng Shui. This may just be the way to go about it.

Bottomquark ... Science can be interesting and often entertaining; you shouldn't need Bill Nye or Beakman to explain it. If you're lucky, you might have had a high school science teacher who made learning fun, rather than some old guy reading molecular equations from a blackboard. The quark team collects interesting stories and tidbits from the world of science, and posts them for your scientific enjoyment (and you can post your own stuff, too). Those with curious minds will enjoy this resource, though I'd also recommend it for anyone who's interested in seeing how much a part of our lives science has become. From Chris Pirillo.

Vmyths.com- Truth About Computer Virus Myths & Hoaxes... Poor Internet, we hardly knew ye. Vmyths.com hopes the fearmongers prove us wrong. Call us jaded, but we want to see the Internet writhe in agony. We want only 30 million AOL users to survive when the Code Red worm strikes... Rob Rosenberger reports just hours before the Internet's predicted "meltdown." [7/31/01]

TechTV | Transfer Video to CD... If you have piles of videotapes crowding your home entertainment center, it's probably time to consolidate the tapes and upgrade your system. You can transfer the videos to CD and watch them in a DVD player.

Cyberspace--it's for stupid people too!...Deborah Branscum on spam reminiscent of the snail mail scam, "You may already be a Wiener".

HMOs are sick, and there´s no cure in sight -- The Washington Times... Excerpt: "When or if enacted, patients' rights legislation may mollify managed care consumers and critics. But those who know say it's too late to save the $600 million system.... As managed care weakens, the need increases for a new way to assure that ordinary people can get medical care they can't otherwise afford. Yet financial consultants say any new system will cost more."

Cringely on the Code Red worm... This thing, or something very much like it, is going to be with us for a very, very long time....This is very, very bad news, but there is a solution that will shortly be presented that will be claimed to save the day. This miracle solution will be the subject of my regular column this week, which will appear, as usual, on Thursday. Please come back then. Because while there is a solution, I believe that many people will see the cure as being nearly as bad as the disease.

Amazon Auctions: Going once... "I don't think they're putting a lot of effort into (auctions) right now, and I don't expect them to," said Jeetil Patel, a financial analyst who covers Amazon for Deutsche Bank Alex Brown. "If they're looking at areas to trim the fat, obviously this seems to be one of them," since revenue from auction sales is an "insignificant" piece of Amazon's business.

Genesis Mission - Search For Origins... NASA's Genesis mission will send a spacecraft to collect pieces of the sun, called solar wind, that may contain the answers. After an August 1, 2001 launch, the Genesis spacecraft will journey a million miles sunward, unfold its collectors, and "sunbathe" for nearly three years before returning to Earth with its precious cargo. Scientists will study the solar wind samples for years to come.

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It seems Ebay is being invaded by honest to goodness brick-and-mortar stores. According to a report heard on a talk radio investment program, some major retailers are using Ebay to rid themselves of unwanted or out-of- fashion merchandise. The report stated that Bloomingdale's now has a staff of 12 whose only job is to take digital photographs, post to Ebay, and ship when sold. The retailer is said to make more than 1000 posts per day.

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The Magnificent DOORSTOP?... This doorstop documentary includes: never-before-seen footage from a rubber doorstop factory; philosophy professors debating the essence of a doorstop; an all-doorstop auction; confessions of doorstop-obsessed collectors; a doorstop dispute that wound up in court; a linguist unraveling the etymological riddle of frog doorstops; film critics revealing how they keep their doors open; and much more!

Jail Time in the Digital Age... Something is going terribly wrong with copyright law in America. Mr. Sklyarov himself did not violate any law, and his employer did not violate anyone's copyright.

Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex... MIT's Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.

How much are you worth?... The more honestly you answer the questions, the more realistic the dollar value returned will be.

LANCE IS NUMBER ONE! TOUR DE FRANCE 2001/... For the third successive year, Lance Armstrong has proven that he’s the most complete cyclist of July. And in the minds of most riders – particularly the likes of, Jan Ullrich, who also has just one focus for the 11-month season – the American is the most accomplished rider of the current generation. Lance’s hat-trick win came through consistency. This year, however, it was also a stage-winning blitz – two time trials and two mountain-top victories – which confirmed the dominance of the rider who, in his own words, wants to be remembered as a cancer survivor. Last year Lance came back for his second consecutive win after fighting testicular cancer into remission.

Lance's story is available in: It's Not About the Bike : My Journey Back to Life.

Old Friends Found Again... More than just a hyper text link - a link to my past and hopefully to my future as well. Friends from the sixties and seventies, rediscovered. Mike's site contains, among other things, many interesting links to gardening information, haiku and Zen.

Big Ball of Mud... A BigBallOfMud">BIG BALL OF MUD is haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle. We’ve all seen them. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition.

Still, this approach endures and thrives. Why is this architecture so popular? Is it as bad as it seems, or might it serve as a way-station on the road to more enduring, elegant artifacts? What forces drive good programmers to build ugly systems? Can we avoid this? Should we? How can we make such systems better?

Talking Moose : Moose Sales Strategy...Ever wonder what a saleperson does? The Moose says, "You know, we all sell. Some sell our bodies. Some sell our minds. Some sell products. Some sell other stuff. So, why do we spend so little time studying the sales process?"

How Californians got burned... The state electricity system is in a shambles, and the worst may be ahead. How did things get to this point? - - - Sacramento Bee. An excellent article on how just about everyone involved in California's power "deregulation" dropped the ball.

Here's a link to free online courses offered by HP.... NOTE! THESE CLASSES ARE NOT HP SPECIFIC. Classes are self-paced, instructor-led, and can be accessed 24 hours a day. List chages each month - some courses added and some removed.

Le Tour... Lance Armstrong leads Jan Ullrich Overall By 6'44"! Lance Armstrong's 1'38" advantage over Jan Ullrich in the 18th stage has pushed the American's overall advantage over the German to 6'44". Joseba Beloki's 6th place today - 2'08" ahead of the rider who started the day in 3rd overall, Andrei Kivilev - is enough to put the ONCE rider in 3rd overall. If the current top 3 hold their advantage through to Paris (as is highly expected), it will be only the second time in Tour history that the same three riders have finished in first, second and third! Go Lance!

DaveNet : Transcendental Money... How much money do you need to feel secure? Ask this question in different parts of the world, and you'll get different answers. In a poor country like India, it might be $1 million. In poorer parts of the US, $3 million. In California where you can hardly throw a pot sticker into a crowd without hitting a billionaire, the answer might be $25 million.

Test Your Temperament... According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, in psychology, temperament is the aspect of personality concerned with emotional dispositions and reactions and their speed and intensity; the term often is used to refer to the prevailing mood or mood pattern of a person. The notion of temperament in this sense originated with Galen who developed it from an earlier physiological theory of four basic body fluids (humours): blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. According to their relative predominance in the individual, they were supposed to produce, respectively, temperaments designated sanguine (warm, pleasant), phlegmatic (slow-moving, apathetic), melancholic (depressed, sad), and choleric (quick to react, hot tempered).

Foot-and-Mouth First Virus Unable To Spread Through Microsoft Outlook... Atlanta, Ga. (SatireWire.com) — Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Symantec's AntiVirus Research Center today confirmed that foot-and-mouth disease cannot be spread by Microsoft's Outlook email application, believed to be the first time the program has ever failed to propagate a major virus

Oliver "Ollie" Yantis - Old West Gravesites... Yantis became a member of Bill Doolin's gang, The Wild Bunch, by request of Bitter Creek Newcomb. It was rumored that Newcomb had a thing for Yantis' sister.

I send you this file in order to have your advice. ... Does that line sound familiar? If so, you're one of the tens of thousands of Internet users around the world who have received the SirCam virus since it was released into the wild last week. BEWARE! This one isn't some cookie-cutter toy from the script-kiddies it was created by a coder who knows what he's doing. Insideous and diabolical come to mind.

New shirt or cloth keyboard?... U.K. startup ElectroTextiles has demonstrated a keyboard made out of a soft, water-resistant cloth--something the company claims could be a breakthrough for mobile computing and text messaging.