This site is amazing... it's one of the greatest projects ever created on the Internet.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. What is so amazing is that it is created by anyone and everyone. Know all about cats? Just pull up the wikipedia page on cats and click the edit button. You can add, edit, or delete any of the information. Everyone works together to build the "perfect" information page on a subject.

It sounds a little chaotic, but it works out rather well. The quality of the writing after enough people have edited it is superb. Also, you can find topics that go way beyond a traditional encyclopedia, and topics that are current. For example, there is already a Hurricane Katrina entry at Wikipedia.

The other great thing is that Wikipedia documents are not 'owned' by anyone. They are listed under something called GFDL - Gnu Free Documentation License. That means you are free to use the content with minor restrictions. (This comment is only provided for information purposes - you should read the actual license agreement on the Wikipedia site before you use anything from there.)

Anyway -- check this site out. It's really an amazing project and is fast becoming one of the best and most popular sources for research on the web.

I don't know how I could ever watch TV without TIVO. I've had a TIVO for quite a few years now, I was an early adopter. We rarely watch TV live anymore -- if we want to watch a show when it is on, we will actually wait 15 minutes. For example, if a show runs from 8-9 PM, we start watching at 8:15 -- and skip the commercials. You still end at 9 PM but you get to watch a continuous show.

If you don't have a TIVO, get one! Most cable companies have their own versions now -- our cable company offers one for $5 a month. Those are usually not as easy to use or feature rich as TIVO, but they do the job. They allow you to see so many more shows than you would normally watch... and there is always something on.

It's not perfect though -- the reason I wrote this is that I was thinking about Prison Break, which I talked about in a previous blog post. I came home late last night hoping to watch PB on TIVO and it wasn't there :(... my fault though, most TIVOs can only record one show at a time, and apparently I had given priority to "Las Vegas" on NBC which runs at the same time as PB on Fox. Luckily PB is re-running Tuesday nights it seems -- maybe due to the Labor Day weekend?

Unknown to a lot of people, Google has many more products than just search and advertising... and most of them are free.

One of Google's products is called Picasa. It is a free image editing program, mainly for digital camera users. It scans your hard drive for any photos and allows you to perform common functions such as red-eye removal, sharpening, cropping, brightness/contrast adjustment, etc.

One of the best parts of this program is that it does not alter your original image, it leaves it alone. It keeps track of any changes you request and applies them to the image whenever you view it through the program. The reason this is great is that every time you edit a picture with regular programs, you lose quality. With this, you don't have the quality losses you would normally have, and you also have the ability to revert back to the original image or undo individual steps.

The program is available at www.picasa.com for Windows users. Check it out!