For the last few days I’ve been struggling to get my new computer to boot up. Then all of a sudden at six o’clock this morning, I woke up before with a new idea…and it ended up taking about five seconds to solve the problem. It’s so weird to me how much great thinking can happen while you’re asleep! I need to remember to do that in the future: When I’m stumped by something, I should think about it right before bed, and then my brain will keep working on it even while I’m unconscious.

Last week I downloaded the Yelp and Path apps on my phone, which let you “check in” to places much like the Foursquare and Facebook apps that I already use. It’s overwhelming. I think I need to delete them. I really ought to spend less time “checking in” with my phone, and more time “checking out” the actual real-life places I visit.

I decided to move my office from the upstairs loft to the downstairs guest room. (I call it a “guest room” instead of a “bedroom” because it doesn’t have a very useful closet.) So for the past week or so, I’ve been working downstairs instead of upstairs, and I love it.

I’m getting tons of natural light during the day because it’s the only room in the house with a multi-window southern exposure. It’s next to the kitchen, which is terrific for snacking. It’s near the front door, so I can see when someone’s coming to deliver a package. It’s where Ilse’s food bowl is located, so she actually eats her food during the day while she’s hanging out with me (instead of waiting till midnight when all hopes of getting people food are dashed). Since it has a low ceiling instead of a vaulted ceiling, it stays warm in the winter, and since it’s on the ground floor, it stays cool in the summer.

Am I the only one who hates automatic drop-down navigation menus? You know, the kind where as soon as your mouse moves across the top bar of the web site, a bunch of links appear below it? I hate them because nine times out of ten, I’m not interested in navigating anywhere, I’m just moving my mouse from the browser’s address bar down to something on the page. But as soon as my cursor moves past the navigation bar, a bunch of crap shows up and blocks my view of the actual content of the page, which is what I actually want to look at. I actually prefer if I have to click on a menu to make it drop down. I’m not such an invalid that I can’t click my mouse button.

Today’s pet peeve was brought to you by paypal.com, verizonwireless.com, and a whole host of others.

I finally found the perfect netbook (to replace my ancient laptop), but it hasn’t come out yet:

The Samsung NF310 is at heart a 10.1-Inch netbook but it will feature unique styling [and] various performance advantages over currently available netbooks. The netbook’s HD LED back-lit display for starters features 1366 x 768 pixel resolution… Also the NF310 when launched will make use of the 1.5Ghz Intel Atom N550 Dual Core processor. [» Netbook Planet]

I’m hoping I’ll be able to get it for myself as a Christmas present, although that might only be possible if everyone else on my list gets coal. So if you’re on my holiday list, please be very poorly behaved between now and Christmas.

I’ve upgraded the blog software on this site to WordPress 3.0. I figured I should get used to it on my personal site as soon as possible, because at some point we’re going to have to upgrade the blogs at work too. The new version has multi-user (and multi-site) capabilities built-in by default (instead of having a separate multi-user version), so it’s more useful for businesses now. It has a host of other new features, so hopefully I’ll either implement some of those here (if applicable) or at least learn to use them for the blogs at work.

One of the best new features: wp.me links! Just like the blogs on wordpress.com, my blog now has a “short link” for each blog entry, which is especially useful for Twitter posts. For example, the short link for this entry is http://wp.me/pYpK0-fM.

In other news, my Twitter feed in the right column is periodically not working, but that’s Twitter’s fault. If you’re a Twitter user, you may have noticed frequent “fail whale” appearances. Apparently they’ve been having server troubles.

By now I’m sure everyone realizes that “Free Credit Report dot com” isn’t really free; you have to enroll in their “Triple Advantage” program to get your free report, and if you forget to cancel, you get billed monthly for their credit monitoring service.

For anyone seeking truly free alternatives, I want to share my own choices for credit tools that don’t cost me anything but do a decent job of keeping an eye on my credit reports and credit score.

1. To get your credit reports completely free once per year, you can use AnnualCreditReport.com. There’s no commitment and no cost. You just pick any (or all) of the three credit bureaus, and you can instantly get a free report once a year to see exactly what’s on your file.
2. To check your credit score as often as you like (although I think it’s only really updated once a month), you can use Credit Karma. It only uses one credit bureau, but that should be fine unless you’re conducting a really sensitive transaction like a real estate purchase.
3. To keep an eye out for identity theft, you can use a service that’s included as a free perk for members of the Auto Club: CreditCheck Select, which monitors your credit report and alerts you whenever there’s a change (like a new account or an inquiry). I know that’s not technically free, but it is if you’re already a AAA member.

Using those three services, you can keep a pretty close eye on your credit without having to pay anything extra!

I was looking through old bookmarks in my web browser, and it made me reminisce about useless web pages from yester-decade.

Some pages I enjoyed, which are still around, include:

• The Really Big Button That Doesn’t Do Anything
• Surrealist Compliment Generator (“Your hair is reminiscent of a self-digesting yak in heat.”)
• How to Keep an Idiot in Suspense
• Bert Is Evil!
• 101 Uses for Extra AOL CDs
• The Godot-Cam (“still waiting…”)

I searched and searched for an existing mirror of “The Page That Turns You Into a Chicken,” though, and I can’t find a single one that’s still up. How sad is that?

Is anyone else upset by the removal of the letter e from the names of web sites? It was bad enough when it was just flickr, tumblr, and a few others, but then I heard about a site called toggl today, so I feel it’s worth bringing this up again. I don’t think other vowels are being attacked at this rate, and that’s just not fair. It’s time to mix it up a little with the missing vowels, people. I was going to suggest creating a medical site called doctr, for instance, but apparently that’s already been done. Good job! We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, though. Actors, please make actr, or if that’s already been done, how about ctor? For vitamins, how about vtamns? I could think of others, but that’s your job.

I knew a guy whose blog was so cool…

“How cool was it?”

It was so cool, it would automatically import comments once a day from the Facebook “notes” based on his blog entries.

“That’s not a very funny joke.”

Sorry, it wasn’t really a joke, just bragging about the cool WordPress plug-in I’m using, called Facebook Comments.

“That’s not a very funny name for a WordPress plug-in.”

No. No it isn’t.