Obligatory XKCD comic...

http://xkcd.com/327/

The problem with most of the credit monitoring companies is the little they do can be done by the consumer for a lot less. The real work comes when your identity has been stolen and the hundreds of hours it takes to clean up the mess. This is where you need a company that will do the legwork for you. I use Zander Insurance's ID theft program. I look at it as one more insurance that I pay per year. If/When I need them they are there and I won't have as much pain to endure and the massive learning curve to cleaning up ID fraud on your own.

With as little time as I have I try to sneak in a round of two of World of Tanks every now and then. The rounds are quick and fun.

I have used TaxCut for years and have had very few issues with it. The one year I tried the online variant of it was horrible. There was one particularly nasty bug that caused my return to be rejected twice before I had to go over the print out with a fine tooth comb. I found they were inserting a bogus figure into one of the fields instead of leaving it blank. I finally was able to work around the system to get the issue fixed, but it caused way more work and aggravation than it should have. I did try calling their "help" line, but the person on the other end was completely useless.

I use K9 on my older Android phone and it works great with my Gmail accounts. I use Thunderbird at home and it also works just as well. I have no issues with the way Gmail "Labels" messages. K9 and Thunderbird treat them as folders and shows me the messages I have flagged.

Man I hope there tech support improves. It's next to impossible to get anyone on the phone and I even have their Tech certification. Our company just switched to HP due to the cost and there horrible support.

Radio announcer: "Well there's a traffic jam on I90. The power to that section of the city went out during a thunderstorm. The electric company has said power will be restored within 6 - 8 hours."

The City of Houston was doing this crap. Yellows that were so short there was no way to stop or you'd be in the middle of the intersection. A petition got the cameras on the ballot and they were defeated. The City was whining about safety, but there were several studies done at intersections in the city by independent auditors that found rear end accidents increased due to the shortened yellows and the RL cameras. From what I read the city was pulling in $2 - $3 million per year on the fines.

You can get an HDMI to SVGA/DVI/Display port converters for pretty cheap so you can hook it to any monitor you want. I also picked up a 802.11N 2.4Ghz WiFi adapter from AirLink for less than $10. I got both at Amazon.

Got my PI Monday and got it setup with Asterisk 11 and FreePBX 3 beta. The site raspberry-asterisk.org has a prebuilt image and from there you can easily update to the latest versions. This is going to be mainly for testing/playing at home, but I may deploy one to setup a small 4 DID/10 extenstion FreePBX install to supplement an old POTS pbx.

"Amazon is also facing criticism right now for allegedly shutting down a woman's account and remotely wiping her Kindle, then refusing to provide information about why it did so."

This is the exact reason why I strip the DRM from every Kindle book I buy and then store them in my own offline repository. Should Amazon ever decide to wipe my account I'll still have the books I purchased. The other advantage is I can use any e-reader I want w/o being locked to a Kindle.

You see how well that went with Verizon's FIOS service. That is exactly what they were on track to do, but it finally became to expensive to run new fiber every and fighting with local governments to get the rights to even lay the fiber.

If you want to read then get an e-reader. I have a Kindle for reading, not surfing the web, not checking email, etc. If I want to do something else besides read I pull out my phone or use my laptop. When reading with a tablet you'll end up getting distracted by new emails, something that pops into your head and you want to quickly look it up, but in reality you end up doing everything else except reading. With an e-reader you can focus on the book your reading and keep the distractions to a minimum.

Following Microsoft's trend this one will bomb.

Windows 98 - Good
Windows ME - Bomb
Windows XP - Good
Windows Vista - Bomb
Windows 7 - Good
Windows 8 - ????