Thursday, September 7, 2006

Taking Online Dating to the Next Level

My lovely wife Rowan and I met thru an internet dating site. I gave my advice for those interested in a good online dating experience about a year ago.

Now there's another tool that will increase the likelihood of finding a good match thru online dating: www.moreProfiles.com

It's a newly launched site that's the first of its kind for online dating. It's a meta-search and profile submission site for many of the top online dating sites, including Match, Yahoo Personals, American Singles, Love Happens, True and more. And it's free.

You can search all of the profiles in all of these services simultaneously. You can create one profile, which www.moreProfiles.com will automatically process into a suitable format and submit to each site.

If only I had had www.moreProfiles.com back in the day! You kids these days have it so easy.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

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Thursday Night Maine Link Dump

Without further ado:

The windmills are coming! Flee to the hills!

Windmills? We ain't afraid of no stinkin' windmills!

For once, a factory closes, and it's not in Maine!

A cabinet factory in Spruce Pine, N.C., will close and an upholstery plant in Atoka, Okla., will be converted to a distribution center. The North Carolina plant’s work is being sent to other company factories that make cabinets, including those in Orleans and Beecher Falls and another in Andover, Maine, said company spokeswoman Peg Lupton.


Blame the weatherman? That's so cliché.

Speaking of clichés, isn't the very idea of a restaurant formulaic? I mean, they make food, we pay them to let us eat it under their roof. The impulse to stop others from doing what they want to do knows no end.

Here's a standing headline: Government Does Things Slower Than Expected.

Peace,

Tor

Linking to the following blogs with open trackback posts: TMH's Bacon Bits, Sed Vitae, Robinik's Open Blog

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Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Slublog on Baldacci's Campaign Ad

Slublog has caught an appearance by a revisionist historian in John Baldacci's latest campaign ad. I knew the Democrats were trying to make every race a referendum on Bush (and in many of their points, I am in agreement), but this is ridiculous.

Peace,

Tor

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Borowitz on NCLB

Andy Borowitz nails the hit on the head. Or something like that.

h/t Maine.com

Peace,

Tor

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Adventures in Kitchen Lighting

Here in Maine, as the fall days begin to grow shorter, our thoughts turn to Kitchen lighting. Is it adequate for us to see the dishes we're washing and the food we're cooking? If we installed new kitchen light fixtures, would we perhaps find some of the utensils lost long ago, which slid between our appliances? If we never install the lights, and never see the utensils, are they still there?

It's a koan for modern times.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

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Belfast City Manager's Retirement Plans

It's nice that a lifelong public servant has decided to try the private sector on for size when he retires:

City Manager Terry St. Peter said Tuesday he will become a business owner after he retires from City Hall next June.

The manager will purchase three adjacent lower Main Street businesses -- Maine Coast Photo and Digital, County Copy and Mark's Printing House -- on Nov. 1 and serve as a "passive" owner until spring.


The best part of the story comes at the very end.

St. Peter, who will be almost 65 when he retires, has spent most of his professional life in public service. "It will be interesting to see if I can run a business," he said.


It would have been nice to have found that out before he took a job for a cool $77k per year in which almost everything he did impacted businesses negatively. It should be a prerequisite of any bureaucrat that they have tried to make it in the private sector before feeding at the public trough and doling out the goodies to their friends.

Peace,

Tor

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The Left-Liberals in Maine Can't Get Their Story Straight

Lance Dutson of Maine Web Report has an anti-Baldacci rant worthy of reading. In general, I'd like to say, "What he said!"

The remarkable thing is that Lance references a report from the liberal advocacy group Maine Center for Economic Policy, which seems to undercut Baldacci's recent claims of economic progress in the state. I guess Christopher St. John didn't get the memo from Jack Cashman that all bad news about the economy should be withheld till after the election.

Peace,

Tor

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A Great New Search Engine for Puzzle and Riddle Lovers

Trumalia Search is a wonderful new search engine that's right up your alley if you enjoy Riddles and Puzzles. It's an especially wonderful site to visit if you like quirky and humorous artwork of a puzzling nature.

But Trumalia is more than just a search engine: it's also a forum for people who want to discuss current events, art or anything else. That anything else includes enigmas that will lead to buried treasure. Read about the first enigma solvers. As a member of Quest4Treasure, I could seriously get into that.

The Trumalia database includes one of the largest repositories of riddles written before the 20th century, so anyone with any curiosity about the history of riddles should check it out. If you're a Da Vinci code-cracking wannabee, there's plenty here for you, too.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

Linking to the following blogs with open trackback posts: Third World County, Diane's Stuff, Stuck on Stupid, Jack of All Trades

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Steve Irwin, RIP

Is there anyone who didn't like Steve Irwin? Nope, didn't think so. Even when South Park made fun of him, you could tell they loved him.

Peace,

Tor

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Employee Performance Reviews

I've worked for enough different bosses to know that a boss who is conscientious about tracking my performance honestly is priceless. One of my best bosses ever took great pains to document the pluses and minuses of my performance in the warehouse, and spent a great deal of time going over them with me. One of my worst bosses ever (this was at the same employer, by the way) just checked off boxes on the annual performance reviews.

If both of my bosses had had ManagerAssistant.com's software for Employee Appraisals and Reviews, they would have become better bosses. The former wouldn't have had to spend so much time looking at varied documents to see how his employees were doing. The latter wouldn't have been tempted to short-change the important boss-to-employee feedback routine.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

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Les Claypool for President

No, I'm not the graffiti vandal who supports former Primus front man and bassist Les Claypool for president. But if push comes to shove in '08, that's certainly as good a write-in protest vote as any. Seems many Claypool fans agree.

Peace,

Tor

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Quadruple Homicide in Newry

The nationally-publicized quadruple homicide in Newry, Maine this past weekend sure won't help the state's tourism prospects this fall and winter. Especially hard hit will be the ski areas.

Police today are unraveling a murder spree in Western Maine that appears to have begun with the murder of a man on Friday and claimed the lives of a three women -- including a mother and daughter -- at a bed and breakfast over Labor Day weekend as authorities say the killer tried to cover up his first crime.


What surprizes me most about this is that Nielsen felt the need to kill more people to cover up his first murder. Usually, when someone commits murder in a state with a death penalty, there's nothing to lose in committing more murders. In Maine, which doesn't have a death penalty, a guy who's committed four murders is definitely going to have a much harder time ever seeing the light of day than a fellow who's committed one. And committing the extra murders sort of takes away the possibility of copping a plea to manslaughter.

But who ever said murder was the act of a rational soul?

Peace,

Tor

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Political Credit for Maine's Economy

Here's something you don't see in the papers everyday: basic economic concepts expressed clearly. The Bangor Daily News has a piece today about the fact that, tho politicians like to take credit when the economy is booming, they have rarely contributed anything to it.

Here's something you see even less often: a politician who tells it like it is.

"Angus King got all kinds of credit because he was governor in a time when the national economy boomed and the state economy boomed," University of Southern Maine economics professor Michael Hillard said. "Anybody could have been governor, and the economy would still have boomed."

Former Gov. King agrees. In an interview just before he left office, King said he was lucky to have been governor with a booming national economy that resulted in large state surpluses.

"Our economy operates on decisions made in the private sector," he said. "For most of the time that I have been governor I have been lucky those decisions have led to a strong economy."


Oh, how the current administration makes us long for the days when Maine had a King in office!

The fact is that almost anything the government does will tend to stifle the economy, even if the intent is to support it. This is because the government will try and shore up one sector that has garnered a lot of attention, to the detriment of other burgeoning sectors that will have to fight on an uneven playing field for precious resources from lenders and investors.

Colby College economics professor Michael Donihue said state and local governments focus on what they can do to create incentives to attract new companies. But, he said, the reality is those in the business sector do not spend a lot of time looking at government incentives, nor do they weigh heavily in decisions to locate or expand.

"There is probably not a lot the administration or the Legislature can do to attract new people," he said, "but they certainly can get in the way and create disincentives."


Peace,

Tor

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Random YouTube Finds

I always knew there was something horrible about coffee... I guess they're changing the name to Soylent Filipino.

This is the best card trick in the world.

There's something to be said for persistence.

Peace,

Tor
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Panama City, Panama

Estelle.tv has a growing number of videos that will help you plan your travels. One of the latest concerns Panama City, Panama. Latin supermodel Estelle Reyna will clue you in on the local sounds, sights and culinary adventures available to anyone who visits Panama City, Panama. (It is very important to reinforce that we are talking about Panama City, the capital of the Central American country of Panama, not Panama City, FL.)



Estelle's accent is very soft, and her English is very clear and easy to understand, so go see the video right now! One fact I gleaned from the video was that the U.S. dollar is the local currency there. That sure makes things easy!



The video also impresses on me that one of the major attractions of Panama City, beyond the great beauty of the landscape surrounding it, is the people who live there. It seems that, since the isthmus of Panama has found itself to be the natural route for wave after wave of travelers over the centuries, the residents there have become some of the kindest and friendliest folks on the planet to foreigners and tourists.



Of course, she's speaking as a Latin American supermodel, so people will tend to be especially friendly to her!

Panama City isn't the only destination that Estelle.tv covers. They have free daily podcasts, and a large online travel video library that includes many U.S. destinations.

For my Maine readers, I even found this video from August 2006 about Fort Gorges, near Portland. That's a trip I'll need to make sometime soon. There's also a general vid about Maine. It does a great job of playing up Maine's natural attractions for all four seasons.

In general, Estelle.tv is a very useful site for those who are planning a trip to any of the best travel destinations in the world.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

Linking to the following blogs with open trackback posts: historymike, Common Folk Using Common Sense, Planck's Constant, Don Surber
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New Oil Deep in the Gulf of Mexico (Open Trackbacks)

This is one of those stories that's both good and bad news. There's been an amazingly large find of new oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico that, if it pans out as "experts" expect (or is that expects expert?), could be on the vanguard of oil finds that would expand U.S. reserves by half.

If this is true, it's obviously a good thing that the U.S.'s dependence on foreign sources of oil would decrease. But there are likely many environmental risks to extracting this oil (the well is in very deep water). Since corporations enjoy their limited liability, if anything went horribly awry, there'd end up being a lot of uncompensated environmental victims in the vein of the Valdez fiasco.

Peace,

Tor

This is this week's post. You may trackback on any subject, provided you link to this post. Click on the chicklet for an FAQ on open trackbacks.

Butch Morgan of 123beta pinged us with Tuesday's Best - Round-Up

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Monday, September 4, 2006

Getting Rid of Fleas

Fleas are a frequent concern at our household. We have three cats, and even tho they are all indoor cats, there's no way to keep the fleas out of the house for good.

If you're in our camp, you can check out this flea control guide. It evaluates the newest products, and provides basic info on fleas and how to kill them.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

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Laptop Stolen from Liberty, Maine Library

News flash from the crime beat of the dark alleyways of Liberty, Maine: a laptop with wireless internet access has been stolen.

"With several weeks since the theft, we had hoped that the person that took the laptop would have come to their senses and returned it," said Worcester. "The library has received a donation allowing us to offer a $50 reward for any information leading to the return of the laptop and arrest of the individual."


And people think I'm hopelessly idealistic for being a libertarian. Librarians are apparently even more naive. These guys waited several weeks to make a stink about a missing laptop, in the hopes that it was just a mistake? I've been known to walk out of a convenience store where I've just paid for a newspaper but forgotten to pay for the gas I've pumped, but I can't imagine walking out of anywhere with a laptop inadvertantly tucked under my arm.

Peace,

Tor

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Ted Murphy and Lucien Bouchard

There's been a lot of speculation around the blogosphere concerning the true motives of Ted Murphy, founder of a startup company that places ads on blogs. Why would he pay bloggers money to write about certain products or services? Isn't there something shady about that? Won't it degrade the journalistic credibility of the blogosphere?

It turns out that Murphy is trying to seek revenge from the mainstream media for his being fired from his internship at a Chinese newspaper more than a decade ago. Since then, he's been on a blacklist and hasn't been able to get respectable journalistic work.

My sources tell me he was responsible for misidentifying a Canadian politician and his wife as serial killers Fred and Rosemary West in a caption in the South China Morning Post.

Peace,

Tor

Tor has been paid to blog about the above topic via PayPerPost. If you are a blogger who would be interested in being paid to blog, please sign up at PayPerPost and fill in tor at torsrants dot com as your referral.

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Campaign Signs in Maine

As much as I would like to see campaign signs not clog up the roadways this fall, as one of Maine's gubernatorial candidates has proposed, I suspect that they will. And with good reason.

They work.

They don't provide much more information than a name, an office, a party affiliation, and perhaps a quick slogan. (The most succinct campaign signs I've ever seen in Maine had just one word and a punctuation mark: "Olympia!") No real depth of a candidate's résumé or stands on any issue can be safely imparted through the written word to a driver hurtling along Maine's byways.

But they work.

Years ago, my now-defunct fraternity at one of Maine's liberal arts colleges ran a fictitious candidate for student office. They plastered the campus with signs, and the name came in with a winning tally on election day, without anyone having ever met -- or heard anything about -- the candidate. And this was at a place where the next generation of America's intelligentsia were supposedly being groomed to take their places in important government and corporate posts.

Fortunately for the fraternity, the dean of students had a pretty good sense of humor about the situation. He went along with a staged assassination of the candidate on the steps of the student union.

Peace,

Tor

Linking to the following blog with open trackback posts: Urban Paradise

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