July 16th will mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, culminating in Neil Armstrong becoming the first human to step foot on the moon on July 20th in 1969. To commemorate this historic event, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum has set up an incredibly cool online experience which allows you to track the Apollo 11 mission from pre-launch to lunar touchdown. You can visit the website at wechoosethemoon.org where you can see that the pre-launch is already underway:

As part of the Apollo 11 celebration, former NASA astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell will be at Northwestern University in Chicago on July 22nd for an evening discussion reflecting on their careers in space. We got two tickets for this event, which you can order here. Buzz Aldrin, of course, was the second man to set foot on the moon on Apollo 11, and Jim Lovell became most famous as the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, which suffered an explosion on its way to the moon but was brought back safely to Earth. It’ll be interesting and exciting to see these two legendary astronauts in real life next week. Aldrin will also be signing copies of his new book, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon.

This is cool: Google Maps has added Street View of selected areas of Disneyland Paris. You can now ‘walk’ through Main Street, other parts of Disneyland, Disney Village and the Walt Disney Studios Park. Pretty neat!

CafePress, the world’s leading print-on-demand service, announced a major change yesterday that will have a huge negative impact on its huge community shopkeepers that manage over 6 million shops. More »

This is my 300th post on this blog. To commemorate today’s milestone I thought it would be fun to have a look at the stats and see what our most visited posts have been over the years. These posts are all pretty old as they have had the most accumulative hits over the years:

1. Hidden Security Tags in Old Navy Jeans
2. The Rat Temple of Rajasthan
3. Pirates of the Carribean 2: a rip-off of Monkey Island?
4. Top 10 Things to do in Tunisia
5. Quechuas Toss and Go Seconds Tents
6. Pop Tarts with Beef Gelatin
7. Top 10 Budget Things to do in Chicago
8. Scuba in Europe’s Largest Swimming Pool
9. Top 10 Things to do in South Florida and the Keys
10. Driverless Robot Buses Crash

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Twitter has been in the news a lot lately. From stranded mountaineers using Twitter to audience members tweeting from the floor during President Obama’s address to Congress, the media seems caught up in a Twitter frenzy. I first remember hearing about Twitter in the media when a student in Egypt tweeted his way out of jail. Twitter also came up during the Mumbai terrorist attacks and eye-witness photos from the Miracle on the Hudson flashed through Twitter like lightening.
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Over one year ago, at the beginning of 2008, I signed up for a web hosting package at UK2. I needed an SSL certificate which they offered with a special package, so I ordered that too. I had lots of issues with their service and the SSL never worked. After dozens of emails with the UK2 support desk I decided to get my money back and I canceled the service. I thought that that was it. Fast forward to this year. In January 2009 I suddenly received an invoice from UK2 of £54 for a website I never heard of, a co.uk real estate site. I sent UK2 an email about the mistake but never got a reply. Several days later the amount was taken off my credit card. I did a whois on the domain and found an address in London with my email address! Obviously UK2 had mixed up my details with another customer. More »

President Obama signed the $787,000,000,000 economic stimulus bill in Denver yesterday. And, as promised, the new website Recovery.gov was launched immediately. I love how the new President is using new media like You Tube videos, blogs and social network sites to get his message across and to keep the American people in the loop on everything he does. On this new website American taxpayers will be able to see where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. It is still pretty empty, but the site will soon display information visually, through maps, charts, and graphics to what projects all this money is going.

Here are my favorite 5 websites of the year 2008, in random order:

1. Hulu – Free streaming TV shows and movies
2. Mint – Free personal financial planner
3. Netflix – DVD mail service + streaming video
4. Flickr – Online photo management
5. Google Reader – News and RSS aggregator

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My favorite software of the year is definitely PlayOn by MediaMall. This tool allows you to stream online videos (from a limited number of websites) from your computer to your TV. We’re using it with our Playstation 3 and it works brilliantly!! We can now watch all the shows and movies from Netflix, Hulu, CBS, YouTube and CNN in full-screen on our TV.

Since we signed up with Netflix we’ve been having some problems with playing Netflix through PlayOn due to the new Silverlight player that Netflix is using. PlayOn is still in beta, so there are some bugs here and there. I’ve been in contact with the support desk of PlayOn, exchanged dozens of emails, and they have been really helpful in working out all the bugs. Netflix has finally been working the last few days, so we now have instant access on our TV to the 900 different TV series on Hulu as well as the 12,000 DVD titles on Netflix.

Talk about fully awesome!

One of my favorite blogs in my Google Reader is The Big Picture from the Boston Globe. Each post features a series of incredible photos from recent news stories. Here are some of my favorite features from the last few months. Click each photo to go to the post for more. More »