I Spy

I fear I have been neglecting you! Here, have a handful of image resources....

Everystockphoto
Creative Commons
Wikimedia
Cool high-resolution images
The Library of Congress on flickr

And finally, a lovely image worth contemplating... gloves with a map of London drawn on them. Is this some early manifestation of handheld GPS?

Lose weight web 2.0 style!

One of the most popular resolutions each new year goes something like this... "I'm going to eat healthier and lose weight." For some folks, like me, the resolution falls to the wayside when the new semester starts. This year, however, you can find assistance in staying strong and keeping up your healthy habits using an online calorie counter program. It's called The Daily Plate and it's free! You can look up and log thousands of different foods in your personal journal each day! It includes a nutritional breakdown for each item you log so that you track not only calories but grams of fat, carbs, protein, etc. In addition, you can log in your fitness activities to see how many calories you've burned. The service includes several discussion boards and is a very active community.

I've been using the service since August & have found it to be easy to use. My favorite part is my ability to enter my height & weight and have it calculate for me how many calories I need in order to lose, gain, or maintain (so far I've lost over 30 pounds). It graphs my weight and calculates my BMI. I keep thinking that there must be some application for this service in courses on campus though I'm not sure where. So, I'll share it with all of you & hope that it's helpful to someone out there :)

Going The Other Way?

PDF (Portable Document Format) was developed to allow files to be viewed on any computer system, regardless of platform or program. Moreover, distribution in this format provided the means to protect the original file--it could not be easily nor cheaply altered by the user. While I recognize the format's virtues, I'm annoyed at the restrictions more often than not, particularly when I wish to print out only part of a .pdf file or save only a snippet from the file. Finally, help has arrived in the form of several .pdf to .doc converters. This one, aptly named "Free .pdf to .doc Converter," allows you to convert the whole file or simply extract selected images or text and edit the results in Word or Open Office.