If I have a full hour to spend on R&R I’ll try to find a good partner and play one or two Spades games. If I only have a few minutes I’ll play something fast, like backgammon or cribbage. Sometimes I like the cutthroat strategies of Hearts to sharpen my mind. These are not time wasters as much as they are mental exercises to keep me alert and sharpen my critical thinking skills.

Now I play backgammon online when I need a mental health break from the busy days around here. I love the way you can go online and jump into a game with a worthy opponent with almost no wait time to find another player. I’ve had the same screen name for years, and now there are dozens of other players who recognize my name and will search me out for a game or two.

Interesting how the only way I ever would have met these wonderful people is over the internet. All those terrible days and nights of waiting in the hospital emergency rooms have evolved into friendships with people from all over the world who share the same interest and passion for a game of online backgammon.

Some of us play in online backgammon tournaments, too. Those are great fun and a better test of skill and staying power than just a casual game or two. If you can win 8 or 9 games in a row, then you are a deserving champion or very very very lucky.

Well, since school is out for the summer, I thought it would be a great idea for him to build his own computer from a Do It Yourself kit. That way he can pick and choose exactly what components he wants and he will learn a lot from the hands on experience of putting together a computer.

There is a great site on the internet that sells the kits for different kinds of computing needs, including the super charged gaming computers like my son wants. The parts are all big name brands and fully warranted, so I’ll be sitting down with him tomorrow morning and choosing the specific parts he wants to order and we’ll order his DIY kit.

But sometimes keeping up with all the numbers without names attached can be very challenging. I was happy to find a web site that lets me look up numbers, including cell phone numbers. It can be hard to find a good place for Reverse Cell Phone Lookup. And a cool part of this site is that if you don’t want your number to be given out, you can subscribe to a “No Call List” and they will remove your number from their database.

Starting any new business requires watching your pennies and making the most of the resources available to you. Starting an internet-based business requires the same thing, and there are many good people and companies anxious to earn your business. The hard part is finding the right ones.

If you want to start with a web hosting company, you need to know what features and services are most important to your purpose and process. There is a nice website that serves as a directory of web hosting services, called Top 10 Webhosting worth reading through the information they have and the charts they’ve put together for the readers. By taking some critical information on each of the top web hosting companies and making an easy to read and understand chart, this site lets you compare the different features and rates and then make an informed decision. The “Best web hosting list” and an explanation of why they are the best is just a click away.

I’ve heard a lot of people fussing about bugs in the VISTA program, but to be honest, I’ve been using VISTA for over a year and I love it. Knock on wood – I’ve not had any problems with it. There have been a couple of odd things, but usually when I restart the computer everything is back to the way it should be.

I think my only concern with the VISTA and the way I use my home PC is that sometimes I like to take a break and step away from the computer, leaving multiple windows open so I can resume my work later. But a few times when I come back to the computer, it has automatically downloaded updates and has restarted the computer on its own. So all my windows get closed and that ticks me off.

A successful agent is very busy and keeping organized and efficient is critical to their success. Computers have been a great tool for agents, but until now finding software specific to real estate agents has been hard to do. Now there is help for real estate agents with a software package called Agent Organizer. If you have an interest in software for real estate agents, take a look at the website for Agent Organizer and see if this new program meets your needs. You can try it out for free for 15 days so if you decide to buy it you will know what to expect and how to use it.

She’ll be turning the extra bedroom into a home office so she can do more work from home and not have to pay for child care, plus she’ll be saving cash by not having to commute. Of course, setting up the home office will take a bit of cash, but you can’t make money if you don’t spend money.

We’ll be underwriting some of the home office equipment to help her out. Since we are on a tight budget, we are looking for ways to save as much money as we can, yet we can’t always get the cheapest products – there are some quality and reliability issues to consider as well as price.

A great source for money saving coupons is a website I found online. There are a variety of coupons to save significant money on Dell small business computers. We are also going to need some home office furniture, at the very least a computer desk and task chair.

I’m not sure which way to advise her on a printer for her new home office. I haven’t had much luck with the last ones I’ve bought. At the moment I’m using a cheap laser printer that only prints black and white, but it is a workhorse and I can use refilled toner cartridges, which saves a lot of money. I think for the sake of just getting started, she should probably have one like what I’m using, and when she starts making money she can upgrade to a color printer later.

The way the Carbon Neutral search works is that the company hosting the search engine takes an estimated carbon emission for each search and donates a minimum of 300g via their offsetters Climate Care and Carbon Fund.

Climate Care is a leading offsetting organization in the U. K., and Carbon Fund is a leading US non profit carbon offsetting company.

It is a pretty cool idea and if you like the search engine results, then you are helping the planet by using it as your default search engine!

The operators of a website that holds backgammon games and tournaments has made plans to hold a backgammon tournament on a huge field with huge playing pieces and dice, then have the people in the tournament flying in helicopters to drop the dice from the air onto the field. Thus, the new world record, based on the distance from the helicopter to the playing field. Interesting plan, don’t you think?

Backgammon is a great way to play a quick game against either a live opponent, a computer opponent or an online opponent and there are some websites that let you wager money on the outcome of your backgammon game and online backgammon tournaments.

Most websites have free downloads of their backgammon game software and many have large communities of regular players who compete online in league games and online tournaments, some of them win points and ratings and serious players compete for money. After all, backgammon was originally a betting game, with doubling the bets a large part of the player strategy to increase their winnings.

The world record seekers, Backgammonmasters.com have online backgammon tournaments and also online blackjack games. If you need help getting started, read the online help for beginners and often an experienced player will not mind volunteering to play a game with you and help you along.

Some of the improvements expected are:

1. Downloadable hot hit tunes from within the game to your own iPod or MP3 player

2. New graphics engine with more details and less load times

3. New cell phone for communication between characters and more activities for the characters, such as throwing darts, drinking beers, bowling, etc.

4. New multiplayer mode that allows up to 16 other players in a game.

5. New, more accurate targeting for shooters.

So I thought it would be good to buy another one just like for the home office and we can give the old PC to our grandson. He has just started school and he loves to play with letters and numbers, he can read a couple hundred “sight words” and he like to play with numbers, too. I’ve shown him how to get online to play a couple of good children’s sites games, like Thomas the Train and Dora the Explorer. He can even play a couple simple card games. We are so proud of him!

So I’ve searched everywhere for this Slimline PC and can’t find it for sale anywhere!

Well, I play a quick game on the computer. I have my favorites but I’m always willing to try something new and see if I am any good at it. Fifteen minutes is just about right to play a game and forget about the world at hand. You focus on shooting targets or gobbling up pacman dots or whatever, and when you are done you can take a deep breath and jump back into your work with a clear mind and a better attitude.

I like the website called playgame.org because they have a variety of different fun games that you can learn quickly and it’s free. They have a variety of different types of games, from action/adventure to puzzles to racing to shoot em up and others. When you need to take a short break try play game and be honest – it does feel good to win, doesn’t it?

This will be a strategic move to try to regain Motorola’s #2 position in world-wide sales. Multi-faceted Samsung holds the #1 spot and LG is currently in #2.

The invisibleSHIELD case is invisible and invincible – the shield does not scratch and protects your cell phones and MP3 players, digital cameras, etc from getting scratched. It has a “grippy” feel, which even makes it less likely to slip out of your hands or get dropped. There are case designs to fit over 2,000 branded electronics, and if they don’t have exactly what you need they are willing to custom make it for you.

If you are looking for an iphone case you should check out the invisibleSHIELD website and watch the cool online video demo.

Obviously, the monthly or annual cost is going to be a big factor in your selection, but there are many other things to consider and should be compared between several options before you make a decision and commit. Now there is a website that has taken the top 25 hosts and done the research for you with their findings in chart form. By reading through the chart you can easily find which hosts offer the most storage space, which ones charge a setup fee, and other things.

For example, I am looking for a new hosting services that is windows based and can support an MS Access database. If I use shopping cart technology for my site and need to track order status and inventory tracking, using a database will be a critical component of the site. By consulting the chart at Web Hosting Choice, I can easily eliminate the ones that don’t meet my criteria and focus on the other features between the ones remaining.

Links within the chart click me through to the actual site for signing up.  The charts are a real timesaver and worth bookmarking to come back later if you expect to have a need for a new web host in the near future.

The Bay Area is a magnet for biotechnology as well as the southern neighbor of San Jose being Silicon Valley with the world headquarters of Yahoo, Google, EBay and dozens of others. The only big boy missing from this gathering is Microsoft, based in Seattle.

What’s missing from all this development are good restaurants. Most eateries are little local holes in the wall that you have to just put down your money and take your chances. In the six months I lived there, the best place I ate dinner was a national chain, Romanos Macaroni Grill. The food was top notch and the service was excellent. Now I search out Romanos in other cities when I have a craving for good Italian food.

A solution to storage space might be to consider colocation services. You can find a site anywhere that meets your criteria and relay your company internet connection and data processing through an offsite center.

Fibernet is one of Utah’s oldest internet service providers and they offer utah colocation services. This might be a good resource for your company’s data processing needs.

I have to log on every night to download reports for my job, but out of the blue my connection to work got blocked or banned somehow. I was frantic to get a connection and tried different computers, different browsers, I tired WiFi and I tried a direct modem connection and nothing worked.

So my geek friend suggested I try a proxy site to see if I could access the reports that way. He was right! So I’m using a proxy every day as a practical matter. Others might find the privacy factor important.

Either way, if you are interested in a list of Proxy sites, check this out.