Remember a few months ago when I told you about the free courses that iVillage holds each month? They just came out with this month’s coursesfor anyone that’s interested. I signed up for Getting Organized, Personal Networking Skills, and Business Networking - anyone joining me?

Online/Computer games are one of those things I can take or leave. I can go for years without giving them a second thought, but very so often I get on a little kick where I’m addicted to them again.

This week has been one of those times the process was this:
Zuma (mentioned on the Epic-Fu podcast)
Chuzzel (which has the cutest little fuzzy characters, really how can you resist?)
Typer Shark (which I used to play years ago but is a lot more fun now that I can type at a faster speed)
Rocket Mania (Bridgette and I used to play this every day we had class in a computer lab in college. It’s so addicting and still fun to play, even though it’s been years since I had even thought about it.)

What are your favorite online/computer games?

I really do enjoy learning. At least, when I’m able to study subjects that I’m interested in at my own pace. I’ve toyed with the idea of going back to school to further my education, but that’s very expensive. So for right now I’m exploring other ways to learn more about things that of interest to me.

One great resource that I’ve found is iLearn at iVillage.com. iLearn offers new courses online each month. The courses are free, set at your own pace and have topics that are applicable to most people (especially women which are the target audience). In addition to the online lessons, assignments and quizzes, if you fill out a short survey from the sponsor of the class, you get access to a PDF of the course that you can print out and reference later.

This month I’m enrolled in two courses that I’m excited about completing. The first is Sweat the Small Stuff: Plan and Budget for Your Future Goals. We took a basic budgeting course for our home buyers class, but I think this well help me kick off our budgeting for the new house. The second is Advanced Microsoft® Excel 2003, Part I: Analyzing Data, which is awesome because as far as career goes, you never know when you might be able to utilize more Excel skills. Of course, there are other great courses this month as well, but these are the ones that I think will be most applicable for me. And for free? I can’t really beat that.

If you remember (and I don’t expect you to), I wrote back in October that once I had tried out the new browser Flock, I would let everyone know how I liked it. Well, I’ve been using Flock since then and I love it. It’s so much better than it was when I tried it out probably a year ago.

Flock bills itself the social web browser and what sets it apart is the ability to integrate social networking sites with the browser. It’s basically an amped up Firefox (which I also love btw). The layout is smooth and slick. You get the tabbed browsing that, I for one, have come to expect and need in web browsing. One of my favorite features is the fact that I can update Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the like, all in a sidebar, rather than opening the page. I have no problem with the speed of the Flock browser either, which was one of my major issues a year ago. And I love the fact that most Firefox extensions will work on the browser as well.

So I totally suggest Flock to anyone who, like me, participates many different social networking sites. It’s a slick looking browser that works great.

I have no affiliation with Flock.

While working on some Christmas presents (which, yeah, I can’t disclose right now) I found this awesome site with some great free fonts on it:

DaFonts.com 

 

I love winter style things in ice blue and white. Right now I’m particularly digging Knitty’s Ice Queen pattern. But no time to make myself something like that right now with all of the Christmas crafting I’m trying to finish. Anybody want to knit me up one? JK

One of my favorite things about using Wordpress as my blogging tool (besides that is free) is that anyone can make a plugin to make service work in just the way you need. I use many different plugins on this site, but today I want to write about one that I’ve been looking for, for months now.

 I’m an avid believer in comments as part of the blogging world. I love to get ‘em and leave ‘em. One of the things I don’t love about blogging vs. using a site such as LiveJournal or Vox is that most of the time people don’t get any of the responses I might right back to their comment. I know most of the time I don’t check back to see if anyone has written back when I comment on a blog. The Comment Email Responder fixes that here on this site.

 Now, when you leave a comment and I respond to it, you should get an email letting you know what I responded. I wish all websites had this feature, since I think it really opens things up for dialogue.

Anyways, I’ve tested this plugin on a comment I wrote and it worked great for me. If you run Wordpress on your site, maybe this plugin is what you’re looking for as well?

* I have no affilation with the person who created this plugin or his site. I’m just very excited to have this plugin that I’ve been wanting for so long.