TechTV.com is giving away money $25,000 to spend on home entertainment equipment. They show four code words each night and you can enter each one here for a separate chance to win (you'll have to create a username, etc.) Don't have TechTV? Don't want to watch 4 hours of TV just to get some code words? Perhaps this might be of some help.

Update: If the syclonefx.com site is down, you can find the codes by searching the TechTV message boards.

I'm still in the middle of getting the church web site ready. To get ideas, I've been reading a blog called Heal Your Church Web Site. Today it linked to The Mountain View Lutheran Church of Apache Junction, AZ, and explained why it was poorly designed. I've seen a lot of bad sites, but this one is . . . ugh . . . you'll just have to see it. It's a good example of what I'm trying not to do with the ACC site.

After a few days of using our new Tivo, I think I can safely say we like it. We've got season passes for our favorite shows, so we can watch them whenever we want. We've recorded a few movies, so that's been fun. Yesterday on my day off I finished watching the 1976 version of King Kong. I trust that Peter Jackson will do a much better job with the story than this version. Yesterday we took Emma to a shopping mall that has a carousel. She thought it was pretty fun. Perhaps I'll put some pictures up later. Now for more about the Tivo. I've found what most consider the best guide for adding a hard drive. I'm considering a 200 GB drive and on Pricewatch the cost has gone down a couple of dollars each day for the last few days (today it is $121). Hitachi's release of a 400GB drive is bound to drive prices even lower.

I called Dish Network and found out that we're not under a contract with them. So I placed my order for Direct TV with Tivo today. With any luck, it will be installed by tomorrow afternoon. Here are the specs for all my geeks.

40 hour Tivo/cable box and Triple LNB Dish: $69.99
Direct TV programming: $29.99 / month
Tivo service $4.99 / month
Shipping: $0
Installation: $0
Peace of mind from shopping locally: Not quite priceless, but very nice.
Cool stuff I can do with a Tivo: Wow.

Here's some good news for those of us in rural areas who can only choose between cheap, slow dial-up internet access and expensive, fast satellite broadband. Balloon goes up for rural broadband. The European Union is funding research for broadband internet that would be delievered by airships. It's expected to be 200 times faster than DSL, and very cost effective. I'm not sure if we'll ever see anything like this around here, but I know that there are no plans to have DSL or Cable internet in Adrian any time soon. I'm guessing that we'll see wireless broadband before DSL. It could be 3G, or airships, or who knows what.

If you're both tone-deaf and incredibly lazy, you can now get a self-tuning guitar. Actually, now that I've read a little more about it, they look pretty useful.

I did some rearranging here in the office today. I added this Linksys wi-fi adapter to a computer Paul brought in and moved my computer to my office. I couldn't believe how smoothly everything went. Brendan and I spent weeks this summer trying to set up a network with some crappy Belkin 802.11b PCI cards. This USB adapter from Linksys was connected about 5 minutes after I opened the box. I was a little annoyed that when I ran windows update on the new computer, it gave me no less than five pop-up ads. Why do I have to look at ads to get security fixes? As soon as the update was done, I closed MS Internet Explorer and went back to Firefox. Now I've got the new computer sharing the internet connection with the other computers in the building and I can work in the quiet of my own little office. Huzzah!

I've been looking forward to this. Mozilla Firebird has released version 0.8. They've also changed the name, so now the best browser on the web is called Firefox.

I downloaded Conquest, a Risk clone, for my Pocket PC and it's a great time killer. If you're looking for some cool games for Windows, Pocket PC or Palm OS, check this site out.