I haven't really given it much though... generally I don't dislike my voice, unless it is recorded.

However, this is an interesting question. that is rarely taken into account. A person's voice tone is just like a facial characteristic. It is an attribute that is subconsciously recorded in the mind and tied to that person. the sound of the voice tells you about the person and the person's state...softspoken, confident, shy, nervous, obnoxious, etc.

Obviously, your voice is also very important when making a first impression. So, in order to enhance the way we come across to others, first time or not, here are some detailed explanations and exercises that anyone can do.

Read more:  Voice and Speech development

"Since Google Analytics was launched in 2005 it has become one of the top analytics packages for small to medium sized websites. Growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now that the waiting list has been removed anybody can sign up to use this great service."

Excellent tutorials on customizing, extending and simply making the most of Google Analytics.  

via BlogStorm: Advanced use of Google Analytics Part I and Part II

Sushi is one of my favourite foods and if it weren't so expensive, I think I could eat it everyday. I had my first sushi about 8 years ago and have since then mastered the art of eating with chop sticks and everything there is to know about the many variety of sushi and sushi rolls.

Only to realize, that I have been completely ignorant about the true etiquette of eating sushi. Sushi is eaten with your hands and not chopsticks! That and much, much more about sushi that you didn't know can be found below.

Read more:  http://www.trevorcorson.com/...

However, if you really want to know the truth about sushi, you will have to watch this undercover video...

Don't compromising your PC. I recently stumbled upon this tools that has received good reviews and its concept seems to make very good sense. It works very similar to the saved state or differencing in virtualization software: the differences are stored in a temporary storage that does not have access to the underlying system. Therefore, if you decide that the software you just tried, is no good, you can just delete the differences and everything returns to its original state.

From the website: "When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations. Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk. If you run Freecell inside the Sandboxie environment, Sandboxie reads the statistics data from the hard disk into the sandbox, to satisfy the read requested by Freecell. When the game later writes the statistics, Sandboxie intercepts this operation and directs the data to the sandbox.

The transient nature of the sandbox makes it is easy to get rid of everything in it. If you were to throw away the sandbox, by deleting everything in it, the sandboxed statistics would be gone for good, as if they had never been there in the first place."

I have yet to try it, but this will be definitively one that I will check out. Of course, as with every other software I try, I will use Virtual PC to see if it does what it says it does....

Read more: http://www.sandboxie.com/

Most of the times when I have to make the choice it really depends on the case...maybe I have only to check one or two cases, in which case, I choose if/else.

However, I knew there was some sort of performance issue with one over the other, but never really knew the details. Well, the folks at BlackWasp have doen some extensive research and determined the pro's and con's, in terms of speed, of each of these two approaches.

The .NET framework and the C# language provide two methods for conditional processing where multiple discrete values can be selected from. The switch statement is less flexible than the if-else-if ladder but is generally considered to be more efficient.

Read more: http://www.blackwasp.co.uk/...

Snow is truly a magical natural phenomena. Countless of snowflakes fall from the sky during a snowfall and each one of them is truly unique. Some people hate the winters and snow, others, like myself, just love it. It adds a sense of undisturbed beauty and calm to any landscape. But there is much more beneath a layer of snow.

This site explains and shows everything you wanted to know about snowflakes. If that is not enough make sure you check out the 36,000x magnification of a snowflake.

Truly amazing stuff...

Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow

Somehow I stumbled upon this site and found it quite interesting, especially the decent amount of (free) software in each of the specializations. If you have an interest in any of the fields of science, check it out...

"The OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world."

Read more: http://www.openscience.org/

Many promising careers have been damaged beyond repair or even sunken into an abyss by standing too close to the fruitpunch bowl at the Holiday Office Party.

Protect yourself from self destruction by following these simple, common-sense steps and make a better impression than the guy everyone will be talking about the next Monday...

Read more: http://wlb.monster.com/articles/parties/

Analogy is either the cognitive process of transferring information from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target), or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process.

In a narrower sense, analogy is an inference or an argument from a particular to another particular, as opposed to deduction, induction, and abduction, where at least one of the premises or the conclusion is general (Wikipedia).

Anyways, those are the serious ones, if anyone is interested. Here are some of the funniest analogies I have ever read...

Read more: http://writingenglish.wordpress.com/...

When needing a particular Javascript function, I know where to find it....usually Google it or any of my many reference books. However, Googling it may not return the most accurate results and my reference books have many other topics, which may make it difficult to find.

I keep a collection of links to many topics with useful tips, tricks and frequently used functions. This here is a large collection of quick How-To's of you most common Javascript questions.

Read more: http://www.faqts.com/...

Very clever way to multiply any numbers by using lines, single digit numbers and their intersections.

It is quite interesting and easy to use.

It will make you wonder, how did they do that and why didn't anyone think of this before?

Read more: http://www.glumbert.com/...

With so much information to search for and somehow wanting to squeeze it all between 1400 and 1050 pixels, it is becoming hard to find an application or site aggregator that does it well. I had been using My Yahoo for a while and although I wasn't necessarily thrilled with it, it did the job and did it decently.

I have tried others as well, such as My MSN and even blogged about Google Personalized and Microsoft's Start a while back. I started using pageflakes for a while, but noticed it would lock up and its performance was less than satisfactory.

The other competitors I found were: Goowy and Protopage, I didn't think I would write about it again until I found NetVibes. A very well designed Ajax-based, all in one, personalized homepage that you can arrange at will with as many blog feeds, news feeds, weather reports, financial information as you will. There are a good amount of widgets as well to choose from. It also offers a multi tab environment and each module refreshes itself without refreshing the entire page.

I am now using NetVibes as my home page with over 300 simultaneous feeds in 6 tabs and hardly notice any performace issues. It is a cool tool I had to write about...check it out!

Read more: http://www.netvibes.com

Google SketchUp is a free, easy-to-learn 3D-modeling program with a few simple tools to let you create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects, and even space ships. You can add details, textures, and glass to your models, and design with dimensional accuracy.

You can place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp is a great way to discover if 3D modeling is right for you.

Read more: http://sketchup.google.com/

Google Mars allows you to view Mars three ways, by elevation, by "visible" and by infrared. Google has plotted points by Regions, Mountains, Plains Spacecraft, Canyons, Ridges, Stories, Dunes, and Craters.

They have plans to add a Google Earth like desktop feature for Mars in the future.

Read more: http://www.google.com/mars/

I am having my site moved to a new .NET 2.0 server. I will be posting some ASP.NET 2.0 experiment shortly, but in the meantime I have to pack everything up and prepare for the move.

Some experiments may be offline for a while, while I figure out how I got them to work in the first place and modify whatever I need to do to make them work again... note: some experiments may cease to work all together since I used to have ColdFusion on the old server and did some CF experiments several years ago...

I Stumbled across this article by Ali Khan with some good guidelines for developing fast and efficient ASP.NET applications.

Some I knew, others I did not, but nonetheless a comprehensive guide to things to keep in mind writing your next web application.

Read more: http://www.codeproject.com/...

Guy Kawasaki has some excellent tips for when you ever need to demo a product or software feature and you "think" you know how to do it, but deep down you really have no clue...

He has some other good advice for getting a standing ovation and and for writing a business plan.

Read more: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/... 

How does a rainbow form? Is levitation possible? Do time machines exist? What does 'quantum' mean? What is the maximum force value found in nature? Is 'empty space' really empty? Is the universe a set? Which problems in physics are still unsolved?

Motion Mountain publishes a free, online, physics textbook that tells the story of how it became possible, after 2500 years of exploration, to answer such questions. The book is written to be entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification. The essence of these fields is summarized in the most simple terms: it is shown how they are based on the notions of minimum entropy, maximum speed, maximum force, minimum change of charge and minimum action.

The text explores the limits of time and space, and the wonders that can be discovered there. Written in English, its over 1200 pages are provided for students, teachers, and for anybody who is interested in the precise description of nature. For each field of physics, the latest research results, the most interesting physical puzzles and the most telling physical curiosities are presented. Over 680 solved challenges and 510 figures, photographs and tables are included. You can Download the 18th revision of the full Motion Mountain physics textbook, of October 2005, in a 40 MB pdf file, for a total of 1250 pages or read each chapter online.

Read more: http://www.motionmountain.net/detailedcontents.html

If you need to know how to add Google Maps to your website, keep reading... Exploration Age explains the details... First you need a Google Maps API key, which you can obtain here.  You can find out much more here with plenty of details of anything you might want to know about Google Maps, especially if you plan to extend your new map beyond this example. Check out this nice detailed tutorial with excellent and good examples by Joshua Siler... (via Exploration Age)

Update: if times allows, over the next week I'll play with it and may post a new entry in the experiments section...

Read more: http://blog.explorationage.com/...

Unbelievable. Of course I had been warned about the amount of rain in Seattle before moving here. And figuring I had lived in South Florida for 6 years, I thought little else could top the frequent tropical rainstorms and floodings that I had experienced there. In Seattle it is not necesarily the amount of rain but it is this constant drizzle and grey, overcast skies that leads people to complain about the weather here. It really doesn't bother me too much.

It hasn't been cold enough for that rain to turn into snow yet, but it may happen tonight...temperatures are expected to fall so we may get a few inches of snow overnight... As of December 19th, 2005 it has not stopped raining and today marks the 26th day of consecutive rainfall. The record is 33 days and we are on the verge of breaking it...

Read more: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/...