@downstairs: it's nice for estimating distances and walking times.

It's a very useful feature for us Europeans, since most of our cities aren't as car-friendly as US cities. For example, I was just checking out the route from the main square of Bruges/Brugge (Belgium) to the hostel where I'm staying next month, and there's definitely a difference! Yay for walking directions!

The sad truth is of course that people usually adhere less to free advice than to advice that they spent $24.95 (or more) on.

I'd also like to share my mom's recipe for de-icing windows: she fills one of those thin plastic lunch bags with lukewarm water and wipes the car windows with it. It melts the ice as you go, and you can use a squeegee to take the water off the windows so it won't re-freeze. It's super easy, no hard work like scraping…

On second thought, here's another tip. A friend of mine also has an extremely rare name (more rare than mine, actually) but now that she's becoming a journalist, she's glad to have a more usual second name, so she can use that at work, to avoid the "what's that again?" reaction all the time when she introduces herself.

My parents deliberately gave me a very rare first name. I'm actually really happy with that, since it's usually still available as a username on most websites :)

@OZTARDS: Thanks, I've found it now.

Am I overlooking something or is Mozy's free 2GB service not available anymore? I don't find any mention of it on the website.

From the article: "The best strategy is to play dumb."

My best fast recipe is always a pasta salad. Fresh pasta often only has to cook for 3-4 minutes, and while it's cooking, you can roughly chop up other stuff like rocket salad, (sun-dried) tomatoes, cucumber, some olives, mozzarella, or whatever else you like. When the pasta is done, rinse it with cold water to cool it…

Ramen with extra stuff (chopped tomatoes, chopped bell pepper, etc.) FTW! Fast & at least somewhat nutricious.

One of the great things about having a unique first name/last name combo is that all Google results are really me :) And my embarrassing old websites don't appear until page 5 or 6 of the Google search.

dualsub2006, I understand your concern about privacy in general, but I'm really not so worried about my financial information (provided it's not credit card numbers or something). I haven't tried out Expensr yet, but I imagine you'd create a (relatively anonymous) user account, and in a worst case scenario, if the…