I grew up in a quiet, middle class neighborhood. We didn’t lock our doors. We borrowed milk and butter from each other. We kids called the grown ups “Mr.” or “Mrs.” but we all felt more like family than many families today. It was (and still is) a great place to live.

And yet. (You knew that was coming, right?) There is always a neighbor - sometimes more than one neighbor - who transforms a wonderful neighborhood into a nightmare. Some neighbors are unpleasant and others are just downright rotten. When you’re dreaming of luxury vacations but would settle for a hospital stay just to get away from an obnoxious neighbor, you know you have a problem!

Now, thanks to the internet, anyone can report rotten neighbors in order to warn others. That means that if you’re thinking of buying a new house, you can check out the neighborhood for any problem people. Pretty cool, huh?

The site is the brainchild of Brant Walker and is owned by @ttenunit.com. They’re not real estate agents or brokers; the site is simply there as a service to those who are considering a move to a new area.

I entered my own zip code and found no reports of bad neighbors so I guess I’m in the clear. (Or my neighbors don’t know about the site yet.) I entered my mom’s zip code and found 4 reports: 2 bad, 2 good. Knowing the area as I do, I admit that I agree with the reports I found.

Whether you’re looking into a new neighborhood or you just want to give your opinion on your own neighbors, this is an excellent resource. Give it a look.

This great big Internet world is very much like real life. There are wonderful, interesting, entertaining and educational places to visit, just as there are places less desirable sites that I prefer to avoid. I love that we all have the choice to decide for ourselves and I love that every once in a while, someone will put out a site that offers something for free that is of real value. Such is the case with Manybooks.net.

Matthew McClintock, the guy who maintains the site, provides a huge database of ebooks as a service to the internet community. Not only can you find all the books from the Gutenberg Project (except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks) but also many public domain and creative commons works from other sources.

The ebooks at manybooks.net are listed by Title, Author, Category or Language. I’m not sure how many books are listed but the categories I’ve browsed are filled with great reads. Whether you’re interested in Computers, Humor, Fiction or the Classics, you’ll find something here to download. There are even book covers that you can download! These would be as cool hanging on my wall as rare movie posters or vintage photographs, especially in a home library or reading room.

Free is good. Books are wonderful. Free books are just plain old fantastic. Thanks to manybooks.net, we can all enjoy great books at no charge. Of course, if you want to help out, there are ways. You can donate through paypal or amazon.com to manybooks.net or to Project Gutenberg. If you can’t afford a donation but would still like to help, check out the Distributed Proofreaders site and consider signing up to volunteer to proofread a page or two of the books that are made available online. It’s really a great way to get involved and give something to the Internet community.

1985? Or more specifically, where were you on March 15, 1985?

That’s the day that symbolics.com was registered as a domain. Today, symbolics.com remains an active website, the oldest continuously running website on the internet.

Do you know which other websites were registered in 1985 and are still up and running? Do you know what sites are on the list of the 100 oldest currently registered domains? Well, wonder no longer. You can see the complete list and check out those sites now. Although the list was last updated in 2003, most of those sites are still around, even if some are now re-directed to other sites or have changed hands.

Quite interesting, nevertheless.

I love cosmetics. I always have. I love making myself look different. It isn’t so much about not liking who am I as it is loving to use my face as canvas to create something different. It’s about having fun.

And yet there are many young girls who use makeup, plastic surgery, extreme dieting, etc. to try to conform to some mythical “ideal” as proclaimed by our media driven society. Our daughters are not simply trying to be better; they’re trying to achieve something that doesn’t even exist.

The beauty that fills the pages of the fashion magazines is not real. It’s computer generated. Don’t believe me? Well check out this post from my friend Cass. Now go show that to a young girl needing to learn the truth about the beauty industry.

For a more interactive experience, take a look at Greg Apodaca’s photography website. Pay special attention to the beautiful, exotic, bikini-clad woman and the young, perky, blonde girl. Look closely at the picture, then hold your cursor over the picture to see it as it was originally taken. There are additional photos on the right side giving close ups of the photos.

Now isn’t that amazing? And wouldn’t that be great if all young girls could see the truth about beauty in the media? For that matter, wouldn’t it be just as good for our sons to see it, too. They need to know that most of what they see as desirable is a fantasy. Maybe if we can show our kids this truth they’ll finally start liking themselves enough to respect and care for their bodies. Maybe a healthy self-esteem in adolescence wouldn’t be so rare.