Useful Stuff of various sorts

Recovering and converting old Quattro Pro files;
an adventure in dealing with stale, proprietary file formats.

How to override your HP printer's work stoppage
when it tells you to "replace supplies."

How to Defuse the IRA Tax Time Bomb
with Ed Slott's helpful book, and website.

Understanding Required Minimum Distributions
from tax-deferred retirement savings accounts.

Patents, Trademarks & Copyrights
information, organized by the National Paralegal College.

A book review of "Critical Chain"
that I wrote in 1998, with a synopsis of the author's ideas about project management.

25 fallacies
in reasoning, just in case you're not sure about that argument you heard someone spout off...

Webhosting comparison chart
from long-ago shopping for a webhost. I settled on Westhost and have stayed a reasonably happy customer for 15+ years (and even after they were acquired by a big UK company). I'm happy to refer you to them (and receive an exceedingly modest referral credit if you tell them I sent you).

A compact manual for Server Side Includes
(SSI) on the Apache web server. Useful and simple HTML technology. The strftime() formatting of dates is good to know for that. (Most SSI refs don't show the whole list of parameters.)

Extending tooltips with DHTML
and finding a twisty maze of bugs between us and where we want to go.

Ad Attack
responding to advertising on- and off-line, including information about monkey-wrenching Double Click's database of your online behavior.

The Honda Insight
A brief look at the new "Ultrahigh Efficiency Vehicle." (We bought a Prius in late 2001 and love it.)

Live longer, happier, and with less stress
through a relatively simple attitude adjustment.

How to deal with abusive persons
you may find on the 'net.

A recipe for invention,
step by step.

Top 10 questions
that science has yet to answer.

Treating small cuts with Cayenne Pepper.
Put a little spice in your First Aid kit!

A "Dear Bill" letter,
that bounced, perhaps the antithesis of something "useful."

Going (or gone stale), but kept for historical interest

Interesting places on the web
from my point of view, from about 1999, looks like. Some of the links are still going strong, some are long gone.

My most-used software
This list was inspired by Dave Winer's list of his mission-critical software. He was interested in demonstrating that it's not "Open Source" that's essential. I'm interested in showing you that when it comes to software, it's often the case that the best things in life are free and providing pointers to those best things. Vintage 2001, but a decade later vim still tops the list!

A dozen tips to save space and time with Windows
Simple and effective improvements to your display, and to the way you get your computer work done.

Three cross-platform javascript approaches to expandable/collapsible documents
Lightweight
Windows folder styled, goes back to IE4
Scripted document structuring
Matt Kruse's Javascript Toolbox has another well-documented example for scripted structuring, and a lot more good stuff. [But the thing to use anymore is jQuery. Once you've linked in its infrastructure, you just .toggle() to your heart's content.]

Exercise in CSS:
a scale "drawing" of a tennis court, turned out to be an Internet Explorer bug collector.

It was worthy of note, back in 1999 that where everyone goes to search
was Google. That was before Google was verbified.
Then what happened?: "Google is going the way of all monopolists, morphing from innovation into rent-seeking." Bringing us to the most significant antitrust case in decades.