Friday, March 14, 2008

Restaurants miss moms

Attention working moms: The restaurant industry needs you. According to an article in today’s Journal, restaurants “are waking up to a worrisome long-term trend: The number of harried working moms isn’t growing like it used to.”

The article says that the steady increase of working women over the last several decades has been a boon to restaurants, as “the combination of women having less time to cook and households having a second income caused families to eat at restaurants more frequently.” However, since 1999 that five-decade increase has leveled off, “with the percentage of women in the work force down slightly at 59.2% as of January,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Why the number of working women is flattening out isn’t entirely clear. NPD Group analyst Harry Balzer suggests it has to do with more young moms opting to watch their children instead of work.

WSJ

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Bush to endorse John McCain

A bold move on Bush's part, I tell ya. Those pundits who thought he'd take the safe road and endorse Clinton or Obama were wrong, wrong, wrong.

OpenDNS content filtering

I've used OpenDNS for a while to speed up my web surfing at home. DNS is what's used to look up domain names. When you type in "google.com", your DNS server (usually supplied by your internet provider) translates that into an IP address that is used to load the page. If your DNS server is slow, your web experience will be slow. OpenDNS promises to speed things up with faster servers.

What I just discovered the other day is that they also provide free content filtering. By default it will filter out phishing sites as they are discovered. The also have a mess of other categories that you can filter.


And it's free.

Note that filters are not 100% accurate. Web sites can only be blocked as they are discovered by whatever service is tracking them. But filters are a good first line of defense in keeping unwanted material out of your home.

Chocolate during Lent

It's fun to sometimes check out the search terms that bring people to my blog. A couple days ago, someone entered into Google "did the lord say it's ok to eat chocolate for lent on weekends" and somehow ended up here.

To answer the question: no. :)

And that reminds me. Since I have a couple days until Lent begins for us Eastern Orthodox, I've got some chocolate eating to do.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Mazda 2


If VW never brings the Polo to the US, I could be consoled with a Mazda 2.

And with diesel? Sweet!

De-DRM'd audiobooks

The NY Times says

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books.

The trend will allow consumers who download audio books to freely transfer these digital files between devices like their computers, iPods and cellphones — and conceivably share them with others. Dropping copying restrictions could also allow a variety of online retailers to start to sell audio book downloads.

And perhaps libraries will start offering audiobooks that can be played on iPods as well. It boggles me that they think they're providing a service when the Microsoft-DRM'd files can't be played on a vast majority of mp3 players.