Not a big chance of correctness, though. Every time I look at a weather report lately, I am reminded of Lewis Black’s words:

“You know what the word ‘meteorologist’ means in English? It means liar.”

For lack of a better place, I usually get my forecasts from Weather.com. Over the years though I’ve developed an innate sense of what I can partially trust and what I can’t trust at all. For example, I can usually trust anything they say will happen within the next 12 hours. Usually. The 10-day forecast, though, is a complete joke, because over the course of 10 days each day’s prediction will change almost 10 times.

Then you have gems like today. I’m sitting in my office in downtown Indianapolis, and wondering if it’s going to rain soon. I go to Weather.com, which reports that today’s high is 81 F (it’s currently 83 F…interesting), and there’s a “slight” chance of rain at only 30%. The radar, meanwhile, is this:

…which I’m fairly certain a monkey could interpret to mean there’s a greater chance than 30% for rain.

Can someone recommend a place to get my weather from that doesn’t suck? The only thing I like about Weather.com is their interactive radar map. Other than that, I’ll be happy to leave the totally inaccurate predictions behind…not to mention the rest of their web site which is so chock-full of animated flash advertisements that I can feel my computer grinding to a halt whenever it loads the page.

(P.S. This post is a true test to see if Kim ever reads this site anymore )

Because using Google Maps and Google Earth to peer into your neighbor’s back yard and look for naked sunbathers just wasn’t fun enough, the search giant has now rolled out a new feature in Maps for select markets called Street View. Currently best demonstrated in — where else — New York City, Street View does exactly what it sounds like: you pick a point on the map, and you get a 360-degree view of what the world looks like for realz right down there on the sidewalk. Or in some cases, right in the middle of oncoming traffic (which makes you wonder how they captured the photos).

Is anyone else getting scared? If not, then check out the helpful demo video, with the super-dorky guy in the way-too-tight orange spandex suit. Hey, at least they have a sense of humor while they’re taking over the world.

Do you frequently use more than one computer? Do you have a desktop and a laptop, or do you use a computer at work in addition to your computer at home? If so, you’ve probably had those frustrating moments of “Where the heck is that one web site? Oh, damn, I bookmarked it on the other computer…” There are a few solutions to this problem, not the least of which is social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. However, probably the simplest one, in that it requires no modification of your existing bookmarks or any sort of tagging scheme, is FoxMarks.

Assuming you use FireFox (and if you don’t, maybe FoxMarks will inspire you to start), FoxMarks can keep your bookmarks synced across computers just by installing a simple FireFox extension. You create a FoxMarks account, enter that information into the FoxMarks extension on your computer, and you’re on your way. The program can be set up to sync every time you close the browser, so that if you are at work and add a bookmark, it will by synced up to the FoxMarks server when you close FireFox before heading home.

As an added bonus, you can log into the FoxMarks web site from anywhere, with any browser, and have your bookmarks made available to you in a side frame without installing anything. I’ve already used this feature many times when I’m on a friend’s computer and need to find a site I bookmarked. Just be aware that by doing this, your bookmarks are residing on a server somewhere. Although they are protected with your password, just be aware of that if you consider your bookmarks a privacy risk (although I don’t know why that would be).

If you’re looking for a simple way to have access to your bookmarks from anywhere, check out FoxMarks!

One of the fondest memories I have of computer games when I was younger (apart from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, of course — what’s better than killing Nazis and mutant zombies?) was the excellent series of You Don’t Know Jack! games. Fun trivia laced with the announcer’s sarcasm combined with great gameplay created one of the best electronic “family fun” games we ever had. I forget how many of those we bought, but it was quite a few.

Now, the games are back in online form — for free. What used to take a whole computer’s resources to run now works in a Flash program at http://www.youdontknowjack.com. Check it out, and have fun!

I am pleased to announce my first Wordpress theme called Atlantis. I created this theme for use with my own site (I was using it for the last 6 months or so), and got lots of requests to release it. It’s a dark theme that comes with the ability to easily customize the color scheme (it comes with six and you can easily create your own) and determine which of your pages appear as “tabs” along the top just by setting custom fields in your posts. I also threw in some custom navigation functions designed to tame large page lists and a recently updated pages notifier that inserts a subtle announcement at the top of the home page.

Since this theme has a number of options, please make sure to read the README file. I know dark themes aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re into it then enjoy!

Screenshot and download:
http://rogersmj.com/design/wordpress/atlantis

Please post any comments on the Atlantis download page.

P.S. No live demo right now, but I hope to get that up tomorrow. Must sleep right now.

Today the popular social networking site Facebook released a substantial site overhaul that includes a reworking of some page layouts and — most importantly — a new Feeds feature that details various activities your friends perform. For example, you can see when somebody added someone else as their friend, when somebody changed their relationship status, when they tagged someone or themselves in a photo, exactly which part of their profile they just updated, and much more. Although I did cave in and get a Facebook account this summer, I still say that it’s way too easy for your personal information to become available to anybody if you don’t restrict your profile to friends (which I do).

If you use Facebook, check out the new features. Although definitely stalker-worthy, the new stuff is nonetheless technically impressive.

UPDATE: Apparently there’s been quite a bit of backlash over the new Feeds feature, with most people complaining that it makes finding out what people are doing too easy and that it clutters the interface. Bullcrap. First of all, it obeys all your privacy rules and it only contains information you could have dug up anyway, and second of all, you can click one little button and it will hide the panel from every profile you view, therefore making the interface “uncluttered.”

If you like, you can join the first group I’ve created on Facebook: Facebook feeds are cool, calm the hell down your privacy is the same.

Well, I finally wrote a Wordpress theme completely from scratch, and this is the result! I hope you like it; I’ve always wanted to design a dark theme, and I had this stroke of inspiration one day. The design was actually easy; getting it into the Wordpress templating system was not. I’ve always tinkered with other people’s themes, but never written one from the ground up. It was an experience, and I’m still not completely done. So consider this a beta test.

Those esteemed vistors who have been around for awhile (thank you, you know who you are) will notice the return of features and content absent since the downfall of 3xmk.com in early February. We have a polling system again (please vote!), and the popular Google and AIM Triton articles are back — but all the comments that were made on them are not, sorry. Make some new ones!

Also, a new feature: anyone can contribute to the site by writing their own news post. Once you click Save, it will show you that your post has been saved as a draft. At that point, I will go in and review your submission. Once I publish it, the post will appear here on the front page under your name. Cool!

Still to come: the Gallery will return, hopefully complete with the hundreds of photos that were in it before. Stay tuned.

Finally, I am collecting links for a list on the sidebar of rogersmj.com. If you have a web site and want to trade links (as in, I post yours and you post mine), let me know!

One final word about the theme…I’m using some unconventional tactics in this theme as far as page inheritance and titles go, because of the particular behavior I wanted. It did require a couple hack functions that work for me, but I wouldn’t want to release them to the world. And that’s fine, because before anyone asks: no, I will not release this theme. I’m sorry, but the whole reason I did this was so I could make my site look unique and still use Wordpress to manage it; I’d like to keep it unique. Maybe one day when I move on to another design…but not today.

Comment and let me know what you think!

I was just able to login to the new Google Calendar for the first time; very slick interface. If you’ve got a Google account (like for GMail), then by the time you’re reading this the DNS entries for http://calendar.google.com should have propogated everywhere. It looks like there’s some great integration with GMail. All we need now are some slick APIs to be able to pull appointments to display on your own website or in your own applications.

…and Google Maps, and Google Search, etc. I found this great extension for FireFox called Customize Google that allows a lot of customization of how Google services appear in your browser. Once of the best parts is that with the simple check of an option box you can hide the text ads that appear in various Google sites — I’m particularly happy about that for GMail. Give it a try, it’s fantastic.

This looks very, very cool: screenshots of Google’s new web calendar service, called CL2. AJAX interface, like GMail, calendar sharing, event pages, RSS feeds…I think it’s going to be pretty awesome. Expect nothing less from Google, I suppose. Can’t wait to see this one roll out!

Also, there are rumblings of an official Google file storage service. This would allow you to upload gigabytes of files to a “G-drive” that you could map onto your computer as if it was a removable USB drive or something.