Regular readers of my blog know that I’m a sucker for improvements on everyday items. A few years ago, I gushed praise on an alarm clock that my partner bought for me. True to form, my quest to buy a new toaster has resulted in a choice that I’m really happy with so far. Thus, I introduce to you the Breville 4-Slice Toaster.

There are a couple of nifty features that our decrepit old Proctor-Silex toaster didn’t have.

* Snazzy LED readout that counts down the toasting time.
* Settings for defrosting, bagels, and regular toast.
* You can lift up the toast to check its progress without disturbing the cycle.
* You can pull the lift handle a little more and it raises things up higher, for easier retrieval.
* The long slots hold 4 regular slices of bread, or even the extra long slices of my favorite round sourdough bread.
* It beeps when it is done, in case you don’t hear the ejection.

It also looks nice on the counter. Especially next to our favorite other Breville product, their electric hot water kettle.

After years of tweaking anti-spam filters on my personal email server, I have all but banished Nigerian dictators ads for “viagkra” from my mailbox. But almost every week I find dozens of emails, allegedly from various friends and business colleagues, exhorting me to join every new social networking site under the sun.

As if the thicket of companies out there trying to build the next MySpace or Facebook weren’t annoying enough, each new venture seems to have gotten even more aggressive than the next in making its users crack open their email address book and launch invitations to everybody they got business cards from at a cocktail party in 1997.

The earliest social networking sites learned the hard way – by being blocked as spam and reviled by would-be customers as pests – that aggressive viral marketing can cause explosive growth, but can also blow up in your face.

To read more, click here.

Howdy dear readers. I apologize for my lack of posting in recent weeks… ok, months. Due to some work and personal issues, I’ve been swamped. And then my decrepit old version of WordPress got hacked by some script kiddie who was running some sort of viagra spam advertising scam from one of my hacked pages.

But with an upgrade to WordPress, hopefully the script kiddies will scamper on to more fertile grounds. Anyhoo… I’m going to get back to blogging more regularly, and I do even have some backlogged items that I’ll get put up here shortly.

Thank you for your patience and I hope you will enjoy!

PS: Thanks again to the folks at WordPress for making their upgrade process very smooth and easy!

My love got us tickets to see Morcheeba at the legendary Fillmore in San Francisco. I had only heard a few Morcheeba songs before that night, but those that I heard were pretty good. But after a fantastic concert in an equally fantastic venue, I am now a big fan. You can hear a couple of my favorite songs of theirs at these YouTube links: "Run Honey Run" and "Enjoy the Ride", and their biggest hit "Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day".

Here are tonight’s news items that I’ll be talking about on when I join my friend, David Lawrence, for my weekly segment on his radio show, The David Lawrence Show:

Privacy and Piracy at Odds in Oregon

Remember, you can always download the audio of this hour, or any hour, from David Lawrence’s website for a micro-payment of 25¢. You can also subscribe to them via iTunes at David Lawrence Unplugged and have them automatically downloaded to your computer.