Its been out for awhile, but I just found this very cool site that allows you to upload a photo and automatically convert yourself into a Simpson. Here you see myself, my girlfriend Tracy and her sister Lori. Kind of fun![img_assist|nid=272|title=Jeff, Tracy and Lori as Simpsons|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=62]

[img_assist|nid=253|title=Chicago|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=100|height=75] Just got back from a trip to Chicago. We took a 6-hour train ride from St. Louis to Chicago on Amtrak. Amtrak provides outlets for laptops to be plugged into. I was able to use my Mac Air laptop much of the time there and back. This made the time go by considerably faster than air travel. While in Chicago we saw Wicked. The show was great.

While I was in Chicago, IL, they there were many St. Patrick's Day celebration activities going on. One of the most unusual was the green Chicago river. Every year, for St. Patrick's Day, the people of Chicago dye their river green! I had never heard of this tradition until we walked over the river the day before St. Patricks. I made a short YouTube video of it. You can see my YouTube video of it here.

I jsut published by 100th Amazon review. I have been reviewing products on Amazon for several years, but reached a new milestone today. As of today, I have published 100 Amazon reviews. I do not plan on stopping here. You can read my review of the MacBook Air's Power Supply.

I've been experimenting some with XMLRPC in Second Life.  This allows me to create a web page and send a message directly into the Second Life world.  It does not have to be a web pages sending information.  I could also use any sort of computer program.  

I am the author of several books. I've offered ebooks as well as paperback for several years now. While my ebook sales are much lower than my paperback sales, I consider the ebooks worthwhile. One reason is international sales. Heaton Research books are produced at two locations: the USA and the UK. These two locations still leave much of the planet with very high shipping costs. For example, shipping costs to Asia cost more than the actual book! Many of these customers buy Heaton Research ebooks.

Square corners seem to be "like totally out" as far as web sites are concerned. Rounded corners are not too hard to do. You use a program, such as Photoshop, and design four corner images for the north-east, north-west, south-east and south-west corners of the box. Then setup some CSS styles to go along, and you are set. Easy enough, but it is still a pain. I happened upon a very interesting technique for doing this, written by Alessandro Fulciniti. This article is from back in 2005, so it obviously not a new technique, but very cool none-the-less!

I want to create some instructional videos for Second Life. These will tie in closely with the examples in my books about Second Life. I have done some work with video production, but have yet to post anything to YouTube. You can now see the results of my work here:

Encogia Ferris Wheel

I am working on recording several instructional videos. I will likely place these on YouTube. More on that later! But for now, I've been looking for a good source of royalty free music to use as a background to my YouTube videos. If the "royalty free" music is also "free", in that I don't have to pay anything for it, then so much the better. I found a site, called Incompetech, that looks really good. Anyone know of any others to reccomend?

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I am wrapping up a new book in Second Life. This book should be available from Amazon sometime in January. The book is titled "Introduction to Linden Scripting for Second Life". ISBN 1604390042. You can get a head start by reading some of the chapters that I have posted online here.