While Jon and Kate’s divorce unfolds publicly on their reality television series, play the official Jon and Kate plus eight drinking game:

1. Anytime Kate slaps Jon, drink.
2. Anytime one child pushes or hits another, drink.
3. Anytime Alexis says “Aldergator”, drink.
4. Anytime Mady throws a fit, drink.
5. Anytime Kate does a germaphobic thing, drink.
6. Anytime you see Jon’s bald spot, drink.
7. Anytime poop is referred to in anyway, shape or form, drink.

The next Powerball drawing has an estimated jackpot of $192 million dollars. But what exactly are your odds of winning? While there are nine ways to win a prize, the chance that you will win the jackpot is 1 in 195,249,054.

Odds of matching five balls with the Powerball ($192,000,000): 1 in 195,249,054
Odds of matching five balls with no Powerball ($200,000): 1 in 5,138,133
Odds of matching four balls with the Powerball ($10,000): 1 in 723,145
Odds of matching four balls with no Powerball ($100): 1 in 19,030

Does anyone still drag and drop their files to the recycle bin? I don’t, but I do enjoy having a minimal and clean desktop. So why not remove the recycle bin from your desktop all together? Simple right click the recycle bin and select delete to remove it from your desktop. If you decide you want the recycle bin back, go to the control panel, browse to personalization and then desktop icon settings where you will find an option to show the recycle bin.

Does your work block sites like gmail, facebook, myspace or youtube?  There are a few options to get around this block and access these sites fairly easily.  Your first choice invovles accessing these sites by a proxy.  You can find a list of several proxies at proxy.org.  This site not only supplies you with a list of proxy sites, but also an easy to use interface to browse blocked sites.  Note that some of these proxy sites may be slow or not work, but just keep trying until you find a reliable one.  If you are having no luck with this method of accessing blocked sites at work, Google has a site language translator that also acts as a proxy.  Simply browse to http://translate.google.com/translate and input the blocked URL that you are attempting to access.  Google no longer supports the English to English translation, so translate the page from any other language to English and it will work just fine.  There you have it, quick access to blocked sites like facebook, youtube, gmail and myspace at work or school.

Looking for a real cure for hiccups?  I have the be all, end all.  It doesn’t involve being scared or holding your breathe.  This technique has never failed me.  The only catch is, you need one other person to help you out.  Simply plug your ears and nose and take a large sip of water.  The easiest way to do this is to plug your nose using your thumbs and index fingers to plug your ears.  Then, have your partner feed you a sip of water.  Do not let go our your ears and nose until you finish the sip.  Thats it, your hiccups will be gone.

As a graduating senior at Northeastern University, I received the following alert email concerning tomorrow’s commencement ceremonies:

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
Message sent - 4/30/2009
Public Health Update Regarding Commencement

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Setting up custom permalinks in Wordpress is an important part of optimizing your site for search engines.  If you click around to different pages on this page, check out the URL if you don’t know what I am talking about.  This may seem simple with the permalinks option in Wordpress, but you may have discovered after selecting a permalink format of your choice, links to the rest of your pages begin to break.  I have seen countless plugins that claim to resolve this issue, but there is actually a much easier fix:

1.  You must have a .htaccess file in your site’s root directory.  This should (and probably was) included in your default setup.

2.  You must have the file permissions of .htaccess set to 666.  This is what allows the .htaccess file to be modified by Wordpress.  If you are using an FTP client, simply right click the .htaccess file and select ‘file attributes’.  Now, simply check the corresponding boxes or fill in 666.  Click ok, and you are all set.

The internet is filled with sources that claim to have up to the minute coupon codes, price comparisons and sale announcements.  However, most of these sites are simply affiliates advertising for specific companies.  The following sites are community run and are true sources of great deals and coupon codes.  Check them out, most are updated minute by minute:

http://www.pricewatch.com

http://www.dealhack.com

http://www.slickdeals.org

When criticizing cloud computing, some argue that it is somewhat scary not being in control of the physical media that your personal data is stored on.  Now imagine facebook decides to disable your account, you lose access to all of your pictures.  

It would take hours to go through your account now and download the tagged photos one at a time.  This facebook app allows you to download all of your tagged images in .zip format.  Just install the app and follow the instructions.

Session variables allow you to store global data for use across your website.  This data can be used for several applications, whether it be just displaying it on a page, or using it for comparison against data stored in a database.  There are a couple of ways to store session variables in C#.  In a specified action (like a button click or page load) use this code:

Session["variable name"] = source of variable;

For example, if you were storing a username typed into textbox1, you would use:

Session["username"] = TextBox1.Text;

An alternative way to perform the same action (where textbox1 is textboxt1’s id) is:

Session["username"] = Request["TextBox1"];

By default, these session variables are stored by the browser for 20 minutes.  This time interval can be altered in your web.config file.  If you wish to clear these variables manually you can do so with this code:

Session["variable name"] = null;