Alias - The Complete Third Season is coming out on DVD next month. This will have to keep me (and other Alias fans) satisfied until January, when the 4th season will finally start airing.

On a side note, does anyone else find it disturbing that The Golden Girls - The Complete First Season is #8 on Amazon’s top sellers list?!? I did… at least until I read some of the reviews, which are even more disturbing!

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At least this year’s Last Comic Standing produced a winner that is actually funny! Last year’s Dat Phan was horrible — and he was horrible again this year when appearing on the final show of LCS — doing the same old tired jokes from last year!

All three finalists were great, but I was definitely rooting for Heffron — his bit about the “we gotta go girl” was too funny! Check out John’s website - John Heffron Industries - for more information on touring, CDs for sale, and other info.

Congrats John!

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I’ve already expounded upon the virtues of Lookout, an amazing search tool for Microsoft Outlook. (Incidentally, Microsoft recently purchased Lookout!) However, I stumbled upon another great search tool the other day — X1

I say stumbled, but essentially it was Marc’s Outlook on Productivity blog that pointed me to X1, Lookout, and other programs. However, I really hadn’t taken a hard look at X1 until about the fifth time or so that Marc mentioned in in a posting. So, I thought that I would give it a try.

X1 is a search program for any files or folders on your computer. You tell it what folders you want to index and it will allow you to search quickly for any file or directory by name.

OK, that’s neat, but not that impressive. However, the next feature is the killer one… It will search the contents of files with certain extensions that you specify. By default it searches Word, Excel, and PDFs (and some others) and indexes the contents of those files. So, if you are looking for something in an old Word or Excel file and can’t remember where you put it, X1 will locate it for you. In seconds.

Also, X1 includes a preview pane for these files, so you don’t even have to launch the program to see if you’ve found the correct document. The document is displayed in the preview pane with the search terms highlighted.

This is simply an awesome tool! I highly suggest that you download it and try it out today!

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I absolutely love Amazon! To me they represent all that is right with shopping on the Internet.

I’ve always thought that their ordering process was very easy to use. I can choose to “save for later” certain items that I don’t want to purchase now, but do want to in the near future, or I can put them in my “wish list”. Another feature that is great is that I can change my order after it is placed. If I want to remove an item, change the shipping method, or add gift wrapping, all can be done as long as the order has not yet shipped. I’m not sure that there is another online merchant that offers this kind of experience - at least not many.

The latest incredible addition to Amazon is their “PLOG”. Amazon defines PLOG as a “personalized blog” for their customers. Regardless of what they call it, the idea is absolutely superb!

When I go to Amazon’s home page, the PLOG lists all activity for my account. For example, when I visited today I had two entries telling me that certain items from recent orders had shipped - along with quick links to track the package or review the order. Essentially Amazon is figuring out why I am visiting their site and where I want to go as soon as I get there, based on my recent activity. What a great idea!

Before I would have to navigate to Your Account, then Track Packages, then find my order, then Track Package… Now I simply click the link right on the home page! Awesome!

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I recently started TiVoing Airline on A&E. For those of you that don’t know, it is a reality show based on Southwest Airlines.

I’ve only flown Southwest once (on my girlfriend’s Rapid Rewards ticket) and it was a good expereince. However, watching Airline has shown me a new side of Southwest and the airline business in general. A few things that I’ve learned so far:

• People try to fly drunk way more often than you’d think (and just like on COPS they’ve always had only two beers)
• The customer is “always” right, but most customers are complete idiots
• Southwest is a cool airline

If you have a chance to check out the show I definitely recommend it… It’s an interesting look into the daily life of the airline industry and customer service in general (how some of the Southwest employees exhibit the patience that they do on a daily basis I may never understand!).

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