Rebecca Writes: Round the Sphere Again

Wednesday, October 4

See not-to-be-missed updates below.

Carnivals

Apologetics

Dan Phillips of Pyromaniacs gives us a suggestion for an approach to apologetics for those who aren't up to "seventeen-movement verbal ballets": Leaning On Jesus (apologetically). Not that ballet dancers aren't important, too, of course.

Geekiness

There's a Google toolbar for Firefox that has, among other cool things, a good spell checker. It also shows the Google page rank for any page you go to. HT to the centuri0n, sort of.

I signed up for wireless broadband today. It'll be twice as fast as my current connection, supposedly, and cost me ten dollars a month less. I'll let you guess which of those improvements cinched the deal with this old fogey. And while we're on the subject, is the correct cliche "clinch the deal" or "cinch the deal"? All clichemeisters are invited to give their ruling in the comments.

Update: John Dekker pronounces clinch the deal to be correct, and points to an article (see the sidebar on the page) to back him up on that. I hate it when I'm wrong, but I have a good excuse: I grew up around horses.

Blogginess

Tim Challies links to (and comments on) an article in USA Today about the increasing number of lawsuits brought against bloggers, and gives some good advice specifically for Christian bloggers.

Update: I forgot to mention that I guest-blogged at Chez Kneel last week because Bugblaster was busy for the whole month of September. While you're over there, check out the other guest posts, too. (And what is the proper spelling of guest-blogged, anyway? Is it two words, a compound word, or a hyphenated one?)

Silliness

Quirky Queries

The most popular search query recently has been some variation of this: strawberry ice cream house number math. Yep, for some reason, suddenly there are many people searching for this math problem. I've even received emails asking for help solving the puzzler. Want a hint? Start by listing all the sets of three factors of 72. Prefer to take the lazy person's short cut? Here's the whole solution.

Update: Like these sorts of problems? Then go help Miss M. with hers.

And how about this for a weird search? DECEASED BIRTHDAY CARD. What do you think they were looking for? A dead greeting card? A birthday card for a dead person? Whatever it is, I'm guessing they won't find it. The market just isn't there.

Quizzicality