Here is part 2 of the list of free Windows applications, this time there are 40+.

Have a look at this list of 20 Windows applications that are must have, and they are absolutely free!

The Museum of the Waxhaws celebrates Kudzu! The whole festival is all about kudzu. See Kudzu Jelly, Kudzu Basketweaving, Kudzu Sno Kones, Fried Kudzu Leaves, Kudzu Princess Halos and Magic Wands, Kudzu Snakes and more! Bring the entire family to Waxhaw and enjoy this event.

Saturday, August 25th, 2007 @ 10:00am, admission to the festival is free.

8215 Waxhaw Hwy
Waxhaw, NC 28173

Map

August 18, 2007 - Morrison @ Ballentyne

Ride length options are 35, 45 and 65 miles through Ballantyne, Fortmill and Waxhaw areas. Your registration fee provides you with sag support, map, staffed rest stops with refreshments and post ride festivities. Ride will start and finish at the Morrison Family YMCA Bojangles Park Pavilion. First 400 registered riders are guaranteed a pair of custom Morrison Metric bike socks. Day of ride registrants will receive socks while supplies last.

Enjoy a fully supported ride from the Morrison YMCA south through Union County. This ride benefits YMCA Community Outreach programs. The 30 mile route has some hills, while the 45 & 65 mile routes are more challenging. Recover at our covered Pavilion with a post ride snack. Browse through the bike fair booths for cycle goodies. Free Morrison Metric cycling socks to the first 300 registrants. Day of ride registration $25 on site at 630 am.

To register online, visit www.activezach.com.

Have you ever noticed that when you are shopping for something online, a few days later the item you just purchased, was less expensive? Or just the opposite, more expensive? So when you should buy? Here’s the insight on a few items.

Cars - buy on Mondays. Why? Car dealers live for the weekend, which is where they make most of their sales. However on Mondays, the low foot traffic makes it seem like the weekend will never come. So because of dealer desperation, along with fewer consumers on the lot, this gives you more negotiating power.

Clothing - buy on Thursday evenings. This is the day when the stores stock their shelves and many retailers start their weekend promotions. So you will find great prices and the best selection.

Dinner Out - when? Tuesdays. Why? Because most restaurants do not receive food deliveries over the weekend. Sunday specials, cleaning out everything, making room for the fresh stuff. So dining out on Tuesday will give you the best odds that your getting a meal worth paying for, no matter what your price point is.

Gas - best to buy on Thursday mornings before 10 a.m. Why? The price of oil isn’t the only factor the influences costs at your local pump. Travelers play a major role. Weekend demand is high, so the prices usually upswing on Thursdays as travelers fuel up to head out the next day. So if you get to the pump before 10 a.m., (that is when many station owners change their prices), you will beat the rush and the price jump.

Yesterday I wrote about the inability of many MLS systems to display or function properly when using Firefox. Here are a few solutions to that problem for those of us that use Firefox exclusively.

The first selection is the one I use and it is called IE Tab. IE Tab, an extension from Taiwan, embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab. With a simple click on the installed status bar icon you can switch the page rendering from Firefox to Internet Explorer and back. It will allow you to run ActiveX controls (IE only feature) and it fools the referring website into thinking that it really is being viewed by IE not just a tab in Firefox.

The next extension is IE View. IE View lets you load pages in IE with a single right-click, or mark certain sites to always load in IE. Useful for incompatible pages, or cross-browser testing. IE View actually launches Internet Explorer as a separate program. Personally I don’t think it is as convenient as IE Tab.

The final one I will mention is IE View Lite. This is a cut down version of IE View. All the same user interface and features are there. It has a right click menu item to open a page in IE and a list of sites to always open in IE. It can close tabs automatically and send additional parameters to the executable. Everything has just been rebuilt from the ground up to be smaller and more efficient.

In all cases these extensions will allow you to run your local MLS sites directly in IE. If you know of any other solution feel free to comment here.

Over the course of the past several months, while researching to get our site up and running, we ran into several issues. Many of the sites I visited did not display properly in Firefox. Firefox is my browser of choice. It is far more capable than Internet Explorer. Many of the features the current version of Internet Explorer has were previously released in Firefox. And with extensions you can get Firefox to do almost everything except wash the dishes!

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For the next few weeks I am on a semi vacation visiting relatives in Oregon. While here I wanted to get in a few bicycle rides. Yesterday I went on a group ride with a local bike shop and on the second half of the ride I crashed. It was partly my fault. I was following right on the wheel of the rider in front of me and I did not know the route we were taking. It has been 11 years since I lived here. He took a right I went straight and clipped his back wheel and then went right over the front of my bike. I now have abrasions on both elbows, left hip, back and left ankle. The bike is fine and I will ride it again today!

The big thing was I broke my Giro helmet because I hit the pavement pretty hard. I had a small bump on the back left side of my head and a huge headache. This morning the bump is all but gone and there is no pain other than the abrasions. Without the helmet I believe things would have been much worse, with minimally a concussion and possibly even a hospital stay. I do not want to think that anything worse could happen.

The reason I mention this is that it is important that while doing any kind of physical activity that can result in injury, please wear protective gear! If you are a parent, make sure your children have the proper gear and that they wear it.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software packages available today. It has a large user community that extends the functionality of WordPress through the use of plugins. With the installation of the WordPress PDA Plugin the WordPress blog is viewable on PDA WAP/WML compatible browsers. It is really a simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of a normal WordPress theme.

Now you can browse www.moorehomesales.com/blog/ on your favorite smartphone or PDA and WordPress will automatically realize that you’re not surfing from a computer and send the tiny version to your device!

There are just so many things good about cycling in North Carolina, click on the read more link to see a list of upcoming events in our area and around the state.

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