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NPR Auction Closes in 3 Days 2/22/07

You can find Smart Box Design’s games and a host of other great items for a great price at this local Northwest auction. Most of the items can be used by anyone anywhere. The vacation packages are a wonderful deal.

Here is the official email from NPR:

It will all come to a close at 7:00 p.m. this Thursday, February 22. Proceeds from the auction will help support the programming that you and all our listeners, have come to rely upon.

This is the last call to browse and place a bid. If you decide you want something or will not be available at the conclusion, you might consider using our new feature – Instant Purchase. Selecting that will insure you win that auction item. Several auction participants have already taken advantage of this option.

We hope you enjoy the auction and THANK YOU to everyone who has placed a bid. We also thank all our donors and we hope you will too when you get a chance.

Go to the Northwest Public Radio web site at www.nwpr.org and click on the auction icon to donate. Or you can click on the icon below.

Contact me for any questions you may have concerning auction. My email address is nwpr.auction@wsu.edu or phone – 1-800-842-8991. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Tom
Thomas Hungate
Auction Coordinator
PO Box 642530
Pullman, WA 99164-2530
www.nwpr.org

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Painting My House and my Palm Zire 72

I recently moved into a new house in Bellingham, WA and have started to paint the bedrooms. Being an organized guy I brought up my painting supplies and laid them out on the floor. I then made a list in Note Pad on what supplies I needed to buy. Often when I am making quick, on the spot and temporary list, I find the freehand use of the Note Pad faster and easier than writing a Memo. Once I had the list done I took a picture of what I had. I do this because I will often be in the store and see an item and say “Hmm, do I have one of those?” and the picture will remind me of what I currently have.

When I get to the store I’ll then open my list and as I add the item to the cart I will draw a line through it. When all the items are crossed off, I’m ready to pay. The nice part of having the Note Pad open during this process is that I can jot down something that I might want to buy but not sure until I get home to see if there is a real need or not. If not, I cross it off, if yes, I leave it on the list for my next visit to the paint store. And there is always another visit to the paint store.

Now if I could only get my Zire to actually paint the room.

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Solitaire Central Reviews Word Monaco for Windows XP / 98

Solitaire Central is a niche web site that concentrates on solitaire games of all types. I noticed this review they recently posted. Please visit their site to see all the interesting solitaire games they have. However, my game, Word Monaco, is a must see. 🙂 Here is their review.

Word Monaco is a unique blend of a word game and a card game, where the playing cards contain letters rather than numbers and royalty, and your goal is to spell words rather than to build according to suit or value.

At the beginning of each round, the cards are layed out as in Klondike solitaire. You must use as many cards as possible to spell as many words as possible within the tableau (there are no foundations). Each letter card is worth a certain number of points, based on how often it is used in common words (this is similar to the way that Scrabble and many other word games work). Words are spelled within individual tableau piles, and letters or words may be moved between piles to build new words, or to add on to or modify existing words. You can score bonus points by building long words, using all the letters, or using various power-ups that you earn during play.

It’s an interesting concept, and it works reasonably well. There’s no time limit, so the game is really more of a puzzle than an arcade game (which is not a bad thing). As in most word games, success does depend a good deal on your ability to spell, and to recognize combinations of letters that form the building blocks for words. With a word list of over 50,000+ words, the game does recognize a great many possible words.

The game uses only the one layout, as far as I can tell. With so many layouts available in solitaire, I don’t know why the developers limited themselves to just one. But that’s a minor complaint. The bottom line is this is a fun game. It’s certainly not your everyday solitaire game, but if you enjoy word games, I think you’ll find this to be a fun way to spend your time and exercise your mind.

Download Word Monaco (7.81MB)

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Palms are Great for Meetings

This evening I met with Darrin in Lynden. Darrin is a writer who will be helping me with various editing and writing tasks. For the meeting I printed out a hard copy of his contract, directions on how to access the FTP site, an outline of work that I needed help on, and ideas that I had for my next newsletter. I only needed to print out one copy as I had copies of all the documents on my Palm. This was very convenient and demonstrated the power of the Palm. We quickly worked up some additional ideas of which I jotted down on my Palm and then copied back to my PC. After the meeting I met my wife for dinner. If I would have brought my laptop to the meeting I would of have worried about leaving it in the car during dinner plus the laptop would have been overkill for what I needed for this quick ½ hour meeting.

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Win a Copy of Word Monaco Solitaire – It’s Easy

Here’s how. Try any version of Word Monaco (Palm, Pocket PC, Treo, Windows XP / 98) and then go to our forum (the link is below) and post your opinion about the game. The first 5 posts will get a copy of the game – no charge – and 5 more winners will be randomly picked. Make sure to register so we have your name and email address on record. Contest ends February 11, 2007 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

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