If you blog, you should probably read this.   50% of US adults have an eight-grade reading level.  If the article is correct that most web content is written at a 12 grade reading level, forget the Digital divide we still have a core Literacy issue that we need to address.  Although I do wonder if the medium is somewhat responsible for this.  When i read content on the web its very much word by word( this is how we are now taught to read in the US education system.) but when i read print i can speed read.  its much more difficult to read fast with comprehension on the monitor.  I think it may be the font and leading.

More interesting statistics

Correctional Education Facts

Reading Facts

Via Broker Universe

American Express has announced a new program enabling members to make monthly home mortgage payments on the American Express card. American Home Mortgage Corp. will be the first lender to offer the Express Rewards Mortgage program for eligible prime loans, AmEx said. Cardmembers with qualifying loans with American Home will pay a one-time fee of $395 to the lender for enrollment in the program at closing. American Express said its research had indicated that members "overwhelmingly cited" monthly mortgage payments as "an ideal opportunity" to use the American Express card. The company can be found online at http://www.americanexpress.com.

I quite like the idea of collecting bonus points and cash back awards off of my mortgage payment.  It is after all the largest bill most of us get every month.  Sadly for those who get mortgages to reduce credit card debt, this would be like giving enabling a heroin addict...

Brad Abrams presents a very nice post on a new feature in Orcas Beta1 .Net Client Application Services which basically allows you to use your ASP.Net Application from a client application.  I thought the idea was interesting but after watching the Microsoft Webcast It was difficult to tell how practical this will be.  It pretty constant to have a web app and smart client solution the two do kind of go hand in hand.  This should provide a nice trick for your developer bag but right now I think your solution would have to be very vanilla for it to work well(still the whole need the Internet thing).  time I am sure will tell.

hmm the bank of PayPal.  check out the full story

 4GuysFromRolla is offering a nice walk through of getting up and debugging with SQL 2005  using the Visual Studio IDE.

Debugging SQL Server 2005 Stored Procedures in Visual Studio

I found an interesting load generation tool on IIS.net defiantly worth a look

Features

• HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 capable
• Supports IPv6
• Multithreaded Support
• Supports generating stress from multiple machines
• Extensible through C plug-in DLLs
• Supports Performance Counter integration
• Measures throughput and response time
• Supports SSL requests
• NTLM Authentication request support
• Easily supports testing thousand of concurrent users

Benefits

• Very light weight (low hardware requirements)
• Extensible to handle any aspect of the HTTP request or response
• Allows remote collection of perfmon data and registry

Down Load

LINQ to XML

Language-Integrated Query (LINQ)

This is how Microsoft packages a product.

Now see how Microsoft names their products.

I just purchased a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 

I paid 52.69(sticker 66.00 then 15% off) I see Amazon.com has it

for 49.99  I guess I didn't do so good.  Even as they go out of business they still manage to rip me off.  However all hope is not lost during my Amazon prize search I noticed Microsoft has a rebate, turns out buying it from CompUSA keeps me qualified for a 20 dollar rebate. so I end up paying a little more for having it today.

I have always been a fan of Microsoft's Natural Elite keyboards and this one does not disappoint.  The F Lock is enabled by default and will remember its state between reboots its USB ( my computers don't have ps2 anymore).  Best of all the home keys are not all jacked up.( I have to get used to a small delete key again).

As a side note the drivers that come in the box's cd will not install under Windows Vista but you can install IntelliType Pro 6.1 to get it to work. 

I have been reading about this case, and some of the comments bug me ( if you don't know about the 40 year old substitute teacher that has been convicted of displaying porn to minors and now faces up a 40 jail sentience. read more here and here and here).  Mainly there are a lot of people that think she should have turned off the computer.  Now even if she had been told not to turn off the computer we would have to take into account how long it would take to get over the initial shock of porn popup's filling the window.  Now if you wanted to turn the computer off hitting the power button does nothing its not like ten years ago when you could just flip the switch. You either hold the power button for 10-15 seconds or you use windows to shut things down.  depending on the spyware/viruses on the computer the latter may not have even been possible.  I also doubt that very unsavy computer users know they can hold down the power button to turn the system off.  Some said that she could have pulled the plug, which would probably have involved unblocking the monitor with her body ( only 10 of the 40 students in the class room saw any thing on the monitor.) which would let the masses see the screen.  Also if this was a laptop ( its not clear what kind of PC this was.) pulling the plug would do nothing its battery would keep it on.  Finally this never would have happened if the school had their filtering software up to date.  let alone some type of active spyware prevention on the PC.