If you use Microsoft Outlook at work or home, you'll want to spend a few minutes at Calendar Updates. You can download holidays and sporting schedules directly into your calendar. Not only do you get the sport schedule, you get broadcast information and a slew of links related to a particular game. Oh yeah, it's free.

The folks at ESPN.com - home to some 500 million page views a month - recently redesigned their site, opting for a tableless, web standards based approach. CSS guru Eric Meyer of Netscape fame caught up with Mike Davidson to find out just how he sold web standards and CSS layout to the ESPN brass. Good stuff.

Got back from a nice, relaxing time in Phoenix earlier this week only to be welcomed by a mountain of work - for profit and not. Now, don't get me wrong, I like being busy. It's just that this kind of busy has been tiring. But my head is slowing rising above the water line, as one of the priority jobs I've been working on (a corporate home page redesign) has finally entered acceptance testing. More here later this weekend as I continue to catch up. In the mean time, how about you read up on how to improve and maintain a healthy Internet?

Ok, bear with me through this geek moment. I had a dilemma yesterday that my new Sidekick solved for me. You see, St. Patrick's Day is celebrated in Chicago on the Saturday before March 17th, which means yesterday. Not a problem, unless you have a live fantasy baseball draft scheduled for the same day, which I did. Now, sitting in front of a computer is not typically a problem for me - I do it far more than I should. But sitting in front of a computer in an IM session for five hours and not partaking in the festivities of a Chicago St. Patrick's Day celebration was not an option.

Enter the Sidekick. You see, the Sidekick runs AOL Instant Messenger and fits nicely in a jacket pocket, perfect for transport to a local watering hole. Problem solved. While I wasn't the most 'social' friend to have around for those five hours (sorry, guys), I was able to accomplish two competing and completely unrelated things at once - something that would have been damn near impossible to do before.

A friend of mine mentioned to me rather matter-of-factly that he had downloaded and ran a utility to check for spyware on his computer and was surprised about what he found. Having sparked my curiosity, I downloaded and ran SpyBot: Search & Destroy, a freeware spyware cleaner. All I can say is, "Holy shit".

Go download SpyBot now and do a little spring cleaning of your own - your privacy will thank you for it.

Pretty long outage here today - apologies. My firewall/router is apparently on its last leg having overheated one too many a time. I've put in an order for a new one, so once that arrives I'm expecting that a number of the issues I've been having over the last week or so will disappear. Not to mention I'll finally have a wireless network running... I know, I know - yawn.

I've been playing around with Dean Allen's new beta content management system TextPattern for the past week or so, with varying degrees of success. Unfortunately, I'm confined to a Windows server environment and with that comes the subtle nuances of PHP on IIS (relative paths, document root, etc.). Regardless, it is a very promising tool that I plan on using as a replacement for Blogger as my CMS of choice - once it stabilizes a bit more on a Windows platform.

As far as Blogger goes, I have to say that I'm mostly disappointed with the Pro service. When I signed up, I signed up for priority service and a number of features (RSS feeds and the like) that are now pretty much standard in the blogging world. The features are there and work, but there has been no priority service. I've posted a number of issues that I've encountered with posting to their support forum, with no feedback whatsoever. I could go on.

My point? Oh yes - that. My point is that I'm glad that there are a number of alternatives out there for blog publishers to use, because it wasn't that way a year ago.