Lauren Wu dot com

Behold the Ambient Orb that magically changes color depending on information you're tracking, such as changes in the Dow Jones or the weather! Unfortunately, it falls under the category of "This is way cool, but I have no way to justify the expense."

Another fun game from Ingo. To play, click the mouse to start the game and then again to swing the club. My high score is 573.8!

When I was paying for brunch on Sunday, I noticed that one of my $1 bills had a pink stamp on it. It said:

Currency Tracking Study
Reporting Sightings To
www.wheresgeorge.com

I visited wheresgeorge.com to enter the serial number of the dollar bill and was presented with all the entries written by others who had received the same dollar bill and had gone to the website. I was expecting a slew of posts, so was disappointed to find that there was only a single entry made before mine that was written nearly two years ago. I hope more people will record sightings in the future because I've registered to receive notification of any updates.

BTW, you can do this for any U.S. or Canadian paper money in your possession. It's all explained on the website.

This reminds me of a movie I saw called Twenty Bucks starring Brendan Fraser. The movie tracks a $20 bill, and tells a story about how each of its owners receives it, uses it and then passes it onto the next person. It's an interesting concept and I enjoyed watching it. I recommend you rent it some time even though I haven't described it properly.

Ingo forwarded this to me:

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand. Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.

Please email me if you know why this happens. Inquiring minds would like to know!

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about purchasing Chinese cheongsams (also spelled "cheung sam" or "qi pao") online. In case you are making such a purchase, here's a list of etailers you may want to try:

• Cheongsam-Dress.com
• EfuShop.com (Efu is the Mandarin word for clothes)
• GoodOrient.com
• Chinatowner.com
• RedTreasureBox.com
• China-Bridal.com

However, if you live in a city that has a Chinatown, I would recommend that you go there to find a local Chinese tailor to have one custom made. I'm glad I did. Maybe my guests couldn't tell that my dress was high quailty (and high cost *sigh*), but I appreciated my reception dress. I'll be wearing it for years to come at various events.

I've finally found a comprehensive list of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Crystal referred me to Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools today. We already own two of the products profiled in November 2003: D has a Petzl Myo 5 Headlamp (for adventure racing), and my sister bought me an Aerolatte this past Christmas.

There were lots of items I wanted because they were, well, cool, but then dismissed after admitting that I would have absolutely no use for them. The exception is something surprisingly low tech: a Moleskine notebook, also featured in the November 2003 archive. Currently, I use my BlackBerry (made by Canadian company Research in Motion - Woo hoo!) to jot down notes. But there's something sensual about paper that I'm inexplicably drawn to... Unfortunately, even if I manage to locate one, (the website says it's available at Barnes & Noble), it wouldn't fit in my tiny purse.

I just added a nifty feature to automatically create printer friendly pages, see "CSS Design: Going to Print" from A List Apart (ALA).

You'll only see the effects when you print pages of my website. To see what I've done, go to the "File" menu, and select "Print Preview". Notice that the right navigation bar disappears and the content stretches to fill the entire page width. Cool, eh?