Namechk is a useful site that allows its users to find out if their favorite username or vanity url has been taken on just about every social networking site known to man (80+).

How it works: Go to the site, type your standard Internet moniker, and Namechk will quickly search and find if your “johnnyfortran8″ is available to use on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Vox and many others.

On the flip side, if you’re in the final stages of erasing your name and presence from the Internet in an attempt to Become Web Dead, you can use the service as a means to verify that you’ve actually wiped clean all of your accounts — even the obligatory services you signed up for in an attempt to get that one piece of information you couldn’t live without. Give it a shot. Read the rest of this entry »

A Harris Poll conducted earlier this month revealed what we have long suspected during this recession: Americans are not eating out as much, preferring to stay at home to cook. In the Harris Poll, conducted in an on-line poll between March 9 and March 16 about their upcoming spending plans, three-quarters of the 2,355 Americans polled said they would decrease spending on eating out in restaurants (74%) and on entertainment (74%). These figures are up from November, when 64% and 65% of them, respectively, predicted their spending behavior. Read the rest of this entry »

The Problem:

You share your home with a precious feline companion who has progressively developed some undesirable (but completely natural and instinctual) behaviors.  Without a second thought, he jumps up on your kitchen counter, climbs onto your stereo receiver and perches (filling it with hair), mounts your off-limits furniture and sharpens his claws then proceeds to end his day by leaping onto your plate of freshly prepared food, effectively ruining an otherwise perfectly prepared tuna casserole. Read the rest of this entry »

The Scenario

So you went a little nuts on your MySpace profile - you posted your age, your interests, some of your funniest home movies and the secret spots you like to frequent on Saturday following your morning dog walk. It felt freeing and liberating to tout your spot in this world and advertise your status to your online “friends”.

And it exploded from there: you started posting in public forums without hesitating to include your full, given name (so you can get credit for your impassioned responses), then proceeded to open numerous accounts on the Facebooks, Friendsters, LinkedIns and Meebos of the world. You even dropped your digits at one point on Craigslist, where they remain cached to this day on Yahoo!. There’s no question about it: you’re now officially “out there”.

But as your friends began to accumulate and as your forum posts became popular (and distributed), your online presence began to balloon to uncontrollable (and uncomfortable) proportions. Personal commentary, asides and intimate information usually reserved for loved ones was now on public display - an inadvertent consequence of your own making.

And with the recent advent of employers checking potential job candidates online before making their hiring decisions, it might be wise for the current job-seeker to Read the rest of this entry »