I ran across the site PimpMyNews.com today. Pretty interesting. Not only is it a great name (“PimpMy” in front of just about anything spells cool), but it’s a great little service that turns text from news sites and blogs into .mp3 files you can listen to on your computer or more importantly on the go. You can easily create a free account and subscribe to up to 10 feeds you want “read” to you. Sure the voice is a little computer sounding devoid of emotion, but it still feels very futuristic.

The feeds are great for downloading onto your iPhone or iPod to listen to while you work out, drive or anywhere you have some down time.

You would think Santa had just brought the household a new puppy on Christmas morning. My family is enamored with Facebook. One good thing about this love affair is I don’t have to clean up doggie “accidents” or deal with chewed up furniture. It’s also highly likely Facebook isn’t going to get hit by a car or develop bad hips.

Needless to say, I’ve been dabbling a bit with the site in an effort to remain the king of my house when it comes to the number of friends each of us has. To help me, I downloaded the Facebook Application onto my iPhone and I’m pretty impressed. It has the most used base communication features of the web version. I’ve found that adding new friends is actually faster than it is with the web version.

If you’re into Facebook and have an iPhone, give the Facebook Application a try.

Microsoft Office for the Mac is a necessary evil for a lot users.  The AutoUpdate feature Microsoft built into Office works pretty well, but if things don’t go as planned with the download and/or install of an update, it can be a little frustrating.  Here are a couple of handy tips in case you need to find the update on your local machine or want to download it manually from Microsoft’s site:

• The AutoUpdate application is stored in the following folder:  Yourstartupdrive/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0.  The easiest way to launch it is from Help-Check for Updates in any of the Microsoft Office applications.
• Downloaded updates are stored in the following folder: Youruserfolder/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/16807Office 2008 12.1.1 Update.  Updates are temporary though and are cleaned out along with other temporary items regularly.
• By default, a log of Microsoft AutoUpdate’s activities is kept in the following location: Yourstartupdrive/.  This can come in handy when troubleshooting.

I turned on my system a couple of days ago, launched Adium and noticed that my ICQ account wouldn’t connect. ICQ has periodic problems, so I thought the service was just down. Turns out a new version of Adium was required to get ICQ working properly. The strange thing was in Adium, when I clicked Check for Updates, Adium reported back that I was already using the latest version. A manual update to version 1.2.6 was required.

Tip: Don’t trust the automatic program updates. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a manual update.