How many have you seen? List of 99 things you should experience on the internet

Found this fantastic list on a site called youshouldhaveseenthis.com
It's described as:

GREG RUTTER'S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU'RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING

You can pretty much guess what its all about based on the title. I have seen many of these already -- but there's also tons I haven't. Here's the full list from the site so you can see what's on it -- but you have to go to the actual site to for direct access to each item on the list.

If you have some time to kill, I highly recommend it. They are in no particular order, so take some time and see what you can find. Here's a link to the site.

Note: Some clips/sites may contain offensive language and NSFW material

Anything with "o-mator" in its name has got to be good

I am sometimes tasked with trying to come up with names that have to have available web addresses. Sometimes an impossible task unless you come up with something like Reflectimixit -- or some other almost random list of letters. Finding a name you like is one thing -- finding one that has an available URL is something entirely different.

Then I came across Dot-o-mator - a site to to create potential names. Just enter some prefix words in one box, and suffixes in the other (Or choose one of the word lists below each field). Then click "Combine". Dot-o-mator will assemble every combination of the words into the results box; click "Check Availability" to see if any of them are available.

It's not a perfect tool - far from it, but can be a useful place to spark some new ideas and perhaps get closer to where you need to be. Give it a try.

How much is a domain name worth?

If you are starting a new company and are frustrated that all the good names and domains are taken. Worry not. I found this great article about buying domain names. It's by James Siminoff, an entrepreneur who has founded more than a half dozen companies, and has spent over $250,000 on approximately 200 domain names because he believes that a great domain is extremely important to the success of a start-up.

Here's the link to the article -- it's a guest post on the Four Hour Work Week blog and well worth the read.

UPS Avoids Left Turns to Save Fuel, Reduce Emissions and Improve Safety

When I was learning to drive a standard growing up -- I used to plan my trips so I'd never have to stop on a hill. It was challenging, but doable. Now I read UPS has taken trip planning to a whole new level.

They have eliminated left turns from their delivery routes. Not only does it save time and fuel but is a whole lot safer.

From their website:

For 100 years, UPS employees have worked to find the most efficient solutions for delivering packages in a safe and timely manner. Careful route planning has been fundamental to the way UPS has always done business.

One of the ways UPS achieves efficiencies is through careful study of the methods used to deliver packages. Time studies led UPS to discover that avoiding left-hand turns would save time, conserve fuel, reduce emissions and reduce the potential for accidents. UPS managers (who for years planned routes by physically driving each one and plotting on maps) began experimenting with their routes to see if right hand turns would increase efficiency. It worked. For decades, UPS has designed routes in a series of loops with as few left-hand turns as possible.

Over the last few years, UPS has been rolling out some internally developed technology that automates many of the design principals that were manually performed in the past, among these is to minimize left-hand turns. Today, UPS managers use a combination of personal and historical experience coupled with specialized, sophisticated computer programs to design our delivery routes.

In 2007, UPS route planning technology, which minimizes left hand turns:

shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes;
saved 3 million gallons of gas; and
reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year.

A great win-win-win. It's one of those things that at first sounds stupid (eliminate left turns? come on!) -- but when you really think about the simplicity of it -- it's awesome.

More interesting stuff about UPS on their site.