Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Friday, August 08, 2008
This List for Saturday, Aug. 2, 2008
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Free travel guide site Schmap.com has crafted a pretty nifty interface for iPhone and iPod touch users looking for spots to hit while traveling. Navigate to the city you’re traveling through, pick a category like restaurants or banks, and scroll through the vertical list of results. Flip your iPhone/touch sideways, and points from the section of the list you were scrolling through are mapped out, and contact and directions info are provided when tapped. Pretty handy for finding notable spots nearby without having to cross over applications. Point your iPhone or iPod touch to www.schmap.com/iphone/ to access the Web app (regular browsers can head to www.schmap.com).
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Missed Steven lately?
Longtime Alice Cooper fans will recognize the little psycho who had a thing for necrophilia, violence and black widow spiders on Cooper’s classic concept album “Welcome To My Nightmare” (1975). Like filmdom’s Michael Myers, Jason and Freddy, you can’t keep a good ghoul down. Steven has popped up on several subsequent albums and slithers back in a big way on Cooper’s latest horror show set to music, “Along Came a Spider” (Steamhammer), in stores Tuesday.
For his 25th album, Cooper’s alter ego is a serial killer who wraps his victims in silk and removes a leg from each of them until he can collect eight and build his own super spider.
Though lacking the musical sophistication of “Welcome to My Nightmare” or any one song on par with enduring rock staples like “School’s Out” or “Poison,” the more brutal hard rock of “Along Came a Spider” nevertheless contains enough hooks to please the faithful. At 60, Cooper’s sneering delivery hasn’t deteriorated. Guest guitarist Slash, a longtime Cooper compatriot, enlivens the catchy “Vengeance is Mine” to such a degree, the track sounds like an outtake from Guns ’N Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction.”
- Howard Cohen, McClatchy Newspapers
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Offered as a free download from the Insurance Information Institute, the Know Your Stuff Home Inventory software (www.knowyourstuff.org) is a full-featured tool for cataloging your possessions in case disaster should strike. Wizards guide you through the basic setup of your inventory, then using Know Your Stuff’s simple interface you can add rooms and items to the inventory. For each item you enter, you can assign photos, receipts or appraisals, make/model/ serial number, quantity and replacement cost.
You then can export the file you’ve created and save it to external media or to a remote location, upload the file to Vault 24 (a remote backup solution integrated into the software, which unfortunately costs $15 a year), or you can go the old-fashioned route and print the inventory off and store it in a safe location. The software works with Windows or Mac OS X.
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