OBSOLETE — THIS PAGE IS OLD JUNK FROM ABOUT 2002 ——– BEING KEPT FOR ARCHIVE PURPOSES

BUT — If you want to see what I’ve written about my favorite persecuted radio personality, JC Corcoran, go here instead.

Miscellaneous non-legal stuff that I talk about purely for fun as a break from the routine

Jump to the following sections:

• JC Corcoran returns to St. Louis Radio
• Learn how to code in HTML and build websites
• “Tims Law” is a homage to “Tom’s Hardware”
• Space Station St. Louis Missouri sitings
• Get the free ‘Proxomitron’ and surf the web with confidence
• St. Louis Personal Computer (PC) clone makers and barebones sellers
• Finding used and rare books: the wonderful free “BookFinder.com”

JC Corcoran has returned to St. Louis Radio on K-Hits 96 FM

[Update - as of Feb 25, 2008 JC’s website is gone and JC is off the air] I’ve been listening to JC for almost 20 years, except when he’s out of work of course. You get in the habit of listening to a morning radio show, you relate to the host, and then one day they are gone. You get kind of an empty feeling, because a part of your daily routine has changed against your wishes. For the last 10 years or so, each day was an adventure: Would JC be there that morning or would his co-host be there alone? Too many times the co-host has been there alone one day, and that was it for JC at that station. So I was pleased to learn that as of November 2002, JC is back on the air in St. Louis again. This time he’s at K-Hits 96 FM. JC’s own website is jcontheline.com at JC On The Line (www.jcontheline.com). He’s got a nice site. Could stand more content, but nice.

Want to learn a little HTML and figure out how to build your own site?

Read Tim’s journey to HTML coding and website building. I tell you some of the things I learned and some of the mistakes I made, and I give you what I think to be a pretty good list of the basic tools you will need to build and manage a website as technically simple as mine.

Homage to Tom’s Hardware Guide

The name TimsLaw.com pays a small homage to one of my all time favorite websites, Toms Hardware Guide. If Dr. Tom Pabst can call his great tech site “TomsHardware” then I guess I can call mine “TimsLaw”. Toms Hardware Guide taught me how to build computers from off the shelf parts. I’ve been reading his site for six years.

Space Station St. Louis Sightings

Here’s the NASA page for finding out when the Space Station will be visible over St. Louis again. Space Station St. Louis Viewings.

Best freeware tool to tame the privacy thieves and the obnoxious Java and Active-X beasts

Get The Proxomitron. It’s free. It’s super. It lets you control many, many things about your web browsing experience, better and easier than in your browser. It blocks ads, disables cookies, blocks many many other things too, like Java, and scripting of many types such as those scripts that prevent right-clicking, or scripts that produce those incredibly annoying scrolling messages across your status bar, or scripts that deliver PopUps, etc, etc, etc. The Proxomitron is very nice indeed and the price is right.

St. Louis Missouri Personal Computer (PC) Builders, Sellers, Barebones

Whenever I want to buy computer equipment, I always try to find a local St. Louis vendor. But vendors come and go, and from one year to the next my “favorite” PC company closes down. I’ve bought components or full PCs from several St. Louis companies over the years, only to see the companies shut their doors by the next time I want to buy.

So, I repeatedly have to go to search engines and try to determine who is currently in business in St. Louis. But with all the spam sites out there jamming the search engines with words like Missouri and St. Louis, it’s almost impossible to sift through the junk and find a “real” St. Louis-based brick and mortar PC seller. So I used the old fashioned method: SWBell Yellow Pages. I visited the websites mentioned in the ads for many businesses.

Those websites that have useful info about PC clone pricing and component pricing (as determined by me exclusively) are listed below. I’ve decided to try to keep a list here on my non-legal stuff page, for those of you who are in the same boat as me, wanting to find a local St. Louis Missouri personal computer seller, manufacturer, or barebones PC maker. As I find more such companies, I intend to list them here.

• Executive Personal Computers (EPC-USA). They are located in St. Peters. They sell used off-lease PCs in a large warehouse store, and also through eBay. I visited the EPC store in March 2003 and bought 2 used Dell Pentium III 450 desktop PCs (to replace two old Pentium 166 PCs) and a used 17″ monitor, for a total price of about $350 including tax. I was a kid in a candy store there. The EPC warehouse is swimming with used equipment off lease. Everything is well organized, clean, reasonably priced, and service was excellent. The PCs have performed as promised, and were in very good shape for three year old equipment. Drawback: EPC wipes the hard drives, and you won’t get an operating system or any software with your purchases. The EPC website and their eBay ads contain a lot of info and pictures of the items for sale, and you can go to the warehouse and see the same items sitting on the shelves.
• J & B Technologies. JB Tech has been in the personal computer business in St. Louis for a relatively long time. They have a retail store, which I have visited several times (but I have not been there recently). JB Tech makes and sells clone systems using what appear to be quality components. They have tried several ways of doing business over the internet. They are not the cheapest; maybe that’s why they are still around. They appear to give reasonable value, have a good reputation locally, and are in the new PC business for the long haul.
• Orange Computers. Nice website. Gives price list on the site. Build and price a custom PC on the site using what appear to be quality components.
• Dimension Computer. Interesting website. They appear to be clone makers in St. Louis, but I have not yet had any experience with them. They claim to be the “St. Louis AMD Experts”.
• Computer Renaissance has a store in St. Louis. Gateway has a store here as well.

Finding used and rare books: the wonderful free BookFinder.com

I finally discovered the great site Bookfinder.com. Bookfinder is a free search site, where you type in the title and/or author’s name and the site searches the internet’s suppliers of used and rare books for you, and displays all the different internet locations where you can buy the book, with blurbs about the format and condition of the book, and the price. You click the price, and you are taken to the seller’s page about the book, where you can buy the book.

It’s a painless and almost effortless way to find great used and rare books at the best price. It’s a wonderful free resource.

I spent a couple of hours one weekend searching for a couple of specific books, dismayed at the difficulty of finding decent sources and reasonable prices. Then I stumbled on BookFinder.com, and in one minute I had located the best price and a decent source for buying one of the books. Three minutes later, I had found the best price on a second book. Five minutes later, I loaded up this “Non-Legal Stuff” page of mine and started adding this section that you are reading right now.