TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPICS: BABY NAME WIZARD / A9 YELLOW PAGES

Welcome Riders! Today's TOURBUS will answer SO many of those burning questions that have been nagging you. How can I get out of debt? What should we name the baby? What color is the awning at Lombardi's Pizza? Who can help me with spyware? And what's up with that French guy and the bike horns? Read on!

HEY BABY, WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

The Baby Name Wizard is an interactive visualization of baby name choices. Type in a name, letter by letter, and you'll see popularity trends rise and fall over the past century. Turns out that "Bob" peaked in the 1930's, and some of the hottest names now are Emily, Hannah, Jacob and Michael. Check it out here:

http://babynamewizard.com

NEWS FLASH: YELLOW PAGES NO LONGER YELLOW

Amazon's new A9 search engine has an amazing new feature that brings the yellow pages into living color, and lets your fingers actually do some walking... right down the street and into the front door of that pizza place you were looking for.

Search the Yellow Pages at A9.com and you'll find the usual search results, such as address & telephone, PLUS images of the storefronts of all the buildings on the block. This Block View technology makes it easy to observe the parking situation, the neighborhood, and check out other nearby businesses.

When launched a few weeks ago, the A9 Yellow Pages included 20 million photos of the downtown areas of 10 major U.S. cities including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City Portland (OR), San Francisco, Seattle, and others. Business owners can add their own photos, store hours, menus and more for free. More than 14 million businesses are currently listed. Try it out here:

http://a9.com/pizza?a=oyp

I chose New York, NY then popped into Lombardi's Pizza and found that there's a lovely park just a few doors down the street.

Got Spyware?

Remove Spyware, Adware, Homepage Hijackers, Unwanted Toolbars, Keyloggers, Malware, Trojans, Spy Popups, and other Parasites. Download the free Xoft Spyware Scanner here:

http://www.internettourbus.com/spyware.htm

Sp-amusement Park

I don't often laugh out loud, but this one got me. Spamusement! is a website filled with (in the author's own words) "Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines".

http://spamusement.com/

If you hate spam with the passion that I do, you'll find this mockery of spam and spammers quite amusing.

Very Strange Things

I want to remind you about a fun feature on the TOURBUS website. "Very Strange Things on the Web" is a collection of links to offbeat sites that are fun, amusing or just bizarre. All in good taste, of course. In the recent past we featured "It's a Wonderful Life" (re-enacted by bunnies in 30 seconds), "Learn Yiddish With Dick and Jane", and "Why Women Live Longer". Today, we proudly bring you "French Guy With Bike Horns Plays Classical Music". :-)

Very Strange Things - http://www.internettourbus.com/bizarre.htm

That's all for now, see you next time! -- Bob Rankin