I'm currently using FunnyDomainName.com to track RSS feeds for Microsoft and NetWare.

http://funnydomainname.com/

Read the best of the personal finance news I can find with an emphasis on early retirement and investing.

http://mylectern.com/

Barbara Sims is an experienced interior designer who creates new designer pillows from antique Aubusson fabric. She also has a hand-sewn line of needlepoint pillows.

At this time I am still hosting Barbara Sims Designer Pillows but am not actively developing it.

Barbara sells her pillows via trade shows, and some retailers will resell her pillows. Unfortunately I don't have a list of retailers.

I'm just a guy who started using the username BigMoneyJim on a few forums. "Big Money" is a nickname given to me by a coworker back when I was a young adult with few responsibilities. "BigMoneyJim" is usually an available username, so I stuck with it. (It's not unique, however; there are some other BigMoneyJim's out there.)

When I first bought this domain name I had ideas of becoming some sort of for-hire web publisher or programmer. Now I figure I'll stick with a normal work-for-somebody-else, but I'm keeping the site going anyway. It's become sort of a hub of my web interests and activities.

I currently plan to keep my other sites going, too, except for barbarasims.com which is not really mine, anyway.

I changed the software driving this website, but the old links still work, and the old homepage is at http://bigmoneyjim.com/content/blogsection/6/39/ .

The new site allows comments and forums. I have a little more arranging to do, then I'll try to move the old content here and redirect the old links.

Here are links directly to the old categories:

Featured Sites

• Designer Pillows
• MyLectern.com
• FunnyDomainName.com
• usr-share-doc.com

• Early Retirement
• TBS Games
• Tech Websites

usr-share-doc.com is where I will share my experiences with Linux, *BSD and anything unix-y or open source. The name is based on a common place to store documentation, /usr/share/doc .

In 2000 when I was reevaluating my finances and studying personal finance I stumbled across the concept of early retirement that I simply hadn't thought of before. I'm many years from being able to retire, but I'm laying the foundation for an early exit.

I'm an on-and-off member of some of the early retirement community forums. I find these to be very useful resources not only for financial wisdom but practialy daily life information, too. Even though many of the regular posters post to more than one site, each site has developed its own character and culture.

• Dory36's Early Retirement Forum: Free to read, free registration to post. This is my favorite of the forums, and I recently helped them migrate to a different forum software. I am currently a forum moderator there and maintain admin rights since the migration. It seems to be the highest traffic ER forum and generally the people are laid-back, helpful and funny although we periodically bicker over suspicious posters or touchy subjects. Dory36 was a member on TMF's boards and created his own when TMF started charging for access. The forum is linked from the popular Retire Early Homepage, and Dory36 is the creator of FireCalc, a safe withdrawal rate calculator based on historical stock returns studies.
• REHP Discussion Board: Free to read, free registration to post. I haven't read this board enough to get a feel for the overall character and culture, however lately I have frequented one part of the board dealing with a notorious controversial poster who has been banned from the other 4 boards listed here; that portion of the site is rather juvenile, yet I post there and participate in the juvenility. The Retire Early Home Page is a wealth of ER information and is the home of intercst (John Greaney) who is seen by many as the one who started the current ER community.

Turn-based strategy games are a genre of games including the Civilization series, Alpha Centauri and others. Turn-based strategy games typically simulate empire-building and involve complex strategy and long playing times. Multiply the boardgame Risk by chess and you have a rudimentary model for a TBS game.

These sites are a great resource and community for the Civilization series, Alpha Centari and other TBS games.

• CivFanatics Forum: I go here to learn about Civilization III strategies and read how others play the game. There is also a very strong CivII community there and I anticipate they'll be strong when Civ4 is released.
• Apolyton CS Forums: This is the best Alpha Centauri forum I've found. They also have boards for the other games, but I read CivFanatics for the other games.

WebHostingTalk is a community forum of web hosts, data centers and web pulishers. In the short time I've been there I've found it a very useful learning tool.

Slashdot is a tech news blog site I visit too regularly. The editorial quality has fallen off lately, and the headlines are more frequently exaggerated and misleading, but I enjoy reading the discussion of the articles and occasionally join in myself.

Aside from the news stories and the attached discussion there is a diverse culture in the Slashdot Journal system. Each registered user has a Journal section linked through is username, and each user can designate other users as friends or foes, and they can tell who are friends of friends and who are foes of friends by icons by everyone's usernames. This has led to a very interesting web journal community.

I've been following the journal of user TechnoLust for a while; this guy is very entertaining as he's farily deeply religious but regales us with tales of women in his hot tub and his love adventure with an underaged teen.

I read the following users' activity occasionally:

• Sanity is Ian Clarke of the Free Network project
• fvis the developer of nmap
• Bruce Perens is an influential person in open source software
• Alan Cox is a developer of Linux
• CleverNickName is Will Wheaton of Star Trek:Next Generation fame and is rather funny as an adult