Waze is a traffic app that has been around on iPhone and Android for quite a while, but it finally came to Windows Phone. It quickly replaced the other traffic apps that I use. Waze combines public traffic data along with data that it receives from everyone who is using the app. That means that theoretically every street in your area could be covered as long as someone has driven it recently. The more you use Waze, the more points you get. You get points for the distance you’ve driven as well as for reporting accidents, police, road hazards and more. What are the points good for? Well, not much, but they of course encourage competition. You can link the app to your Facebook friends list to see which of them are also using it and see how many points they have.
There are about three major choices I can make for my commute. Chose the wrong one can easily turn 30 minutes into 50 minutes. Waze has been doing a great job of making good picks for my commute and I use it every day!
In addition to the 
It had been a while since I rebuilt my computer so I decided to do it over Thanksgiving break. I was amazed at how quickly it went! Windows 8.1 installed off a USB key in the blink of an eye. I probably could have used the reset functionality built into Windows 8 but I really wanted to do a bare bones completely clean install. Windows 8.1 remembers pretty much every customization I did to the machine and even all of the apps that I had downloaded from the Windows Store. Office and a few other desktop apps required manual install, but Office 2013 is takes literally a couple minutes to install.
Grant Imahara is currently one of the hosts of Discovery’s Mythbusters. He’s fun to watch on the show, but that’s all I knew about him. He was recently interviewed on a 
A recent episode of the American version of Top Gear featured multiple locations in Washington State. (You can watch the whole episode at 
On a hike through the mountains in the Pacific Northwest, you’ll often cross some streams flowing down the mountain. Where do they start? How do they make their way to the ocean? There’s a tool from 
If you watch a movie set in England before the mid-1700s and the actors are speaking with a British accent, feel free to annoy your fellow movie watchers and point out that the accents are not historically accurate. What we think of today as a British accent didn’t exist back then. They spoke pretty much like we do in America now. The British accent was created by rich people in England who wanted to distinguish themselves from commoners. And since Boston and New York City in America had similar deposits of rich people with connections to England, they picked up some of the accent too (dropping the R’s.) I’m not sure who sits around at a party and decides to stop saying a letter to sound more cool, but hey, stranger things have happened!