So I’m a poor college student and I’m always looking out for a good deal, especially if it will help me with school work. A few days ago, The New York Times announced they were opening up their TimesSelect premium content to anyone affiliated with a US college or university, i.e. anyone possessing a .edu email address. As you know, I’m at a university just not in the US. So I was a little disappointed. But, I started thinking about it a bit… I remembered that my alma mater gave me lifetime email forwarding for anything sent to my undergraduate address. Woo hoo! Let the hack begin! Here are some of highlights I’m excited about:

• Access to columnists David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof, Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. Notice the economists in there?
• Preview of The Sunday Times before it’s published.
• And the best feature… The ability to search The New York Times back to 1851.

I presume most universities offer the email forwarding service to their alumni, which means there are going to be a hell of a lot of people switching to TimesSelect for free. That’s a savings of 50 bucks a year! Whether you’re a student, faculty member or graduate with a school forwarding address, all you have to do is click here and enter your .edu email address to get started. Enjoy and spread the word via digg or your favorite social bookmarking site.

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I apologize to those who were not able to access the blog this weekend. DreamHost, my provider, was down for a bit due to an unexpected emergency power repair required for one of their data centers. Fortunately this sort of thing does not happen often and they have a special site to keep customers updated on events and outages.

All this aside, I have been very pleased with the service DreamHost povides and you can’t beat their features for the money. They offer over 160 GB of storage for a Level 1 account, and an amazing 1.7 TB of monthly bandwidth. For you newbies, that’s 1700 GB of monthly transfers, i.e. a hell of a lot of traffic! WordPress is literally a one-click install with DreamHost and they are always increasing storage and bandwidth limits.

Thank you for your patience during this brief outage. You can support me and this blog by joining DreamHost today for as little as $7.95 per month and right now that includes a free domain name registration and unlimited domain name hosting. Or, feel free to donate if you already have a hosting plan!

Have a great week, and now for the flood of posts I have been meaning to post this weekend…

The famed voice of Bart Simpson visited NUI Galway today in an event hosted by the Lit & Deb Society, the university’s debate organization. Ms. Cartwright entertained the students with her many voices while speaking about her humble beginnings from Dayton, Ohio which has led her to much success. She was well received by the students and promised to consult with the writers of “The Simpsons” to organize future visits to Ireland along with the rest of the cast. Cartwright spoke of the forthcoming The Simpsons Movie due in theatres July 2007.

I grew tired of the “connections” WordPress theme I have been using for so long that I have decided to mix things up a bit…kinda like how life as we know it has been turned upside down for the move to Ireland. I promise…more posts to follow and enjoy the new design!

The focus of this blog will undergo a major shift as I embark on a 2 year journey with my family to Galway, Ireland. I am studying Economics and my wife Erin, is pursuing a Masters in Medieval Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In Gaelic, that’s Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh. I plan to post here much more frequently than in the past to keep friends and family informed and hopefully have a nice permanent record of our experiences as well.

Sláinte! (cheers or good health)

Bill Clinton announced an agreement between schools and the top three soda makers to elminate sugary sodas in America’s schools in hopes of fighting childhood obesity and diabetes.

read more | digg story

Newsvine, a social news bookmarking site, has launched a private beta test to which I have been invited. It’s similar to digg.com but goes several steps further by allowing users to tag stories under a wide array of news categories unlike the tech-centric Digg. Users can also write their own columns and will eventually see a cut of the advertising revenue generated from readership. Check it out here.

Here’s an interesting use of an IKEA store (not that I would practice it myself) I found on boingboing.net. Some German parents use IKEA as a drop-off babysitter while they run errands and make hair appointments. You can’t beat the 1.50 Euro lunch either!

Another tropical storm has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, one day before the busiest and costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record officially comes to a close.

read more | digg story

Please come check out my new location at blog.jamesrbritton.com.

And if you know how I can migrate my blogger posts over to WordPress, please enlighten me!