Unemployment Rate Data made easier by Google

If you go to Google.com and type in [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates!

Unemployment rate, Los Angeles County, CA
11.3% of the labor force - Not seasonally adjusted



Yay! You still may need to provide an adequate source though, and not just the Google search page.

u.nu :: the shortest urls. period.

Yet another URL shortening service: U.nu

From their website:
u.nu :: the shortest urls. period.: "Why u.nu is the 1-4-u

* u.nu is the shortest domain name available.
* u.nu doesn’t use look-alike characters, such as l, 1, I, 0, and O.
* u.nu isn’t picky about upper- and lower-case, so you can easily read your URLs to someone over the phone, or send them via SMS.
* u.nu is a palindrome (if you ignore the dot)."

Status-bar Scientific Calculator :: Firefox Add-ons

Status-bar Scientific Calculator :: Firefox Add-ons

This is genius! This extension uses the Firefox Status Bar (yes, the small row on the bottom of your Firefox Browser), as a calculator. Great for those simple math queries. With a quick glance, it seems to also have some advanced functions -- trig functions, logarithms, frequently used constants (pi, e, etc). It's a lot easier than pulling out the calculator that came w/ your Windows Operating System!

Enjoy!

Ooops. Error in Earnings Exporter 2_00g

Hello,

Its embarrassing to say I made a boo boo when I did the formulas to the "Category Analysis." The Percent of Total Questions was incorrect, and it calculated something that had almost nothing to do with it. Thank you Kathy Bond for letting me know of this error.

You can download the new version here or view the Earnings Exporter page here. I'll also have a few screenshots up for you on the Earnings Exporter page.

Thanks again!

Earnings Exporter v2_00g released! Category Analysis

Hello,

I just finished a rough version of the Earnings Exporter with added analysis on your categories. You can download it here. Now you can see which categories are earning you the most money per hour!

Expeditors, this doesn't help you guys too much. However, you guys may find the daily analysis charting nifty.

Keep in mind that this is VERY rough. It may not be as visually appealing as you may expect, but it does its job.

New features:

• Category Analysis
• Daily Analysis Charting

Known Bugs:

• Some graphs may not be working on the first click. Try viewing some other charts first, and coming back. Sometimes this helps.
• I still don't know where the 1004 error is coming from. If that's the problem you're having, and it has worked before, sometimes trying again the next day will help. (Otherwise, I'm sorry)

Greet or Delete - Ubiquity

Greet or Delete Extension Review: Ubiquity

This interesting add-on has goals to make browsing the web more userfriendly. If you wanted to send an email to lets say your friend Ben a "welcome back" message, you could do that without having to navigate to Gmail! After pressing a hotkey, you would just type something like "Email Ben Welcome Back!" and it would automaticaly do that for you.

Although interesting, this Add-on doesn't have the capabilities (yet) to be useful for ChaCha. "Search Top Cell Phones" would bring you to a Google search page for "Top Cell Phones," but there're already quicker ways to search Google (including the use of bookmarklets).

Firefox has plans in putting the features of the Ubiquity project into a future version of Firefox as Taskfox, so hopefully it'll gain some useful features (or an easier way to "develop" features) sometime in the future.

Final Verdict: DELETE (for now)
Score: 3/10

Next Review: Whenever I run into an interesting extension to test. I think this would be best as 1) I have spent VERY few hours a week ChaCha'ing and 2) even less hours testing the extensions.

Good luck.

College Basketball 2009 - March Madness

ChaCha HQ posted a tipsheet to help us with the March Basketball Queries.... And although their help-page layout looks appealing, I was never a fan of using ChaCha links to help me on my searches (I don't think I've visited the Quicklinks page more than 10 times).

Anyway, Google just posted a page that might provide help to the same queries. Its an alternative to the ChaCha way, and may or may not be quicker for you.

Give the page a look--maybe you'll like it.