Free Defensive Driving Course

Just renewed my insurance, during which I was reminded that a defensive driving course would save a bit off the bill.

But the thought of spending 6 hrs taking a stupid course I’ve already seen before just sounds like torture, plus my time is far more valuable than the savings, so… no thanks.

Which made me realize – in the world of internet marketing, most effort is spent trying to attract eyes to content and monetize it etc. Just think about having a captive audience for… SIX HOURS. That would be a marketer’s dream. Why not offer a free defensive driving course and monetize it via ad revenues or some other route? Surely some creative marketing could be squeezed into this long of window. Plus your audience is so bored by the content they are being forced to watch, they’ve probably welcome a distraction.

A quick google reveals that, at least in Texas, any course provider is required to charge a minimum of $25 for the course, thus a free one would actually not be legal nor valid. I imagine there could be ways around this- offering like-value coupons or some other rewards (if the law allows these), but it looks like the truly free defensive driving course is not an option.

If you the internet visitor read this and go start it, I only require 15% of all revenues 😉

 

 

Copy path to file

When I’m working with files of any kind, I usually have an explorer window open to the path(s) containing those files. So then when I want to open one of the files in another app (and one that doesnt support drag-and-drop), I’m forced to go through the whole file, open, dig through file system, dig through file list, oh there it is… click and open. I’ve often sped this up by copying the path from the open explorer window and pasting it into the file open dialog just to at least get me to the right folder, but then it’s back to digging through what might be hundreds of files.

Why can’t I just copy the path of a file (instead of copying the file itself) and then paste the path directly into the file open prompt?

Well, turns out you can, in Vista and Windows 7 (and likely 8).  

Simply: 

Hold the Shift key, right click on the file, and then select “Copy as path”

Wish I’d known that several years ago..

Undelete popular tabs in IE9

Using IE9, I like the “popular sites” list of links that shows up when a new tab is opened. Of course google is one of the first ones.. except I accidently removed it a while back, and now can’t figure out how to “un-remove” it.

Some searching online found out there is no real way to do this (wooooops!) but deleteing the keys in the registry seems to fix it: wipe anything under this path-

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing\NewTabPage\Exclude

 

bam, worked for me.