Handicapping Harness

Tech Tuesday

 

Handicapping Harness frequently gets my desktop looking frazzled and cluttered. Here are a few small apps I use to help out: Fences - Helps you to corral all those desktop icons into specific groupings (doing a double click completely makes your icons disappear! Great for seeing that wallpaper that's been hidden for so long!). WinSplit Revolution - A small utility which allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate (or as alternative, try PowerResizer). DeskPins - Allows you to pin any window on top of others, keeping it visible at all times. Desktop List View - Allows you to see your desktop as a list instead of as icons all strewn about. All of these programs are free, and can come in very handy while Handicapping Harness!

StatsMaster

I don't know when this started, but if you have an unlimited Platinum Plus Performance account at TrackMaster, you now also have unlimited access to StatsMaster.

From TrackMaster: "StatsMaster is the revolutionary online tool that puts the power in your hands to obtain the harness racing handicapping statistics and angles that are most important. Our constantly updated database of statistics specific to the track and dates you choose covers three main categories: drivers, trainers & horses. StatsMaster is available to all unlimited Platinum Past Performances customers at no extra charge. Pay as you go customers will be billed one download for each track they access each day."

This is a fantastic tool for the handicapper. Pick a track, set a date range and it will show you stats for Drivers (all starts, off track, favorites, longshots), Trainers (all starts, detention barn, 1st off claim, 1st off layoff) and Horses (all starts, off track, detention barn, 1st off layoff). All in all, it's a great addition to the Handicapping Harness toolbox!

Join Us!

The Clocker and I have started a new Harness Racing Network on Ning, an online service for creating social networks. I think this may really turn out to be something good. Members can form their own groups, post in the forum, make their own blog posts, contact each other (if you choose to be publicly accessible), upload videos, photos and other file types and much, much more. Check it out and see what you think. It's pretty basic right now, but even a basic Ning network is pretty cool (IMHO). Don't eat any yellow snow and have a great day, Handicapping Harness!

Tech Tuesday

In case you haven't noticed for the past few weeks, Youbet.com now supports Firefox, my favorite web browser. What a relief it is to do all my Handicapping Harness from the comfort of Firefox and never have to open up that other browser (Internet Explorer 7). I have all my Handicapping sites in one folder and simply click "Open all in tabs" and all my sites pop to life and all my passwords are then automatically filled in with Roboform. I go from zero  to 60 in about 5 seconds :) Give a tryout to Firefox and you won't be sorry.

Send Me Your Links!

If you've never taken a look at our del.icio.us links in the sidebar, go ahead and take a gander. Just click on any subject and away you go. They are all harness related and you may see a few that you've never seen before. If you have any links that you go to that we don't have, let me know and I'll add them in. Enjoy!

Tech Tuesday

I use Adobe Acrobat to read my pdf files, but have also extolled the virtues of Foxit in the past (we link to both in the sidebar). If you want to try another pdf viewer, with a very small footprint, give Sumatra PDF Viewer a tryout. It's very plain and simple but gets the job done without hogging system resources. And the price is right: Free :)

Skypecast Anybody?

Quick question: I'm thinking of adding a 1/2 hour long Handicapping Harness Skypecast to the blog once a week (or maybe biweekly) and wonder how many people would be interested in something like that. What's a Skypecast? A Skypecast is basically a hosted call using Skype (the call would be between myself and The Clocker, talking harness, with anybody able to listen in and/or join the conversation). What is Skype? Skype is basically an instant messenger, similar to Yahoo/MSN/AOL messenger (I personally prefer Google Talk). I would also record the call and distribute it as a podcast.

So, anyone interested at all? Please comment either way!

Foxit Reader 2.0

Just wanted to let everyone know about the update to my favorite pdf reader, Foxit Reader. If you install this version, you will never have to update again, as a self updater is now included in the program. Check out the link and see how Foxit Reader has it all over Adobe Reader. As always, we also link to Foxit Reader in the sidebar, under: handicapping harness links.

Is it 1984 already?

Online Gambling Not Only Illegal, Now Also Unmentionable. This story shouldn't just disturb online gamblers, it should disturb anyone who values free speech. Like it says in one of the comments, the best solution to this is to vote the promoters of this nonsense out of public office.

Tech Tuesday

Internet Explorer 7 (beta 2)

Everyone knows that I'm a Firefox man (having a tabbed web browser is the only way to go), but when I saw that a new version of Internet Explorer was out (IE 7 beta 2), I decided to give it a whirl, and I have to admit, it isn't too bad. The only problem I've really had with it was installling it. I could never get the program to finish the installation process on my computer and kept getting an error message at the end of every install I would try. I went to the Microsoft site and followed the instructions to fix it, but still couldn't get it to install. Finally I Googled the problem and came across a solution that worked: install it while in safe mode! After I did that it worked like a charm. It has good safety features and the tabbed browsing is set up very nicely (in some ways better than Firefox). It did seem to load pages pretty slowly at first, but once I turned off the anti-phishing feature, things speeded up nicely. Should you install it? Well, if you use Internet Explorer as your main web browser, I would probably hold off for the final release version later this year. If you use IE as a secondary browser though, or if you just want the latest and greatest, I would go right ahead. It seems very stable and trouble free (at least for me so far). I've been running YouBet and several betting services at once and had no problems at all. If you are still afraid to give it a try, you can give a tryout to Maxthon, which is an Internet Explorer shell that offers tabs (and more). Here is a pretty good CNET review of IE 7.