As a volunteer fire fighter here in Halifax County, Virginia, I cannot tell you how many times that I've been called to the scene of a fire or emergency and not been able to find the house or location of the victim.   The problem is that more than our fair share of citizens fail to properly identify their numerical address on their house, yard or mailbox.

One dark , cold and rainy  night last year, we had a call to a chimney fire on Mountain Road.   I came through the neighborhood with the fire truck lights flashing and the siren blaring and went right past the house.    There was no prominent marking on the owner's mailbox or house, so we could not tell what address we had just passed.   However, most of the time, when  we get called to a fire, it is obvious which house is on fire, but in many cases, the fire is not yet showing outside when we arrive on the scene.  In this case, there was no hint of a fire.

I don't remember how I found Leo Laporte, but I've become addicted to his podcasts and radio shows about all things Tech.   He has audio and video podcasts about Windows, Macs,  Home Audio/Video and many other topics.

One thing that he always says is that if you only have one copy of an important document or file, then you don't really have a backup.  He recommends two or more back up copies of a file. I've come to believe he is right.  I've seen more than one person who has lost their entire company's records when their computer crashed.  I've even lost all the pictures that I had of my son when he was a baby when I reformatted my hard drive.

Destination Downtown South Boston entered a photo of the Ducks on the Dan drop in the Derby Duck Network's Picture of the Year contest, and it placed as one of eight finalists! 

Follow the directions below to vote for our So Bo picture (it's the first photo - the yellow box dumping ducks). Thanks to Joe Chandler of the Gazette-Virginian for taking the photo!

We've got the beta stage of the community area up, and you can login using your Facebook account if you'd rather not create a new user account.  You can use the community area to share photos & videos from around the region.

Once you're logged in (whether through Facebook or by creating a user account), a user toolbar will appear in the Community section; the toolbar includes links to your Profile, Applications, etc.

Unless we lose power tomorrow, we're going to launch the beta version of SoVaLife's community area this weekend so you can share photos and videos of the snow with other visitors; if the storm lives up to the forecast, it will probably be one of the biggest (if not the biggest) snowfalls that any of us have ever seen around here so we we decided to launch the community feature before we had planned to.  If we lose power, the launch will have to wait since we won't be able to work on the site; check back in tomorrow, and share your pix - but please be forgiving if there are any glitches since we haven't done much testing yet.

And by the way - you'll be able to login to the site using your Facebook id if you'd prefer, so you don't have to remember one more username/password combo!