I’m happy to say that I’ll be heading out to Chapel Hill with Amanda for the rest of the week for a wedding. I’m very excited to get back to CH and of course happy to see all my friends again! Congratulations, Kate and Joel!
As I’m sitting in stop-and-go traffic outside of Sisters, I’m thinking to myself the sad irony of the situation. It just so happens that this weekend of remembrance for our fallen soldiers is also one of the largest fuel consumption times of the year in America. Whether it’s cars, trucks, RVs or boats, Americans are guzzling gasoline today while our soldiers are dying in Iraq largely because of our nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
I was thinking the other day about the amount of form spam that most web sites get (and again just now as I moderated a ton of blog comments), and I was reminded of a proof of concept I saw a while back. It required the user to utilize drag and drop functionality to submit a form, thus verifying human interaction. Then I thought of the iPhone’s unlock function and how it would make a cool CAPTCHA.
I’ve written a handy JavaScript class for including these types of sliders into a web site- stick around after the break for more details and cool configuration options.
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with Amazon Web Services. Over the past few weeks I have been developing a simple way to manage multi-node applications using EC2. Much of this is very project-specific but the methodology could easily be applied to a wide variety of deployments. The techniques described here were inspired by this blog post. This article is intended for people who are already somewhat familiar with Amazon Web Services — for a brief introduction to S3 and EC2, view my previous blog post. If you’re ready for it, read on.
Apparently, this Italian TV personality was able to con his way into the Bernabeu recently to get VIP treatment for a Champions League game against AS Roma. He did so by pretending to be, of all people, American movie star Nicholas Cage. Interestingly, his C-list Italian celebrity wasn’t enough to afford him the luxury (on his own continent no less) reserved for the star of Con Air.
As someone who has managed to sneak into more than one sporting event where I didn’t belong and/or had previously been kicked out, I would like to salute you, Paolo Calabresi. Your accomplishment has proven to the world that anyone with enough balls and enough confidence can pull off the best seats in the house and a chance to shoot the shit with the team prez.
I will leave you with this amazing tale to inspire all those fans out there- remember, just look like you know what you’re doing.
I was reading a couple of my favorite blogs recently and I saw a few examples of what is starting to become commonplace among the blogging community. Whether it’s somebody trying to find an obscure painting, or a well-known software firm attempting to secure an advertising contract, it’s become fairly common to see people trying to get something done via a blog post.
While it immediately struck me as somewhat lazy to outsource these tasks to your readers, I realized rather quickly that it makes a ton of sense. I’m sure that Jason at 37 Signals did his research trying to find the best marketing firm, but he’s limited to the resources of one or a few people. And I’m sure that Anthony scoured the web and Google images to try and find his painting to no avail. BEFORE they posted. But I guess that’s one of the good things about being a high-profile blog (that’s right I consider vdov high-profile) - you have the kind of distribution that makes doing something like this on your own almost selling yourself short.
Today at work, our marketing team rolled out the web site for our new product, Email Center Pro. The service is still in private beta mode, but the thought is the new site will start to pick up organic search traffic, and by the time we launch publicly in the next few weeks, the site will start off with decent search results.
To those small business owners out there, keep your eyes peeled as we go public with the new service. Palo Alto Software’s latest offering will help you manage your customer service, informational, and other generic public-facing email. It’s group email management done the right way- check it out.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, me and my brother started a best-of-13 series of cribbage, but sadly I had to head home with with a 6-4 series lead. When he came by my place the following week to finish the match, we had to keep score using paper and pen. Since cribbage is essentially just a card game, I decided to create this iPhone cribbage scoreboard so cribbage lovers can pack a deck of cards and their iPhone and be all set to play a game.
The online cribbage board is located here: iPhone Cribbage Scoreboard. Read on for some instructions.