milos topic

I changed my Twitter background and in order for me to “peek” to the left of the Twitter time line resolution suffered. It’s not my best photo editing work, but it’s good enough for my first attempt.

Here’s the full resolution JPG file in case you want to tweak it for your own background.

Several people I “follow” on Twitter have recommended Intersquash as a website that can make your site iPhone friendly. The process is simple and at the end of it your site (when viewed on an iPhone) will look something like this:

As you can see, your site will get the “famous” iPhone gray look. You can even add an iPhone icon (size: 57 x 57 pixels; format: .png, .jpg) during this process.

All you have to do is provide your website’s/blog’s RSS feed, name the site, add an icon, and then add the generated JavaScript code inside the “head” tags of your site. Here’s the code generated for this blog:

I tested it, looks good, but have decided to take the code out and here’s why:

Overall it is a cool service and I’m sure will be quite useful to many people. Try it and let me know what you think. So far, I’m back to my “as is” look.

Over the past month or so I have been asked to review some 4 or 5 services/websites/products and have to say that I have enjoyed doing it. All of these have been in either their beta or pre-release stages. A couple of them are very cool ideas and hopefully they will be able to position themselves properly and gain decent market share by providing something new and original.

If you would like me to take a look at something you are working on and are planning on unleashing onto the world, let me know. All reviews are confidential unless you want me to talk about them publicly. Also, please note that the only prerequisite is that the product/service/website has already had some time spent on and is in a functional stage. I would love to help earlier in the process, but I don’t have enough time to provide free, unbiased reviews in the early repetitive stages.

My reviews come from three different perspectives (in no particular order):

I’ll take the time necessary for proper review and will provide my input as requested. Please note that since I have no direct (personal) involvement/interest in your company/idea you will get both good and bad, I will call it like I see it. Don’t take it personally.

Furthermore, if you are one of the people I have already provided input for and would like me to share that info here please let me know and I will gladly help you promote your idea (as long as I didn’t hate it).

Here’s the video I mentioned of Gary Vaynerchuk breaking it down yesterday at a Mashable sponsored event. They were outside as you can see, which wasn’t planned, but they still went ahead and made it happen. Perfect example of how to improvise, be creative and deliver.

This event was promoted through Facebook and Twitter among other services. Btw, if you don’t know who Gary is, please go to his site and read about him or watch some of his videos. He’s a rock star of social media, a vino connoisseur (Host of Wine Library TV) and a very cool guy.

If you are passionate about something and enjoy doing it, nothing around it should be difficult.

#votereport voted in #07442 and it was all smooth like butter. #wait 1 minute.

That was the message I sent to Twitter Vote Report this morning as soon as I was done casting my vote and it made me think a bit more about this election. Not just how it is different from all the previous ones for the obvious reasons, things that are at stake, our current international and economic position, race and gender of the candidates and their running mates. Furthermore, it is also significantly different in how it is covered and how people get involved, what tools they use to get their voice out, share their experiences, opinions, concerns and reservations about the candidates and the entire election process.

Starting from the candidates themselves, they have built a significant online presence and marketing avenues which have been used for months to get their messages out. On the other hand, people are talking about politics, the election and future of the U.S. online, on their social networking sites and services.

Some of many (way too many to list here) examples of how people share their election experiences, political views and ideas online:

People are using Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, MySpace, and many other online services and websites to promote their views and support their candidate of choice. This is something new and I am sure will continue to expand and grow into even a bigger force in 2012 election.

I love the fact that people now have more power and opportunity to get independent information and news from other voters instead of simply being fed information from media conglomerates often controlled by people heavily invested in politics with their own personal agendas.

Please share what you have to say, someone out there will listen!

Over the past several weeks I have experienced intermittent audio issues playing Flash content in Firefox 3. I’m running 32-bit Vista Enterprise SP1 and have tried all the usual “suspects”…reinstalled Firefox; updated/reinstalled the Shockwave Flash plugin; checked permissions on some of my site/script blocking add-ons, but the loss of audio remained intermittent. Then I did an online search for this issue and some people recommended going to Tools –> Add-ons –> Plugins and disabling, then enabling the plugin itself. This seemed to work momentarily, but days later (especially after updating the plugin to the latest version) problems came back. As you can imagine, this was getting annoying.

At that point, I decided to look at the OS side of sound control (don’t ask why I didn’t do this first) and found that for some crazy reason Firefox was muted in the Vista volume mixer. I turned the volume up and it’s been working ever since. I can’t believe that the problem was caused by something so simple which I should have looked at initially.

It’s time! Seriously, it is time for me to get an E-ZPass again. Yes, again, I broke the first one and it’s not a story I would want to get back to as to how it happened…let’s just say it was years ago, when I was a bit more temperamental. For those of you that do know the story, please keep it to yourselves…shhhhhh!

As I was saying, the need for an E-ZPass has been increasing recently and it doesn’t look to be going away any time soon so I figured I would go to their web site and sign up. First impression of the website wasn’t that good, from color scheme to sharp corners to unused space (although it does have some CSS resizing happening), but who cares it’s not my site, all I need is their product/service, right? Right!
But then, I looked at the URL bar and was momentarily confused by their favicon (an old Netscape logo, really?). Why is it there?

Not really up to me evaluate their site, but I think that a company that generates so much revenue and visibility should have a much better web presence.

To end on a positive note, their application submission form travels over HTTPS.

It was bound to happen, we had a great run, but today, Google Maps has failed me.

I’m one of those users who (many years ago) used to turn to MapQuest (remember them?) for driving directions. Several years ago a search engine company developed online maps which were up to date, fast and reliable and as such quickly won me over. Since then, I have been using their service almost excusively and it always worked as advertised. Today, I tried to estimate the time needed to get to a Friday Night Fights NYC event, but couldn’t do so. Google Maps found both addresses easily, but couldn’t connect them for whatever reason.

In any event, I will be using my GPS, but it would have been nice to be able to estimate the trip length (not accounting for Lincoln Tunnel traffic obviously). Hopefully this glitch will be resolved soon.

Below is the e-mail I received yesterday from 1and1, my web hosting provider of choice. They have informed me of future hardware upgrades and downtime in their data center where my sites are located. Now this is something simple to do, yet it helps them differentiate from some of the other hosts who are not as professional and courteous.

While it is nice to see them informing people over a week in advance and scheduling the downtime during the least invasive time frame (for most at least) luckily it won’t bother me at all. Friday night, the 24th, I’ll be in New York City watching another Muay Thai fighting event so I really won’t care or even notice the downtime. By the way, I think that some of you should join me, it will be fun!

In all, I really appreciate this level of professionalism and it further contributes to my decision to select them as the hosting source for all my sites.

Dear Milos Topic,

We are pleased to inform you that we will be installing new hardware on the core switches that are used by the webserver that hosts your account. In order for these upgrades to be performed the server will be disconnected from the Internet for approximately one hour.

Due to the magnitude of the upgrades which will occur across all core switches, altering the underlying technology that our data center infrastructure is built upon, our normal redundant mechanisms can not be used. The redundant systems have to be concurrently upgraded along with the live systems.

Afterwards, you will benefit from increased router capacity across our whole network and infrastructure.

The upgrade can take up to an hour and will occur on October 24, 2008, sometime between 12 am and 6 am Central Time.

Only the following package will be affected by this upgrade:
xxxxxxxx [removed the account number]

During this upgrade, your website will not be online for approximately one hour. Writing and editing of files in your web space will not be possible.

Please be sure to make any changes to your web space before October 24, 2008. Depending on how frequently your site is updated, you may find it useful to post a notice on your website telling visitors or to inform web-based application users that your site or service will not be available during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns before or after this process, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

To find out more about our Data Center, please visit
http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/DataCenter

Sincerely,

Your 1&1 Internet Team
1&1 Internet Inc.
http://1and1.com

While arguing exaggerated charges I came across an interesting line on AT&T Wireless’ website which made no sense to me:

“REPUBLICAN PARTY OF TEXAS FAN#: 00070219″

Anyone has an explanation?