A friend pointed me to this today and I just had to share it with my geek-kin:
These look awesome! Go buys some for your geek friends including me!!!!
Needless to say, the water cooler talk at almost every office today wrapped around the latest episode from Kanye West during the MTV Video Music Awards where he interrupted Taylor Swift just as she started to give her acceptance speech for her first Moon Man trophy.
If you haven’t seen/heard about it:
A co-worker today floated a conspiracy theory. We all love a good conspiracy right?
And the logic behind it is pretty strong actually. Lets face it the VMA’s are not what they used to be. Are they even relevant any more? MTV doesn’t play videos. MTV2 which was supposed to play videos rarely plays them anymore. Even CMT only plays videos about half the day. doesn’t play videos and VH1 Classics play oldies. That leaves GAC for country videos (and now they have an hour or so mid-day with more interviews than music) and FUSE. So how can you have a Video Music Award when there are no TV stations playing videos?
So there needs to be some excitement to get MTV and their non-relevant awards show back into the spotlight. So use a tried and true formula:
West becomes the bad boy. Swift comes off as the innocent angel. Beyonce becomes the hero. All further each performers reputation. MTV is thrust back into the media. Since West needs street cred, even a bad event is good for him.
But we have to defer to Occam’s razor that states that when you have to competing hypotheses, the simpler one is usually the right one.
Conspiracy Theory or Jerk? You decide.
Several celebrities have made their thoughts known in the media and through Twitter. Pink, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson have all spoken out. The links to their responses are below. Be aware that they are heavy with expletives.
Katy Perry summed it up the best “IT’S LIKE U STEPPED 0N A KITTEN”
So what are your thoughts? Planned? Not planned? Right? Wrong? Leave your comments below!
The newest release of TweetDeck came out yesterday, September 9th and it included a lot of new features.
For those that do not know what TweetDeck is, it is a Twitter “client” that runs as an application on your computer rather than using Twitter through their website. Clients are a popular way to use Twitter rather than using their Website.
Here are some of the highlights in TweetDeck 0.30 that makes it worth upgrading.
Prior to this release, Tweetdeck used bit.ly as its URL shortener. It also would expand bit.ly URL’s to their full URL in a preview window so you could see the URL you were really clicking on. But bit.ly is more than just a URL shortening service. It provides analytics on your tweets. They can track click thru’s on URL’s that you shortened through their website. This gives you an idea of how popular your links are based on click through rate. Now TweetDeck 0.30 allows you to enter your bit.ly account ID and API key and URL’s shortened in TweetDeck will now show up on your bit.ly account.
This may seem like a minor thing, but it was quite a major feature for me. It better serve my Twitter followers, I decided I should separate my Geek tweets from my Photography tweets. So I now have two twitter accounts that I post from. For some of my followers, I follow them from both accounts.
Previously, if I clicked on a Reply or Retweet and I followed that person from multiple twitter accounts, it would sent the tweet for each account, meaning for those people, it double posted unless you were careful and turned off one of the two accounts. Now TweetDeck is smart. If I reply from a column that is for my @OmniGeek account, it picks that account to tweet from. If I click from a column setup for @MiracleMan then it uses only that ID to tweet. I’m sure my followers will greatly appreciate this feature.
I pretty much ignored Facebook from TweetDeck. Most of the people I follow on twitter I have as friends on Facebook, so I ended up reading their status updates twice.
Now you can get a full feed complete with Wall posts, photo uploads, and those annoying app updates. I’ll now know when you iced Don Bunko in Mafia Wars. Okay, maybe that’s not a good feature.
In addition to the enhanced feeds (and you have always been able to update your status from TweetDeck versions that supported Facebook) you can now also favorite (Like) a post and you can leave Facebook comments on posts directly from TweetDeck. It shows you the Like and Comment counts and clicking on the comment balloon or the thumbs up icon lets you activate those items.
MySpace has kind of become irrelevant with Facebook’s rapid growth. But people still use MySpace. Now from TweetDeck I can update my status as well as my mood. I can also see my friends activities, their statuses and comments left for me. These are different columns. I would have liked to have seen a combined Status/Activities column since column space is precious in TweetDeck.
Instead of clicking on the photo icon (which you can still do) you can drag a photo to the update bar and it will upload it to your photo sharing service of choice. Previously this was limited to yFrog and TwitPic. Now TweetPhoto has been added and its the default unless you change it. Now if it just did Flickr!
You can upload 5 photos at a time with this service. Oh and you can upload photos to Facebook as well.
TweetDeck included a lot of changes in 0.30. I’ve highlighted what I think are the big changes. You can see the full list of what changed a the TweetDeck ChangeLog which has lots of information about each of the new features.
Previously you had a separate box to enter a URL and had to click a button to shorten a URL. Now just entering the URL as you type your update will cause it to shorten once the URL is complete. Of course this is optional if you want to do it the old way.
If you’re not using TweetDeck you should. Its an incredible tool for managing your Twitter, Facebook and now Myspace accounts.
This is a turn off for some people since you have to install Adobe AIR to being with. Of course people with IT locked down computers will struggle with their IT departments to get it added, but its so worth the fight. When a new version of TweetDeck comes out, it can install itself with nothing more than a click and perhaps entering your password. No ugly installers throwing pages of legalese at you. No techno-scary questions about where to install it and problems it might case. It just works.
If you are using twitter.com you have to refresh your page to get new updates. Tweetdeck checks every few minutes for you automatically updating your feed showing you what is new.
You can watch for mentions where you are referenced in a reply. You can have a column of your direct messages. You can have columns of search based replies. You can have a column that shows you currently hot or trending topics. You can even create columns to group your followers by. Do you want to separate your friends from your activities? You can. I’m follow four groups of people: Photographers, Programmer Geeks, Sports People and my Co-workers. I can group my followers and give each one their own column.
In addition to letting you manage your FaceBook and MySpace accounts in 3.0, TweetDeck has long supported multiple twitter accounts. Perhaps you have a personal account and a work account you need to use. TweetDeck will let you do that.
Go get TweetDeck Today. You won’t be sorry.
Comments? Have a favorite TweetDeck feature? Lets us know by posting a comment below.
Full Disclosure: I’m a born and bred Kentuckian. I’ve lived here in the heart of the Atlantic Coast Conference for 10 years. I have no loyalty for any school’s athletics in the ACC. I respect UNC/Chapel Hill and Duke’s basketball program for the success that they have earned. UNC and Duke have had success in non-money sports like Soccer, Lacrosse and Baseball and those programs deserve respect as well.
All opinions expressed herein are of course tainted.
What I can’t fathom is why that people here worry about how the conference is seen as a whole. Growing up in SEC land and spending a lot of time around Big 10, Big 12 and Big East teams and fans, listening to news casts and talk radio hosts in these markets, I don’t ever remember much more than a passing mention about how the conference was fairing against other conferences. But that seems to dominate the fans and local media in in ACC land. Maybe these other conferences are secure in their standings?
What should be important and discussed is one simple question “Is my team going to kick your team’s behind next week?”
What I’ve learned since living here is that the ACC has an ego that pretty much isn’t present in other conferences and its bruised. No one at Florida cared how the ACC teams did this past week. They didn’t care how the SEC teams did as a conference either. Its just “How good is Tennessee and Alabama and will they be in our way to a national championship?” Maybe Florida cared how the Miami-Florida State game fared, but beyond that practically no one in Gainesville could even tell you that the ACC was 5-7 on opening weekend.
This morning while driving in to work, 850 the Buzz (WRBZ 850 AM) and Adam Gold made it to my radio. It was so much fun listening to him complain about the ACC’s embarrassing opening weekend. He suggested (and I saw a similar suggestion in Caulton Tudor’s column in the News & Observer) that the ACC should play conference games on opening weekend. What? That has to be one of the craziest suggestions I’ve ever heard.
Why you ask?
The ACC is struggling with football mediocrity. They opened the season 5-7 and had what seems to be several embarrassing losses. But this suggestion would guarantee that every year they would start out 6-6. Isn’t 50-50 the very definition of mediocrity? You want to bring your self-esteem up by insuring that you can never be better than average?
Well when you loose games to “piddly Division I-AA teams” I guess that should be a concern. But lets look at reality. Using the Jeff Sarigan computer rankings (since it gives us a look at the whole 200+ teams in Division I football), this is how things looked going into this past weekend’s opening games:
| Rank | Team | Opponent | Rank | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | Fla. State | Miami | 36 | Loss |
| 52 | UNC/CH | Citadel | 146 | Win |
| 60 | NC State | S. Carolina | 31 | Loss |
| 89 | Duke | Richmond | 75 | Loss |
*NOTE: I don’t feel like analyzing all the schools. These are the key ones for the Raleigh-Durham market. You shouldn’t really care that Virginia (46th) lost to William and Mary (117th).
*NOTE 2: Actually this may have been the biggest embarrassment for the conference. A 46th rank team shouldn’t get their behinds handed to them by a team ranked 117. Maybe we should care about that game after all?
Based on rankings, the above results were almost perfect except for Florida State loosing to Miami. South Carolina (31st) beat NCSU (60th). In fact, NCSU improved in the rankings to 58th in this weeks ratings. The Tar Heals killed the Citadel which a team some 90 ranks above should do. The AP had UNC in the top 25, though Sarigan has them well out of the top 25 at 52nd. We will see what happens when UNC plays a stronger opponent.
There has been a lot of tears spent on the Duke loss to Richmond. There shouldn’t be. Richmond was the computer favorite coming into the weekend. The difference between Division I-A and I-AA is 15 scholarships. A well coached I-AA team with some talent will best a weak-to-mediocre I-A team with surprising frequency. I like the Duke football coach David Cutcliffe. In time he will build a program that wins more games that it looses; however to look past an opponent because they are in the Championship series when they are ranked above you is a grievous mistake.
The Virginia whoopin’ and Miami beating Fla. State are the two real black marks on the weekend. Everything else happened as it should. The one game the ACC should want back is the Wake Forest / Baylor game. Wake Forest was ranked significantly higher (30th vs. 82nd) than Baylor and lost to a surprisingly good Baylor team. Amazingly Baylor jumped to 27th in this weeks ratings and Wake Forest improved as well, rising to 21st in the Sagrigan rankings.
Gold went on to say that the Miami-FSU game saved the weekend for the ACC. I don’t think so. There is no doubt that it was a fantastic game; an instant classic. But the ranked FSU team lost to an un-ranked team at home. How can this be anything other than an embarrassment in Tallahassee and at the ACC offices over in Greensboro? Great game or not a conference striving to be seen as a strong conference can’t have their stars loosing.
Why is the ACC a great basketball conference? Because Duke and UNC kick everyone elses behinds and those two stars get to shine. The SEC is strong because Florida, Alabama and LSU dominate the rest of the conference. Sure Georgia and Ole Miss throw in the “tough games” to help out in schedule strength. But at the end of the day, the Kentucky’s and South Carolina’s are there to be win’s in the other team’s record books. BTW: Kentucky (47th) killed their opening day opponent, the other Miami(OH)(126th) 42-0 I’m just sayin’.
My advice to those pimpin’ the ACC as a whole: Stop. Spend time trying to make your school better and let the conference take care of itself. Once the teams do their job the rest will fall in line.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Leave a comment below!
Everyone who’s worked with WordPress falls in love with this free, open source blogging / content management system. The engineers who created WordPress gave it the ability to be skinned with themes and you can now find a million themes for your blog. Or with a little effort you can write your own theme as I did for http://www.robmiracle.com. But the engineers gave us something more: Plugins.
Plugins are ways to add additional functionality to your website using WordPress. Like themes it seems like there are a million plugins available. As with any community contributed add on: themes, plugins etc., some are better than others. Some are rock stars and some are lemons. For plugins, WordPress maintains an “app store” for the lack of a better term, where you can find and download (and starting with 2.7 of WordPress install automatically).
Adding a plugin is so easy:
- Login to your admin interface
- Click on Plugins in the left hand menu
- Click on Add New
- Enter what you are interested in finding in the Search field
- Browse the results. The 5 star rating system is pretty good!
- Click on the plugin you are interested in
- Click on Install
- Click on Activate
- Make any preference changes, most likely under Settings
And just like that, you have added features to your blog. The process is so easy you may find yourself adding and adding plugins because there is so much good stuff out there.
Use the 5 star rating to help determine the lemons from the rock stars!
Do you want random quotes in your sidebar? You can have them. Do you want to have quote marks turned into fancy quote marks without you doing any work? You can have that too. Fancy animated tag cloud? Easy forms? Show your latest tweets? Its all there for you.
Plugins are crack. You get addicted to them and before you know it you’ve sold your blog soul to the plugin devil.
There are multiple studies on how people view web sites. But basically for every 10 seconds it takes your page to load, you loose 20% of your audience. Some studies say you have 7 seconds to get a readers attention and try to hold it. 5-10 seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but its an eternity when someone is waiting to hear your message.
On both this blog and my photo portfolio site, I had installed a plugin recently called wp-Typography. It converted boring quotes to fancy quotes, figured out the right size dashs, managed wrapping text, hypenation and so on. It had a fairly high rating, 5 stars no less.
The plugin works by wrapping your page in some code and then it filters the text based on rules that you setup.
I recently switched hosting providers and I started seeing some long page load times in the 10-15 second range. A couple of viewers complained about the load time as well. I started to try and track down the problem and I opened a trouble ticket with the hosting company. Naturally I blamed them, they were “new” in the system.
Using FireBug’s Net panel, I was able to analyze where my delays were happening. The index.php file which is only 50K was taking over 10 seconds to load. The images, css and javascript were loading quickly. FireBug breaks down not only how long each request takes, but where that time is being spent. In my case it was “Waiting on Response”. This means that the web server was taking time to deliver the page.
So it was either an Apache (the web server) issue or a database issue (MySQL) since WordPress uses the database quite heavily. My tests showed that even a non-Wordpress page that accessed the same database was very fast, so I ruled out both Apache and MySQL as the cause.
What was left? WordPress. A friend suggested that it may be a recently installed plugin causing the issues. I took a few moments and went through all of the plugins that I really didn’t have to have, deactivating them, reloading the page measuring the time. wp-Typography was the first one I turned off. The 10+ second load on the index.php file dropped to 4 seconds.
This great 5 star, recommended plugin makes a lot of database queries and then filters the output file before letting Apache deliver it to your browser. Six to eight seconds for automatic M-Dashes is too high of a price to pay. I turned off a few more that I wasn’t using or were not essential and got the times down in the 2 second range. This morning I was still seeing some longer times for the whole page to load. I’ve temporarily turned off the e-Commerce plugin since it loads a bunch of unnecessary CSS and Javascript and is a database heavy plugin. Hopefully it will be faster.
I clearly need to find a way to only have plugins load on certain pages. For instance, I use the highly recommended “Contact 7″ for my contact form. It only needs to load on the contact page. There should be no DB queries or any CSS or JS injection on pages I’m not using it on, but with the WordPress architecture its a problem and there are no good solutions at the moment.
The moral of the story: Install only the plugins you need. Make sure you have caching on.
