A respite from blog posts

in

Recently, I got offered a position at Merscom Games to be a flash developer for social media games. Everything is happening quite quickly and it made me realize a couple things.

  1. I have a lot to get done to move to another city so I'm going to have to take a break from blogging.
  2. I have been blogging too frequently to put the quality in I would like.

So, for the next couple weeks I'm going to take a break from my scheduled blogging times. When I come back I'm reducing the amount of scheduled posts to 2 a week. I will do this by staggering the posts. So one week I will do a Just Another Magic Monday post along with a Flash Friday post. The following week will consist of a Sunday Funnies post and a Wednesday Warrior post.

Hopefully this change will allow for me to put more time into my blog posts. At the same time, it should help me to continue to post even when certain major events occur.

So, until I am settled - adieu.

Fanatical Support Creates Fanatical Customers

in

The past few months have been somewhat of a whirlwind at work. The person who was handling IT and server issues is no longer here so much of that duty has fallen to me. While I have some basic knowledge of how things work, I'm a much better programmer than server admin. Also, we starting publishing stuff to the cloud - The Rackspace Cloud. Then we began moving our clients mail services off of their servers and started using Mail Trust and all this while migrating every domain off of an old server to a newer server. All I have to say is thank goodness for Rackspace and their fanatical support. In learning how to best manage our servers, I've learned to rely on Rackspace and their expertise, rather than attempting to teach myself the necessary skills. Plus, they are always doing their best to handle requests for things they are not even required to do. Then when the cloud came there were many unknowns for us, but the benefits were to great to pass up. Once again, Rackspace - having bought the Mosso cloud - has made the transition fairly easy. As for email, our clients were very worried at first - and rightly so. Email is the communication pipeline of many businesses. Now our clients are singing the praises of a much better email system and Rackspace makes it much easier to support. Finally, in regards to server migration. Well, server migration sucks anyway because there is so much time involved but moving SSL certificates and Unique IPs was a breeze ( for me anyway ) thanks to Rackspace. In fact, the migration was finished ahead of schedule.

Rackspace and their fanatical support reminds me of a book I read once - Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. There fanatical support makes them worth every penny we spend with them.

The most addicting App on Facebook...

in

I'm on facebook just about every day. I play chess, mostly with coworkers, and due to my history I also play Wrestler with some regularity. I've also tried and stopped using all the popular apps my friends play.

What I find interesting is that the most common tag line I see for facebook game application advertisements is "The Most Addicting Game On Facebook." While on some level it disgusts me that this sort of advertising works, I am intrigued by the psychology of why it works. Is it because of the nature of facebook and other social networking sites? Is it just human nature? Why is addiction something we would knowingly chase? Is it the man trying to keep us entertained so he can keep us down?

Needless to say, one can spend a lot of time analyzing this simple phrase and why it is so popular. So, in an effort to crowd source with the 1 or 2 people who come across my blog :) I leave it to the comments for discussion.

Only because I mentioned the 2 game apps I use on facebook:
My chess challenge URL is:
http://apps.facebook.com/chessfb/?page=create_game&challenge_to_id=590273940
And for those of you who wish to see the facebook incarnation of Deacon (the wrestler) may go to: http://apps.facebook.com/wrestle/Wrestlers!show.fb?id=590273940

Geek Fruit Salads

in

A friend of mine at work and I were talking about healthy geek foods and of course we started talking about apples. When I came in the next day he had made a few salad recipes that I thought I would share with you. He said these recipes are open source - completely. So without further ado, here are the open source geek fruit salads created by Devon Scott. ...

The Java Applet
Cubed Juicy Red Delicious Apples Mixed with Chocolate covered Coffee Beans

The Web Server Serving
Sweet Apache Corn Mixed with diced PHP Pears

The Mac Classic
Sliced Mandarin Oranges mixed with Sweet Blueberries and Sliced Cinnamon Coated Macintosh Apples

The Variabowl
String Steamed Noodles Mixed with Honey Nut 0's and topped with Soft Dates

The Firewall
Sweet Steamed Honey rice and Walnuts covered by Spicy Sauteed Peppers, Mushrooms and Onions drizzled in Hot Sauce

-----
What's next? We need some pictures to go along with this post.

My Wimbledon What If...

in

I was watching Wimbledon this morning. Specifically, I was watching Venus and Serena face each other. The first set was so insanely close and tough fought it was enjoyable to watch. Now I'm not an avid tennis watcher but such a close final matchup between 2 big name sisters of tennis got me thinking something I often think about professional sports. ...

Once again, I'm not an avid tennis fan ( or any professional sport for that matter ) but I enjoy the athletics of it. What I'm about to say has annoyed a few people as I've brought it up in conversation, but really it is just a what if. What if professional sports are moving more towards entertainment like professional wrestling. Long ago, professional wrestling saw the money to be made in having more entertaining matches and things got less real. What if other sports are moving in this direction?

We've seen inklings of people's greed making certain sports less about the competition and more about someone making money, but it usually doesn't benefit the entertainment value of the event. Watching the Williams sisters play together made me think, it was something for the network to sell and it was also quite entertaining. There were many things a good play by play team could discuss to make it even more entertaining.

So, despite the negative connotation that goes along with "fixed" games - what are some of the ways we could benefit in watching sports where outcomes ( or at least some level of play ) are decided before we even start watching. For example, how could it look in baseball? football? tennis? soccer? Remember, focus on how it could be made more entertaining, not just how some unscrupulous people can make money betting on the events.

Just Another Magic Monday: Florian Zimmer

in

I may focus on my French heritage too much, and this JAMM post continues this tradition by showing a video from France 2. However, this post is now sharing the love of my wife and her German heritage. Florian Zimmer is an amazing magical artist from Germany. He definately has his own style. ...

This video shows an extremely creative routine based around graffiti.

I also wanted to share this short clip of him doing a little street magic. I doubly like it because it uses the same music as the parkour video, vaults 102.