Perhaps this is one of the video demos from today’s Apple release?

You be the judge!

I did something interesting with my website. I took a look at my stats, and created a neat-looking word cloud, based on the keywords that people enter in search engines to get to my website.

It’s quite interesting to see.

dmpP website word cloud for 2009

Last year there was a serious flaw. Their websites, and I’m presuming their servers, were overloaded, slow, and crashed. It was an epic failure then, and I bet there are a lot of people who are hesitant to take part this year for fear that their abilities to just browse the site, let alone place items in their cart and place their orders.

Hopefully the BB and FS IT folks have learned from this, and are ramping up for tonight.

There’s a message on the BB and FS “view cart” pages that says all carts will be cleared to allow fair access for all customers. Take a look at the screen captures:

BestBuy view cart screen shot from 2009-12-24 at 2.45.49 PM

FutureShop view cart screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.46.08 PM

What’s interesting is that there’s a partial failure. When you click on the image with the text explaining the cleared carts on the BestBuy site, it takes you to their homepage. When you click on the one on the FutureShop site, it takes you to http://localhost/ Clearly someone’s brain is already on vacation. Why does the image need to click through to anything anyways? What’s even stranger, is that the FS site is pulling it in with jQuery and iFrames. Why?

Code view from FutureShop website - screen shot 2009-12-24 at 2.56.09 PM

Also, according to the FS twitter account, the site is going to be closed at 3 to 6 p.m. EST and it will be open from 6 to 8 p.m. EST to browse before the sale starts. I wonder why they’re doing this? I don’t think it’s going to build up the anticipation. The flyers were leaked about 4 days ago. There isn’t anything that I’m hoping to score from FS. There are a couple of things I’m looking to get from BestBuy though.

Here’s my shopping list for this season:

• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand A
• 2x 1.5TB drives – brand B
• 2x NAS RAID array’s
• 2x 8GB SDHC class 6 cards
• 1x inexpensive laser printer – this isn’t for me

That’s it. Nothing all that special. HDD’s are on sale at NewEgg and TigerDirect, so I’m likely going to get them from there. Having said that, their prices are “Boxing week”, so I have plenty of time to get them.

I’ll let you all know how “well” I did once all the purchases are done.

2009 was a good year, and 2010 looks promising.

I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very happy and healthy holiday season, regardless of what you celebrate, and happy new year.

The new blog design

So, I’ve embarked on a new design – again!  Tell me something…

What do you think?

Is there any functionality that it’s missing?

Any suggestions on ways to improve?

Blood, sweat, tears, 6-innings, and an 8-8 tie, followed-up by a BBQ at Brandon’s.

What a great day!

David at bat, swinging for a double and 2-RBI's

Shiva is only one day at my parents on Wednesday after the funeral until Thursday morning.

We will miss you!

He had to out-do the mitzvot… 613 + 1.

Zaidie Harry

So, in an effort to block the spam, I’ve setup a few spambot’s to bounce-back spam to the sender. If anyone gets a bounce-back, please give me a call and let me know so I can put your address in the white list.

This can be viewed both from the end of the search engine and the internet user. Search engines will always lead readers or customers to highly relevant websites. SEO increases your visibility on the internet so you can reach out to your target readers or market.

SEO helps you to build your brand and make it among the top choices in the market. Visibility through SEO means fundability and accessibility from the end of the consumers.

Today, I hit the 60,000km mark on the car… not too shabby since I’ve only had it about 23 months!

Champagne for everyone!

my kilometer reading