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.

It lets you run versions 1.0, 1.5, 2.01, 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, and 8.0

Kudos to the developer.

More details can be found at: Final Builds Site – IE Collection

What do you think of it?

I think this is a keeper…  until I get bored of looking at it (again).

New web design is launched

Perhaps they should get a ‘dev’ environment to work on.

Rogers staff – if you need help resolving the problem, let me know.  :-)

The errors are numerous!

broken website

Totally different section of the site - just as busted as the first!

Serious errors displayed to the public. Tsk tsk!

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.

Anyone looking to get me, I’m @davidpisarek or you can view my profile page at http://twitter.com/davidpisarek.

I had my blog setup to automatically create a new post whenever I sent a tweet, but it looks like that’s going to get annoying pretty quickly, so I’ve disabled that function.

Bring it on fellow twits!

I figured I would give it a shot… and it’s pretty cool. You can make an avatar of yourself for free, and have it saved out with an animation too!

I was a bit skeptical of the black keys and black around the screen, but I must say that I’m quite pleased with it, and the design has grown on me.

I was able to use TimeMachine to restore all my data, applications, settings, etc. I did have to reinstall my printers, but that’s not such a big deal.

I get about 5 hours out of a full charge, compared to the 2-2.5 on my former one. To get this amount of time I set the screen brightness all the way down, turn off the back-lit keyboard, and that’s about it. I leave the wifi still enabled.

I’m quite impressed.

Next stop, upgrading to 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD. I might wait a bit on the HDD, until they come out with affordable 750GB or 1TB drives.

Here are some of my latest shots with the new setup…

Click one of the thumbnails to view the full version.