Monthly Archives: October 2009

Happy Halloween

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Hope you have a happy and fun filled Halloween! The kids, wife, and I plan on going out this evening for trick or treating with my friends and family. We usually all go in a big group and have a great time walking around. It’s an annual tradition I really look forward to each year. I love watching the kids run around to get candy, seeing the great decorations many people around here put up, and checking out all the neat costume ideas people come up with.

Hope your Halloween is filled with plenty of treats and maybe some good tricks too. As always, thanks for tuning in and keeping up with df.com!

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“Pink In October” Ends

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Susan G. Komen For The CureThis October, we participated in showing support for the efforts of The Susan G. Komen Foundation. October is breast cancer awareness month. Organizations and individuals are encouraged to display pink ribbons publicly to show support for raising awareness about breast cancer treatment and prevention. During the month, df.com featured a pink ribbon linking our viewers to the Komen Foundation’s web site as part of our efforts to raise awareness about both the disease and the Foundation.

The Komen Foundation is a key supporter in searching for a cure for breast cancer and helps raise awareness for those most at risk (including educating both men and women how to proactively locate tumors through routine check ups etc…). A big thank you to all of you who checked out their web site and especially to those of you who sent donations to help them continue their good works. We appreciate you taking to time both find out more about the foundation, as well as, helping them out.

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Birth of InterWebs

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Some random items and thoughts:

  • Forty years ago today, the first packet was sent across the Internet between the Univeristy of California (LA) and Standford Research Institute (both in the State of California in the USA). Happy birthday Internet!
  • Everyone keeps asking me if I’m psyched about the soon to be launched DJ Hero video game– I’m not. Just like Guitar Hero is nothing like playing a real guitar, DJ Hero is nothing like mixing real tracks.
  • A local bank robbery is solved… I think the best part is the bank robber made it all the way to Hawaii on the cash and then came back to Orange County, NY where he was caught by parole officers with the clothes and money in his car from the robbery. Why would you come back? Come on!
  • Your first official look at the new Verizon Droid mobile phone.
  • If you use Mozilla Firefox be sure to upgrade to the latest release. They just patched like 16 security holes.
  • There are a number of password stealing scams going on right now across the world. One such is the recent Facebook phishing email scam. I got about 15 of these messages in my various accounts this morning. Don’t be a moron and fall for it lest I mock you publicly for all to see.
  • For all you Yankees fans who mocked me when the Mets where being clobbered by the Phillies… hope you’re happy now because they are 100% your problem to deal with.

I’m hoping the weather holds out for Halloween. I’d like to walk around with the girls for an hour or so. It’ll be my first time outside of the house or a hospital in over a week. Fortunately I’m not getting cabin fever as of yet– yet being the operative word.

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DF v11.0.6 Update

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I continue to work on the site as whole with small tweaks and fixes as things crop up on the radar. We right now have no open bugs and are on df.com version 11.0.6 (final) code wise. The most recent fixes:

  • Upgraded back end web site engine code to latest WordPress engine to “harden” site against attacks and improve performance/stability.
  • All plug in modules that enable features are 100% up to date as well.
  • Implemented additional back end security checks and database configurations that improve site security while not degrading performance.
  • Optimized all page load times and database structure to speed up/maintain quick load times on all web browsers.
  • Improved search engine including result sorting for better search returns (both quicker and more relevant based results instead of sorting articles by time line from most recent to earliest). In other words, you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for quicker instead of having to read every search result (similar to how Google and Bing work).

Today marks one week since my shoulder surgery was performed. Still sore, but over all feeling about 30% of my total self again. Finally starting to have some control over my right lower arm (below the elbow). In less than a week I have my post operation follow up with my orthopedist. Hopefully the wound is healing is a good as it seems to be. Cannot wait to get the bandages off and to be able to take real showers again.

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The Catch Up

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When you spend hours laying around unable to move one thing you do manage to do is catch up on the tech world. With that, here are some of the neatest things I’ve been following in tech lately:

  • Check out MaximumPC’s Top 50 Web Sites list. You’ll find some of my favorite daily clicks including Wunderground.com, DrinkHacker, and What The Font.
  • If you’re as confused as me about the whole FaceBook Farmville and Vampire sim thing, there still may still be online multi-player gaming hope yet for the nerd community as a whole– Civilization is coming to FaceBook by 2010!
  • Remember a few days back I told you about Verizon’s new Droid phone and how both open availability of both the Moto Sholes hardware and the Android OS itself could lead to other things? Word is Dell is working on a mobile Android hand held of its own right now.
  • The US FCC Commission has unanimously declared Net Neutrality as a top mandate in regulation for online access and that is great news for consumers as a whole.
  • If you’re into on the go computing like me, be sure to check out Portable Apps. They rock!
  • The BK Windows 7 Whopper is amazing, but only sold in Japan.
  • Kudos to the US Executive Branch IT team for moving the White House site over to an open source CMS saving all tax payers money and developers’ time. Excellent job!
  • R.I.P. to GeoCities. Your wealth of poorly designed sites may have not been much to brag about, but being the first to offer the masses free web space is not only notable, but changed the way web content hosting would forever be offered to the residential market as a whole. There would be no MySpace, AOL, or Facebook had there been no GeoCities.
  • At the end of this month, Ubuntu’s latest OS (9.10) will be released. Looks slick. Why would I pay for an OS again? Windows who? iPhone what?

Right arm is still sore and 95% unusable, but the intense pain has died down. Able to take a sponge bath, which is nice. You forget how much you take simple pleasures like bathing until you can’t do them.

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