Please keep in mind that with the Wii’s maximum resolution of 480P wide-screen, the Wii-Netflix service may not be capable of properly displaying 720P HD content.  Although it is unknown at this time, chances are the HD videos will be downscaled to 480P.

To reserve your Wii Netflix disc today, click on the image below.

I’m very interested to see where this ends up leading us to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And for those that haven’t seen the original, here ya go!

This week’s PlayStation Store update features the game TV Show King for $9.99 for the PlayStation 3, in the style of the more popular television game shows like wheel of fortune, weakest link and others this game will challenge you, your friends and family with questions ranging from history to geography, literature to science and sports to entertainment. Check it out:

Also available for download is Crystal Defenders for $9.99. A defensive strategy game in which players deploy popular job classes used in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 like soldiers, monks, black mages and archers to strategically place them on the map to defend your crystals from a stream of enemy creatures that fly or crawl past your army.

Here’s a list of everything else that’s new:

Qore

• Qore Annual Subscription: August 2009 (PS3/$24.99)
• Qore Episode 15: August 2009 (PS3/$2.99)

Downloadable Games:

• Dynasty Warriors (PSP/$14.99)

Game Demos:

• Rag Doll Kung Fu Demo Demo (PS3/Free)
• Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo (PS3/Free)
• Crystal Defenders Demo (PS3/Free)
• Worms Demo (PS3/Free)

Bonus Game Contents:

• Cross Edge Trial Edition Pack (PS3/Free)
• Cross Edge Additional Dungeon 4 (PS3/Free)
• Cross Edge Enigma Synth Pack (PS3/Free)
• Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires Additional Music Set 3 (PS3/Free)
• Hannah Montana: Rock Out The Show Musicians Wardrobe Add-On (PS3/Free)
• Hannah Montana: Rock Out The Show Moment Maker Special Effects Add-On (PS3/Free)
• Hannah Montana: Rock Out The Show Stage Prop Add-On (PS3/Free)
• Hannah Montana: Rock Out The Show Fashions Add-On (PS3/Free)
• Cross Edge Latest Technology Pack (PS3/$1.99)
• Cross Edge Pretty Little Pack (PS3/$1.99)
• LittleBigPlanet: inFamous Costumes Pack (PS3/$1.99)
• GTI Club Plus (PS3/$1.99)
• Savage Moon Waldgeist Add-On (PS3/$4.99)
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 Cog Hill Golf & CC (PS3/$4.99)
• Call of Duty: World at War Map Pack 3 (PS3/$9.99)
• Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood Old West Map Pack (PS3/$9.99)

Guitar Hero World Tour Individual Songs:

• “Camel’s Night Out” by Eric Johnson (PS3/$1.99)

Rock Band Music Packs:

• Spinal Tap’s TAP TEN (PS3/$17.99)

Individual Songs:

• “America” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Big Bottom” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Cups and Cakes” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “(Funky) Sex Farm” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Gimme Some Money” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Heavy Duty” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Hell Hole” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “(Listen to the) Flower People (Reggae Stylee)” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Rock ‘n’ Roll Creation” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Stonehenge” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)
• “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” by Spinal Tap (PS3/$1.99)

Rock Band Unplugged bonus content:

• “Had a Dad” by Jane’s Addiction (PSP/$1.99)
• “Renegade” by Styx (PSP/$1.99)

Free Game Videos:

• TV Show King Trailer (English, French and Spanish versions) (PS3/Free)
• Unbound Saga Between the Panels Issue 2 (PS3/PSP/Free
• Watchmen The End Is Nigh Part 2 Launch Trailer (PS3/Free)
• Watchmen The End Is Nigh Part 2 The Complete Experience Launch Trailer (PS3/Free)
• G Force The Video Game Trailer (PS3/Free)
• Mini Ninjas Futo Gameplay Trailer (PS3/Free)
• Mini Ninjas Futo Vignette (PS3/Free)
• Mini Ninjas Shun Vignette (PS3/Free)

New Movies to Rent or Own:

• Obsessed. Rated PG-13 (Own/SD Format/$14.99)
• Miss March. Rated R (Rent/SD Format/$3.99)
• Miss March. Rated R (Rent/HD Format/$5.99)
• Miss March. Rated R (Own/SD Format/$14.99)
• Dragonball: Evolution. Rated PG (Rent/SD Format/$3.99)
• Dragonball: Evolution. Rated PG (Rent/HD Format/$5.99)
• Dragonball: Evolution. Rated PG (Own/SD Format/$14.99)
• The T.O. Show Season 1. Rated TV Y-7 (Own/SD Format/$1.99)
• Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs. Rated G (Own/SD Format/$1.99)

Wallpapers and Themes:

• College Football Theme: Arkansas (PS3/$1.99)
• College Football Theme: Clemson (PS3/$1.99)
• College Football Theme: Colorado (PS3/$1.99)
• College Football Theme: Illinois (PS3/$1.99)
• College Football Theme: Missouri (PS3/$1.99)

Read [PlayStation Store Blog] Site [PlayStation]

Full Story ? | Written by Lucy Newman for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article ?

A friend on Twitter recommended it for everyone to try. I was a little reluctant to try the application because it states it’s still in open beta. I kept TinyTwitter on my phone, and downloaded UberTwitter. The first question I had was “will it kill my battery?”. A test was started, I set the application to refresh Twitter every five minutes and then let it go.

I am happy to say my phone was off the charger all night and through the day. I am only at half battery.It will continue to refresh your Twitter for you, but it won’t pull pictures or information until you go into the application itself.

UberTwitter also has a leg up on it’s competition with BlackBerry Twitter applications. The settings when you download it allows you to fully customize your application, including refreshing your feed when you want it to, and displaying pictures or not. It also allows you to see pictures on the feed itself (if you choose the option) instead of using your mobile browser to view pictures and opening a new application.

It’s definitely the best Twitter app I’ve found for the BlackBerry, and it’s still in a beta phase. This means we’ll probably see some major improvement before too long.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We regret to inform you that due to the current economic conditions we are forced to indefinitely suspend the FileFront site operations on March 30, 2009. If you have uploaded files, images or posted blogs, or if you would like to download some of your favorite files, please take this opportunity to download them before March 30th when the site will be suspended.

We would like to give a warm thank you to all of you who have been part of the FileFront communities we have built together. Your support has had a meaningful impact for all of us here at FileFront. Again, we want to give you a sincere “thank you” for your support over the years and wish you all the very best.

Keep gaming alive,

FileFront Management and Team.

Contact_us@filefront.com

TGM wishes them the best, and hopes that a service can step up and fill the void that we’re sure will be left after March 30th.

• Stereo Bluetooth
• In-App Downloadable/Purchasable content
• ‘Spotlight’ Device-Wide Search & App Launcher
• Push Notification
• Cut, Copy & Paste between apps
• Turn-By-Turn GPS Apps allowed (just not using Google Maps)
• Embed Google Maps in non-Turn-by-turn apps
• Apps can now inter-operate with iPhone and iPod Touch accessories
• Landscape keyboard in most core Apps
• MMS support, send pictures or audio to other cell phones
• Voice Memos
• CalDAV and .ICS support in Calendar

The SDK Beta is available now to members of the iPhone Developer Program and will be released this Summer.  The update will be free to all iPhone owners and cost $9.95 to all iPod Touch owners.  Original iPhone owners will not, however, recieve Stereo Bluetooth or MMS.

As it stands, the current graphics coming out of the CryTEK DPs are already over the top of what the everyday system can handle. It stands that Crysis still won’t run on my system on it’s lowest settings, and I can currently play World of Warcraft on it’s highest settings without any hiccups or issues. With that kind of benchmark, I really scratch my head and ask myself what CryTEK wants to do by advancing their platform, graphics, and tools even more. I understand they’re out to sell copies of their software and prove they’re the premium game developer that they feel they are, but seriously? More powerful graphics? Do they want no one to be able to play their games? This is silly in my opinion, you have to let the general public catch up with what you’re putting out.

This has been a random opinion from your neighborly CEO, Leto.

It’s a long letter, probably two or three standard pages worth, so be ready to sit down for ten or fifteen minutes and digest this instead of just skimming over, just click the read more tab to see the letter in it’s entirety. Credit to Kotaku.com and their network for posting this.

An Open Letter to Utah’s Parents and Leaders
March 6, 2009

As you read this, Utah legislators are preparing to pass legislation that risks, perhaps unintentionally, putting an end to hugely successful efforts to prevent children’s access to video games intended for older audiences. I write today in the hopes of averting this grave mistake, and to propose a more responsible course of action instead.

Legislation expanding Utah’s existing Truth in Advertising law (H.B. 353) would require that if a video game retailer promotes its adherence to a policy restricting the sale of video games rated M for Mature – which, like the R rating for movies, indicates it is recommended for those ages 17 and older – and then sells an M-rated game to anyone under the recommended age, they could be subject to a lawsuit, fines and/or the payment of additional costs and legal fees. In fact, all major retailers of video games currently have such policies, which they have put in place voluntarily and with which they are in compliance the vast majority of the time. According to a recent audit, Utah video game retailers enforce their store policies regarding the sale of M-rated games an impressive 94% of the time – without any laws or requirements that they do so. That level of compliance took many years to achieve, and speaks to the strong commitment of video game retailers to do the right thing.

So why is this bill likely to put an end to those very efforts it seeks to support? On its face such an amendment makes good sense; after all, if a retailer says they’re going to do something, they should do it, right? While the intent of this legislation would be to hold retailers accountable for compliance with their stated policies – presumably in that negligible 6% of instances where they fail to comply – the unfortunate reality is that it would introduce a liability that will likely force many retailers to seriously consider abandoning their voluntary policies and ratings education programs, undoing years of progress made on behalf of parents and their children.

It’s worth noting that when the Federal Trade Commission first began measuring retailer compliance with video game sales policies nationwide in 2000, a scant 15% of underage customers were turned away. However, the most recent such study reported in May 2008 found that national retailers refused to sell M-rated games to customers under 17 a remarkable 80% of the time, far surpassing the comparable rates of compliance for movies, DVDs, or music CDs rated for a mature audience. The unraveling of this substantial progress would be a tragic consequence, depriving parents of the assurance and control they currently have with respect to deciding which games their children can purchase and play.

Utah State Representative Michael Morley, the chief sponsor of this new amendment, was recently quoted in the Deseret News stating that, “if they’re one of those places that thinks, ‘Well, as long as they have a heartbeat and some money we’ll sell to them,’ then this won’t have any impact on them.” That statement reveals exactly why this law would
be so destructive. It would effectively penalize responsible retailers that have policies, and provide safe harbor for retailers that refuse to adopt a responsible policy in the first place. That is downright senseless. If the goal is to make sure our children are playing age-appropriate games, there is a better way.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), of which I am president, is a non-profit organization created in 1994 to help parents determine which computer and video games are appropriate for their children. Most retailers only carry games that have been rated by the ESRB, and game consoles and handheld devices include settings that parents can activate to block games by ESRB rating. Elected officials across the country, including Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, and groups like PTA have joined ESRB in helping educate the public about the rating system to great effect. The FTC recently reported that 73% of parents regularly use ESRB ratings when buying games for their children; 59% “never” allow their child to play an M-rated game, and 34% only do so “sometimes.”

The bottom line is that parents are more than capable of utilizing tools like the ratings to make the right choices for their families. And there is broad support of ESRB ratings from major retailers and the game industry alike. The proposed legislation is looking to fix a system that is not broken. Instead, we should all be focused on figuring out ways to encourage parents to use the excellent tools already available to them to make informed choices about the media their children consume. Punishing retailers for promoting responsible sales policies is irrational and counter-productive. I write in the sincere hope that Utah chooses to empower its parents with information rather than undo the substantial progress made by retailers to date to serve the best interests of Utah’s children.

With warm regards,
Patricia E. Vance
President

The new Mac Mini now includes the NVidia GeForce 9400M (128MB to 256MB shared memory) integrated graphics while supporting up to 4GB of internal memory itself.  Not really a “power-house” for gaming in the graphics chip side of things, but definetly a Mac system with some staying power.  This update also sports 802.11-N wireless networking, five USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, Mini-DVI and DisplayPort video outputs.

The new Mac Pro tower system now comes with either a 2.66GHz, 4-core or two 2.26GHz 4-core (called 8-core) Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processors, 18x dual-layer SuperDrive, 640GB hard disk, 3GB or 6GB internal memory and an NVidia GeForce GT 120 with 512MB of memory.  This is the great grand-daddy of the Mac Mini, sparing no expense with the power it delievers.

Before now, the Airport and Time Capsule line of devices have all been single-band, broadcasting either a B/G, G, or N based wireless network.  With the new Airport and Time Capsule will have the ability to broadcast two seperate wireless network, allowing for better placement of your wireless devices that currently fight for wireless bandwidth.  Currently, I use an Airport N for my main computer and an Airport Express B/G for my iPhone/Wii/360/DS.

See more at the Apple Store…

DryIcons.com | Free Icons
(tags: web free icons)

Redirection – Manage 301 redirections without modifying Apache | Urban Giraffe | Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation
(tags: ping.fm)

100 Beautiful Free Wordpress Themes | Back to Essentials | Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation
(tags: ping.fm)

51 Amazing/Inspiring Blog Styles | Tom Altman’s Wedia [...]

Click here to view the embedded video.

My luck is it is when I’m showing off the cool flash app to the boss.  The method above works – I have also had luck with adding a quick class/css switch in javascript too – [...]

How to Manage Geeks – wikiHow.
This is a great article sent to my by my buddy/co-worker Matthew.  It really gets to the point of how geeks think.
We had some customer service issues, or at least percieved issues – and it certainly makes me wonder if this was not a piece [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the post I did a while back called “Sales must evolve too” – I think sometimes iitis easy for the web developers and people “on the outside” of sales to point fingers…but as my Grandma used to say – when you do that you have [...]

At first I thought she was just saying that it looked like a Mii in the picture that was used, but no. This is a Mii, an actual Mii from the Wii gaming system, used as a mugshot to help find a criminal. A Mii, for those that aren’t Wii fans, is the avatar one can make to go along with a player profile, stats, and other options that you have with the Wii.

The article doesn’t say whether the Mii is the actual perps, or just a composite the police put together using a Wii, but either way it’s a sign that people are using new technology in innovative and creative ways. You can read the original article here!

Philippa Curtis, 21, who was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving in December, had told Oxford Crown Court she felt there were times when using a phone while driving was acceptable.

During the trial the defendant, a waitress, said she had been “hyper” as she set off on her two-hour journey on 20 November, 2007.

She had made various calls and sent text messages to a number of friends using predictive text.

Shortly after making a call, her car hit Ms McBryde’s parked Peugeot 106, then spun into oncoming traffic, hitting two more vehicles.
Ms McBryde, 24, from Horton, who had stopped to deal with a burst tyre, suffered a fatal brain injury in the crash.

Curtis, who suffered an arm injury, spun into oncoming traffic, hit two more vehicles, a white van and an Asda lorry, the court heard.

She admitted sending text messages while driving, but denied using her mobile phone at the time of the collision.

TwitterFriends – joining the dots (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business (momblognetwork.com)
TwiTip – Twitter Tools and Resources Round-Up [...]

Arvind Narayanan’s journal – Why Craigslist needs to die.
This is an interesting post which discusses (and complains) about Craigslist.  I’m not entirely sure they “get” Craig and his plan – but they do get some interesting points correct – Craigslist has a horrible UI and the technology is way over [...]

Technology Review: The Army’s Remote-Controlled Beetle.
This is an interesting concept.  Instead of making imitation insects for recon, they will modify the real thing.

The new design was implemented last night, then – I had to get Facebook Connect working.  I chose use the “official” one from the Facebook developers.  It is a bit more difficult to integrate -but I like the look slightly better. It requires you to dig into the code.
My buddy Jason [...]

Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail: Because they don’t do anything.
There are three types of amateur entrepreneurs out there, and in my young life, I’ve been every single one of them. By coming to terms with my failures, I’m more prepared to classify which type of amateur entrepreneur I am, and thus [...]

Found this on Mashable the other day – “10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired”
I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but I think its something to read.  I’ve been involved in VERY interesting job”stuff” recently and in the past.  I think these [...]

I love WordPress – I’m going to dedicate Wednesday to a post about it.  Hopefully I can maintain the concept.  Here we go.
Wordpress Wednesday #1
20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins
I’ll put 2 of the 20 I love:

cforms II – An easy tool for creating submission forms on your site that [...]

I really love UI (User Interface).  Like my buddy Matt T says, “I’m not ’smart’ enough to do UI, but I know a good one when I see it.”
Breathtaking and useful designs happen because the UI has been worked on tirelessly. It takes a real UI Master to understand how to make a [...]

Here is a post from jason calacanis called “how to launch a new product“.  Jason tends to have a love him or hate him following – I tend to lean to the “love him” camp in the fact I think he comes off a bit like I do sometimes.  A bit brash, but [...]

The statistics here are based on users who are 15 years of age or older and are as of December 2008.

• Worldwide Unique Visitors: 1,007,730,000 users
• Asia Pacific: 41.3% – 416,281,000 users
• Europe: 28% – 282,651,000 users
• North America: 18.4% – 185,109,000 users
• Latin America: 7.4% – 74,906,000 users
• Middle East & Africa: 4.8% – 48,783,000 users

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how newspapers and media must move forward – and then, it started.  So now what do I do – that boat left the harbor…or is at least boarding.

I know – time to pick on the sales department!  Here’s the post that sparked this convo:

Revenue growth is priority #1 for most businesses today. So, good salespeople are in demand, and management wants to give them the best possible tools to make them productive. Selling is a numbers game. As long as you do reasonably sensible things, the time invested tends to corelate to revenue earned. Therefore, productivity really does matter. This is not an area to skimp on. If you can make somebody who brings in $1 million in revenue 10% more productive, that would mean an additional $100,000. So, what is happening in the market with tools for those who hustle on the front lines of business, the people who sell the products and services, who get capital for your business and sell it when the time comes, who hire the people who can grow your business? What will they be using in future?

Sales departments must get it together.  It is time to change or be rolled over.  The potential is huge here – the consumer wants to get the best deals they can.  Business’s need education on what their type of business needs and we (media outlets) have to be the people the business’s turn to.

But have we figured it out yet?

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NOM NOM NOM NOM

Intego, makers of VirusBarrer anti-virus for the Mac, has issued a security alert over a new trojan horse called “OSX.Trojan.iServices.A”.  Currently this trojan is found in pirated copies of Apple iWork ‘09 software installer.  Intego is reporting that the pirated copy has been downloaded over 20,000 times.

Apparently when installing the pirated copy, an additional package called “iWorkServices” is also installed and begins as soon as the installer is launched.  It is installed system wide, is a startup item and has full read-write permissions as the “root” user.  Once installed, the trojan basically has the ability to do anything it wants.

Once the trojan is installed, it connects to the internet allowing remote users to know that a system has been infected and open for control.  The remote users will be able to log in, make changes, and cause all sorts of havoc that they wish.

This is NOT a virus and cannot spread to other systems on it’s own.  It is simply a remote control exploit.

If you are a Mac user and have downloaded the pirated version of iWork, regardless of where you downloaded it from or how “safe” you believe the service that you got it from to be, take NO chances.  Delete the downloaded file if you have not installed it yet and forget about it.  Switch to OpenOffice or NeoOffice, or go out and buy a retail copy of iWork ‘09.

VirusBarrier X4 and X5 have been fully updated to detect and remove the trojan.  However, VirusBarrier may not be able to remove any software that remote users may have snuck onto your system.

The Mac is not 100% safe from exploits of this nature, and don’t let any Mac fanboy say otherwise (even me ).

I heard of these about a couple of years ago – and was simply facinated.  Here is a post I found at Dev Hardware:

Back in 2004, Bowyer set an idea in motion to create a 3D “‘printing” machine, along the lines of an industrial rapid prototyper that creates solid shapes from extruded molten plastic. Commercial versions of these machines are nothing new, and are available easily enough as long as you have $30,000 or so to spend on one.

The important thing for Bowyer was to create a version that just about anybody could afford. He figured the best way to achieve that was to design a machine that could replicate itself, and to minimize the barriers to entry by releasing all of the designs under the open source GNU General Public License.

So basically this thing can print itself.  Wow.

Also – I remember them speculating this could be a new model for how structures will be created as well.  XXL printers would be constructed “around” a building site and then the printer would go to town and just build.

It’s an amazing concept and seems to be coming into reality.

I think my buddy Nick told me about this a while back – I’m 100% sure I ignored him until I found ashort time ago again in Google reader.  The site is called Apture.

Add Multimedia to Your Website with One Click.

• Integrate text, images, video, maps, music, documents, presentations and more from 20+ sources.
• Keep visitors on your site, instead of sending them away.
• Embed media with a single click – no more urls or codes.

My only beef is the cool things they are doing reminds me of those pesky little pop-ups that advertisers have latched onto over the past couple of years.  They are annoying – not apture’s cool ones – but the advertisers el-junko.

I have not plugged this one in yet – but would be interested to hear anyone else’s mileage.

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I was reading this post from a new blog I found tonight called Employee Evolution – post from Fortune Mag tonight.

I got to thinking – if I’m ever put in charge of a company, not sure that will ever happen, but if I do…I think I’ll really strive for this.  I’m not sure how it would work – but I think the building blocks are just having happy people working there.

Now happy is not really enough – that have to be happy, passionate people.  But if you have those two things – I’m not sure how you can lose.  Because the passionate, happy people I know are wonderful.

They get so much done and are so much more productive that the non-happy, or worse non-passionate ones.  The worst kind are passion people in a bad place, I’ve been there too many times.

Passionate, non-happy people are destructive.  Why?  They have gangs.  What? Gangs?  Yes, these are people who have charisma and a posse.  They can undermine forward progress quicker than you can imagine.  And it’s the worst kind of destructive – it is deep and wide.

So, if you come across a company I am running someday – look for the one with casual day every day and ping pong tables in the lobby.  We don’t need no stinking lobby – but we do need ping pong tables.

The whole reason I started blogging was to “conversate” about the web, media and how they were (and many time were not) coming together.  The company I work for (Gazette Communication) has been in the “oh crap, people are not reading newspapers like they used to – what do we do now” boat with a lot of other old media companies for a while, realizing the world is changing and it is time to change or be trampled by new media outlets.

I was so glad, and nervous, to hear of the bold moves we have made over the last week or so.  (The process has been going on for over a year – so I was very glad to see the outward push.)  The Gazette has made the decision that it is time to change – or, hopefully, transform.  A part of this transformation is explained in our editor’s (Steve Buttry) post from Saturday:

The changes we are making are no surprise: Chuck Peters, our CEO, began discussing them with the staff about two years ago, long before I showed up last June. He began blogging last April about the need to change.

…

For all of those 126 years, our success has been tied to a packaged product, a newspaper. Even though our customers like that packaged product and many even love it, they aren’t buying it because of the package but because of the content: stories, photographs, columns, graphics, editorials, obituaries, calendars, box scores, lists of information, advertisements.

We’re moving to a way which will allow the content to be much more portable than is has ever been before – and that is hard.  Hard because not only have we personally been doing this for 126 years, but there are not a lot of road maps on making it work.  So we’re traveling in uncharted territory.

And even though all eyes are on the news room – you can rest assured this message is clear throughout the entire organization.  My job is in technical services, in web development.  So although we’re no where near the front line, you can bet our service is something which will be so important and we want to be the best we can be too.

Read more about how and what technical services is thinking here at Mike Coleman’s (my boss):

As we continue as a company to close in on target models for information content gathering and packaged product delivery, one thing is very clear. We still have some distance to cover before a clear path is laid for gathering or packaging content.

This is the first of many very scary, but positives, moves into the direction of content creation for a new media world.  I applaud the Gazette for being aggressive in a time where the easy road leads directly into passive town, but the dirt road leads over aggressive mountain.

We’re building new roads and albeit I am very nervous, most of all overwhelmingly excited to be a part of it.  This is one of those times when you day – yup, I was a part of that.

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Why can't we just hold hands and sing "We are the world"?

Welcome back to the article series that has no business being written from a lowly internet user like myself, Rob [Citation Needed] Shepard.

WKOWTV in Madison, WI reported on a woman named Abbie Schubert who bought a laptop from Dell.  The laptop was going to be used with the online classes she enrolled in for the Madison Area Technical College (MATC).

She didn’t realize, however, that the laptop’s default OS was the Ubuntu distribution of Linux…

Schubert says she never heard of Ubuntu until learning that she accidentally bought it.  She called Dell the very next day and says the representative told her there was still time to change back to Windows.

But she says Dell discouraged her.

“The person I was talking to said Ubuntu was great, college students loved it, it was compatible with everything I needed,” said Schubert.

Since the story was posted, many Ubuntu users (over 100,000 as stated in the linked article) began to send  emails to both the station as well as Schubert via her FaceBook account.  Many of the messages are said to to calling her “lazy”, “dumb” and “not worthy of a college degree”.

I asked TGM Strategist, Dan (Leto) Hahn to get in contact with the news station and the woman, but they simply want all of this to go away now due to the can of worms that was opened up.  Would we like to get Schubert’s full and more detailed description of the events in question?  Yes.  The original article was rather sparce and has been added more to the whole debate.

For the last few months I’ve been on the WordPress train.  This is a pretty big step from my background as an ASP.NET programmer.  I know,and trust me – the nightmares came back when I found out php was TOO much like classic asp. 

Why WordPress?  I think it is a brilliant platform.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  From the elegance and completeness of the platform to the insane dedication of the community…it’s comm-plee-teet.  And please do not get me started on the plugins.  It took me a month to find something no one else had built yet to learn how to build one?

So what…you like it Tom, ok – I get it.

That brings us to iowa.com.  I work at Gazette Communications in the WebDev group.  We’ve been working with a team of   are trying to break free of the traditional media ties and begin to make new roads (at least of old media people) on the “internets”.

There are many plans laid for what iowa.com will be – basically they can be put into two categories:  content or engine.  The engine part is most exciting for me – we have a calendar engine, a blogging engine and a few more which we have to keep under wraps for a bit.  This is very cool and it is letting the WebDev geeks get some kung-fu going, but that is not the part that has me worried.

It’s the content that worries me.  Yea – content.  Why, we’ll it was my suggestion we used WordPress in setting up the site.  Then I had another brilliant idea – enter all content into the site as pages, I hope that one doesn’t come back to haunt me.  I only figured out a month later that pages in WordPress cannot be categorized.  (Now, in perfect WP community fashion – there is a solution to this problem.)

So here we are – the site is pushing 125 pages now…I used to think think that was big, but then I realized this site has 300+ posts.  If things get nutty – we can always leverage WP-Cache, and that should solve any of the serving issues.

I’ll keep you up to date – just keep me informed if you take a look at the site…please be honest.  Also – I’m looking to talk to anyone else who is using WordPress as a CMS and hopefully with some fairly significant traffic.

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This is a great post about textures in web design.  Hey – most people’s bandwidth is up, let’s make things look nice.

If you look around at well-designed websites in CSS galleries or any other source of design inspiration, you’ll see that texture is extremely common in modern Web design. One of the reasons it’s so popular is because of its versatility. Textures can be used in countless different ways and in a wide variety of design styles. As you look around, you’ll see how textures can be used in so many different ways by Web designers.

This gives me flashbacks of 1998 when every design the “creative team” gave us had gradiants and multi-colored background.  We’d smile, tell them how cool it was and then undo-it when we got back to the bat cave.

They would question it when they’d look at the finished product – but we would just tell them it was just the crappy PC screen…it would look much cooler when they got back up stairs to thir mac! 

That’s what we’ve been hoping for – Those two efforts [Mac and Linux releases] proceeding in parallel.  They’re at the same level of progress.

That team now is able to render most web pages pretty well.  But in terms of the user experience, it’s very basic.

Also in the article, CNET notes that extensions, one of the major missing part of Chrome when compared to browsers like FireFox and Opera, will be in a future release and are currently in the cutting-edge version of Chrome, 2.0.156.1, via GreaseMonkey scripts.

[Source: Chrome gets Mac deadline, extensions foundation | Webware - CNET ]