Think back to the days before the network we call the internet existed. Think back to a world before “google” became a verb, before a user-generated encyclopedia called Wikipedia replaced Britannica and before eBay turned the planet into one big garage sale.

It’s easy to forget that as little as a decade ago all these innovations that are part of daily life had yet to be dreamed of. The effect can scarcely be overstated and there appears to be no slowing in the number of new ways that are being invented to use this new connectedness. (more…)

It is with great pride that the Joomla! community announces to the world the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5 Stable [Khepri]. As a community of contributors, we have been through celebrations and tribulations. We have had fun, and we have worked hard. We have learned from and helped one another. What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community has grown into a great opportunity for both the Joomla! project and community to benefit from these efforts and to consider our future.

As an application, Joomla! 1.5 boasts remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization. Building extensions is vastly easier and faster because of the comprehensive new API. The simplified user interface eliminates unnecessary clicks and context changes for site administrators and managers. Support for extended character sets, right to left languages, and translation of all static text in the front end and the administrator allows enhanced internationalization and worldwide use. New options for use of layout overrides and template parameters give designers total control over the look and feel of sites.

While this release marks a major milestone in our history, it also marks a new beginning. The next phase offers the opportunity to bring together the code created, lessons learned, and momentum gained, to build something truly great. It took us tens of thousands of hours, thousands of revisions, and hundreds of people to get to this point. It has been a remarkable journey filled with fun, discovery, and enlightenment where everyone has something to offer and anyone can contribute. Come join in.

The incongruous “current” post about San Diego wildfires caused him to have a TIVO moment — an out-of-timeline experience. His first reaction was … are they having NEW fires? Fortunately NOT.

It would be easy to blame it on the writer’s strike but what happened is that I accidentally hit the pause button … but all is well now. I’ve fast-forwarded through Christmas and New Year’s Eve, deleted “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the Rose Parade as well as 22 Oprah shows (my wife), 92 reruns of Hannah Montana (my daughter) and 114 hours of news programs (mine).

Previews for 2008 look exciting (don’t they always?) so check you local listing for upcoming programs!

I’m refining the “must take” items I took during evacuation and, although I already have most of my critical information backed up online, I am filling in blanks that I became aware of.

I also registered my cell phone number with the city and county reverse-911 systems (you can do both)

City of San Diego Reverse 911® Emergency Notification System
Cellular or Voice over IP (VoIP) phone numbers are not currently in the system database. If you would like to be contacted on your cell or VoIP phone, you must register those phone numbers.
Register with City of San Diego Reverse 911 system

County of San Diego Cell Phone Registry for Emergency Notification
Alert San Diego, San Diego County’s mass notification system, provides notification to your cell phone on emergency information regarding evacuations, etc. This is in addition to the landline calls received by those that have landline phones. If you have registered on the City of San Diego’s Reverse 9-1-1 system, you may also register with Alert San Diego.
Register with San Diego County Reverse 911 system

Long story short, the culprit turned out to be their Internet connectivity –an expensive, legacy fractional T1 plan that was overpriced and underperforming.

We identified the problem using this great, free tool:
SpeedTest.net

Based on impressive new discoveries regarding the body’s subtle energies, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) has proven successful in thousands of clinical cases. It applies to just about every emotional, health and performance issue you can name and it often works where nothing else will.

If your spending too much time in front of the computer (like…who isn’t?), you should check out the information on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Find out More

There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the semantic Web. While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other. read more

If you’re not already using a desktop search utility (like google desktop), you may want to try one out.
Based on recommendation of an associate I’ve been using the one Yahoo uses (smaller footprint)

I’ve been using it for about two months and find myself using it more and more to get quick access to info (particulary in my ginourmous outlook.pst file). Free trial. Good functionality remains even after the trial period. Or splurge and drop 50 bucks on it.

You can download from:
http://www.x1.com/ or
http://desktop.yahoo.com/

Build a good “honest” site (i.e. a site that is about what it purports to be about), have LOTS of great content, keep ADDING content on an ongoing basis, and work on building links.

In a nutshell:
Long-term SEO success starts with good web design, hosting and URL practices, requires good (great!) site content and is supported and optimized by cultivating and implementating a good strategy for inbound and outbound links.