I haven't been to the Beale Street Music Festival in a long time, mainly because the bands that were appearing weren't a big enough pull for me to want to fight the nasty behavior of the crowd that attends that event.

This year, there are several bands I'm looking forward to seeing, including my new favorites Tegan and Sara.

So if you're planning to be at the Music Fest this year, let me know.

I'm in the middle of experimenting with Twitter.

Currently I get direct communication by: cellphone (no landline at home), office phone/voicemail, e-mail (several accounts for different purposes, including both Facebook and MySpace), instant messaging (several accounts on different networks), and SMS. We are truely in an over-connected or hyper-connected era.

I get news through several podcasts I listen to daily, and through an ever growing list of blog and website RSS feeds I check almost daily using Google Reader. This in addition to television news and websites like Digg or NYT.com.

So this experiment with Twitter has me kind of puzzled about how to manage the information flowing in from the people I'm following.

I'm not a big fan of receiving bacn through SMS on my phone, so I've turned off the Twitter SMS option. Instead I installed the Twitterific application for Mac OS X.

This experiment is fueled by the desire to really understand this new medium following reading this article by Robert Scoble who stated, "...lately I’ve been telling people that the secret to Twitter isn’t how many followers you have, but how many people you are following."

If you're on Twitter, send me an invitation to follow you. And feel free to follow me :-)

Yikes. How often does that happen?

Today's quote comes from Bill Maher on the April 18, 2008 episode of Realtime with Bill Maher:

Come on. I think what [the Presidential candidates] care about, what most people care about, is that gas is very expensive ... You know that since George Bush has become president, gas has basically tripled in price. Now, Bush is an oil man. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m just saying that if we had elected Colonel Sanders president and the price of chicken had tripled, I’d be a little suspicious. That’s all I’m saying.

Ya think?

Yep.

Mozilla is an impressive success, rising from the ashes of Netscape to prove that open source works. I've been using the Mozilla browser (and now Firefox) since it was in an early beta stage, and loving every minute of it.

Happy 10th Anniversary, Mozilla!

So Google altered their search algorithm 450 times in the last year. How many times has it altered it in the last week?

Ok, so this is intereating. Not 12 hours later, and the Classmates.com listing that was in the top ten search results has disappeared.

Now, my website is at #3 and #4, with my Facebook page at #5 and my LinkedIn page at #10.

I should explain, I'm not the owner of www (dot) waynehastings (dot) com, nor am I the guy with books for sale at Amazon.com. So I'm competing for the top spot on searches for my name with and author with the same name as mine. He and I split the top 10, with two others now showing at #7 and #9.

Any ideas why Classmates.com would be listed then disappear in such short order?

I'm still not loving the experience of watching video embedded in a Web page.

I tried Hulu.com, and have found it tolerable but not good for a living room experience. I feel the exact same way about the Fox Video On Demand page.

I spent the past weekend watching a season of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares on the Fox website. The show is great, but having to babysit a browser with a keyboard and mouse was teh suck.

I'm still hoping Joost can pull it together to expand their service. Joost makes for a decent living room experience.

I find the Myka set top box intriguing, but I'll have to see a demo unit in action before I'll be convinced about spending that kind of money for a piece of hardware that isn't a true computer.

Miro has a decent interface, but it lacks the content network that even Joost has already in place.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Joost and Miro are based on the Mozilla XUL technology. I'm a big fan of the Mozilla development team.

So the last couple of weeks, I've been playing with Facebook and my profile pages on a variety of services. I wanted to see if I could bump up the placement of my website using these other pages, so I updated several to link in and have my profiles link back out. The crosslinking appears to have paid off.

The above screencapture from the Google Dance Tool show my page on Classmates.com at #3, this website at #4 and #5, and my Facebook profile at #6.

I'm actually surprised that Classmates.com is so high and that Facebook isn't higher. I could have sworn that Facebook had been higher last week...

This isn't new, but it still makes me laugh...

I've been a fan of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast for some time (years?) and have been enjoying their new Cultural Gabfest as well. When will Cultural Gabfest get it's own feed?

New this morning via Digg:
http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b5/releasenotes/

I've had good success with 3.0b4, so I'm going to stay on this beta bandwagon.

Everyone knows about Facebook and MySpace by now. They're social networks. People create profiles, link to friends, and stay in touch in various ways.

So get this...

Now there are social networks for people who love books. And there isn't just one, but at least three that I found quickly:

GoodReads.com

Shelfari.com

Bookspoke.com

I'm giving GoodReads.com a whirl -- we'll see how it goes. I like to read, I hold onto the books I enjoyed, I re-read books occasionally. And I'm always looking for new, interesting books to read. So I'm hoping a social network focused on books might be just the ticket. Browsing in Amazon.com is fun, but maybe this will take it to the next level.

Here is my profile on GoodReads, in case you care to check out the books I've read and reviewed so far:
http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1042549

Ok so maybe "love" is too strong a word. But these reviews from Ars Technica are very positive.

Safari 3.1 on Windows: a true competitor arrives (seriously)
By Ken Fisher | Published: March 24, 2008 - 11:55PM CT

Safari on Windows: decidedly not illegal (plus, font fixes!)
By Ken Fisher | Published: March 27, 2008 - 09:15AM CT

As most know, the Safari web browser is based on the KHTML browser which has been enhanced into WebKit which is the heart and rendering engine for the web browser first on Mac OS and now for Windows also.

We already have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and now Safari. Do we really need another web browser is kind of a moot point -- we have it. The question is, will it catch fire and become adopted by any significant portion of web surfers.

Spotted this blog entry via Digg:

WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build
Posted by Maciej Stachowiak on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 6:55 pm

UPDATE We now believe we have a full rendering pass (but not necessarily an animation smoothness pass yet). See the bottom of the post for details.

UPDATE The Windows nightly is now available for download. See below for details.

With r31342 WebKit has become the first publicly available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on Acid3. The final test, test 79, was a brutal torture test of SVG text rendering. Details of the bugs we fixed will follow. Indeed, we found a critical bug in the test itself that would have forced a violation of the SVG 1.1 standard to pass, so until a few hours ago it was not possible to get a valid 100/100. Acid3 test editor Ian Hickson has the details.

Read more >>

So I just had an epiphany...

Windows Vista has been pretty much a dismal failure. End users are clamoring for updates to XP and "downgrades" to XP from the Vista that came preinstalled on new computers.

Apple has been growing marketshare and mindshare. People who never dreamed of buying a Mac are doing so.

Gamers have been fracturing the PC market so that home PC users and gaming PC users have very different hardware. In most cases, the only real reason to run Windows is to run games.

Meanwhile, in the console market, consoles have become more and more powerful to the point that they are as powerful as a desktop PC.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the Windows OS morphed into a console platform as Microsoft abandoned the business market, released a PC based Windows gaming console and the rest of the world moved to the Mac OS for both business and home tasks.

Stranger things have happened.

I'm curious what kind of setup people are using who claim to have killed their television in favor of streaming over the Internet. 

The last couple of weeks, I've been playing around with Joost . This review on PCWorld.com summarizes my experience pretty well, "I liked the look and feel of the site, but found the picture quality and the video selection somewhat lacking."

Since my main computer is an Apple MacBook Pro, I was happily surprised to discover the Joost interface works with the Apple Remote I use to control Front Row . But after watching the first season of the CBS show Jericho , I didn't find much worth watching. The first three episodes of the second season of Jericho available on Joost were only available with the director's commentary turned on, not exactly the way I want to watch a show or movie for the first time. 

I turned to Hulu.com to see if Jericho was available there. Jericho is linked to from Hulu, but those links take you to the Jericho video recap page, which means watching the second season of Jericho through the official CBS Jericho website using their Flash player, which was problematic. The videos didn't want to play, and when they did, the player wouldn't operate in truly full screen mode. But at least the Jericho website was playing a different set of commericals. Joost wore me out with the same three Diet Mountain Dew commericals over the 22 episodes of the first season of Jericho. How annoying is that?

I could have turned to Limewire to search for episodes of Jericho, I suppose. Then I could have used any video player I wanted. But that is hardly legal. 

I really like the Joost interface, given that it works with the Apple Remote, so I can browse channels and shows from across the room. The downside to Joost is the thin content and too much repitition on the commercials. Hulu has better content overall, but videos are embedded in Web pages, meaning you have to be sitting in front of the screen with keyboard and mouse to manage the experience.

I like the direction both are headed. I would be happier if the Hulu content was available through the Joost interface. But neither are perfect, and certianly won't be replacing basic cable anytime soon.

I installed Firefox 3.0 beta 4 on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard) and haven't had any problems at all. No crashes, which is what I was worried about honestly, but also no odd rendering bugs or other problems. This is beta!?

Then this morning, I found this article about Firefox 3 memory usage . Some people are going to be very happy.

So today a customer contacted us complaining that the default search field in Joomla is too limited at 20 characters.

Google to the rescue. Here are step by step instructions for expanding the Joomla search limitation:
http://www.joomlashack.com/community/index.php?topic=9013.msg32610

Blogging this for my own reference, links to development sites regarding the next versions of the major web browsers.

Firefox 3 beta

Safari 3

Internet Explorer 8

I'm really glad I now have Parallels to run WinXP and IE for testing -- running all over the office to look at a Windows screen was always a pain. Are there differences between running IE7 on WinXP and Vista? More and more of our customers are running Vista now. What fun.

Microsoft's talking about making IE8 more standards compliant that IE7. One can hope.

I still love the Mozilla / Firefox DOM Inspector -- I use it nearly every day to track down oddness.

I think I'm actually going to install the Firefox 3 beta and see how that works out.