As Far As I Can Tell

Building a Web Site That Works

Seth Godin released a new eBook this week entitled "Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works".  Your can purchase it from his website for $9 or wait till September when it's free.  Since we're in the beginning stages of doing a redesign of our website I decided to purchase it now.  It's a quick read, yet is full of insight.  I'd recommend it to anyone getting ready to either create a new website or redesign a current one.  The book is filled with great tips on how to view your website from the eyes of the visitor and includes many real world examples.

As a side note... when reading his eBook Seth references a book entitled "Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results".  I've since started on that book and have found it really good material!  More to come when I'm finished.

Revenge of the Sith - My Impressions

(don't worry no spoilers!)

A couple of us from work stayed up late last night and saw the first showing of Star Wars Episode III at 12:01am.  It was well worth the long night.  This is by far the best of the prequels.  If it wasn't for the childhood magic of the original movies it could have been a contender for 1st or 2nd place in my mind.  I'm glad to see 'ol Jar Jar didn't get many lines (perhaps one?) and there was very little cheesy dialog (like the 'I truly... deeply... love you' from Episode II).  The best part was the level of humor in the movie.  Like the first three there were small incidents that made you chuckle without ruining the seriousness of the movie.  Anyways go see it... and I need to catch up on some sleep!

Today, I had the experience of a life time.  Jeff Hausman, Commander of the 61st Fighter Squadron invited myself and three others to try out the F-16 flight simulator at Luke Air Force Base.  All I can say is that it was awesome! You sit in a full mock-up of an F-16 cockpit with full instruments and HUD.  You then slide into a dome of screens where you can see above, below, behind and in front of you.  Then the fun begins... dog fights at 20,000 ft! Jeff walked us through the equipment and techniques over the headset.  Polygon free graphics is provided banks of SGI units (reminds me of my Unix days).  Many thanks to Jeff for taking time out of his schedule to make this happen!!!

Tomorrow our senior pastor goes up for the real thing!  Lucky dog!

Google Web Accelerator

Google just release it's latest tool (these guys are busy!) called Google Web Accelerator.  I usually stay far away from these types of utilities but... since it was Google I installed it immediately!  It works by providing an intelligent cache as well as prefetching pages.  For instance when searching Google it will pre-download the first search result for you.  So far I've saved a whopping 4.7 seconds (it provides a toolbar for tracking such things).  No bad for 5 minutes of use.  Hopefully some day they will provide a .adm file for managing the settings via Group Policy....