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Google Wave Invites and Reciprocation

Wow! Mention "Google Wave invite" er…nomination or simply "I have a Google Wave account" and you have friends coming out of the woodwork that you never knew you had! Actually that word friend is fuzzy in meaning to me in this new age of social networking. I mean, most of the people who have begged me for an invitation to Google Wave are people I’ve never heard of. And not one, not one!, has offered me so much as a steak dinner in exchange for the invite…er, nomination. People! These things are going for $80 on eBay.

So who should get the 8 invites that came with my account? Well.. no one else because I’ve given all mine out. But who should have received them? My clients. See, Google Wave is about collaboration. At least that is my take on it. So, to get an invite from me, you should have said, "Doug, I know you have PHP and CF skills. Hook me up on Google Wave and let’s run a small project through this together." That’s call equitable plus it uses the tool as is designed. Instead I feel like I’ve largely been approached by strangers wanting to declare "I have a Google Wave account before anyone else. My penis is large!"

Now let’s talk about these invites Unlike GMail where Google genuinely offered invitations that allowed me to instantly bring someone else into the project, Google Wave is offering nominations. (Btw, I still have 99 invitations to GMail if anyone needs one and those are free!) If a nomination is truly a nomination, then the more of these that you get, the faster you will get to the front of the line. If you want to test this theory and have invitations available, contact my wife @cathymccaughan and send her an invite..er, nomination, and let’s drive her to the front of the line. I have seen no documentation that indicates 10 invites..er, nominations, will get you to the line faster than one but it seems sensible to me. We could start a Wave about this but you’ll need an invite..er, nomination first.

Who got my invites? My invitations went out to friends, family and clients with whom I may actually collaborate. If you didn’t get one, that means 1) that maybe I added you to my nomination list and your invite just hasn’t gone out yet or 2) I simply ran out of invites..er, nominations before I got to you. My apologies.

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New things I tried today

I tried Google Wave and see great potential in collaboration. I also see Google Wave treading into Facebook’s territory not Twitter’s. Mashable has the best write-up thus far including a reference to Google Wave’s advance serarch commands. Robert Scoble discusses the overhype and sums up the problem I’m trying to get my head around "noise" and "I don’t know where to look".

I tried TinyChat which is a video chat service that promises to supplant Skype but the true potential is in the features included in the $14.95/mth price. The video quality is high. The features are well integrated into the user interface. I think this could be a lot of fun for synchronous chat but I question why use TinyChat instead of ustream.tv or Livestream.

I’ve also tried Twirl TV which looks a lot like Hulu for the networks. They also claim to only be letting the first 10,000 people in.

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Prevent Compatibility View

Internet Explorer 8 introduced a button beside the address bar that looks like a rectangle with a break through its middle. If you click it, Internet Explorer reports, "Compatibility View on" but the button does not clearly indicate if compatibility view is on or off. Compatibility view is Internet Explorer 8 pretending to be Internet Explorer 7. To prevent your website visitors from clicking this button, simply make it go away:

Include either the following meta element (which in invalid in HTML5) on your page <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge"> (before any script elements!) or set the following HTTP header on your page: X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge

[Source, hsivonen.iki.fi, Activating Browser Modes with Doctype]

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Browser Testing

Yea there was Gopher and it was good.
Lo and behold, Mosaic!
And it was slow.
Veronica, Gopher, and I were the hare to the Mosaic tortoise.
But Mosaic was pretty.
And Netscape Navigator became standard.
Microsoft saw Mosaic was good and, like Netscape, based Internet Explorer upon Mosaic’s code.
But Microsoft was evil and the world loved Netscape.
Programmers knew code must work in Netscape and then maybe in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3 for W3C standards were good, and CSS was good, as long as Microsoft could have some of their own proprietary "standards."
Still Netscape dominated.
Enter Internet Explorer 4 and Browser War I was lost.
Now we tested for first for IE3, IE4, and then Netscape Navigator.
Internet Explorer 5 – meh.
Quirks mode – blah.
WML? No one will ever browse with their phone. WAP!
Internet Explorer 6 – WTH!
Opera.
Mosaic beget Navigator beget Mozilla.
And geeks professed the end of Microsoft while normal people replied, "Firewhat?"
Internet Explorer 7 -FTW.
Now we tested for Internet Explorer at least version 7 and 6, Mozilla/Firefox, and maybe Navigator.
Oh, don’t forget to test with JavaScript enabled and disabled, delete your cookies, clear your cache but be ready to explain this to your end users, and don’t forget the magic reboot.
Internet Explorer 8 – is great?
Be sure to include conditional code for a special IE6 cascading style sheet.
What is Flock?
What is compatibility mode?
All hail Google’s Chrome!
What do you mean? Regular people use Macintosh computers!
Apple has a browser? Safari!
Browser War II.
The website looks different on your phone than your computer?
When you say your Internet enabled toaster prints the New York Times fine but my blog burns your toast, is all the bread blackened or just the crust?
And my website does not control the spooling on your Internet enabled toilet paper dispenser.
And if the ink is smearing on your butt, that just means you are wiping before reading the paper.

What is browser compatibility? Testing against this list.

Today I have a website that looks good in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8. I have not been able to test it in Internet Explorer 7 but will be fixing that today. However, if I put Internet Explorer 8 into "compatibility view," my horizontal list based css driven navigation menu breaks. IE8 Compatibility Mode and IE7 are NOT the same thing! There are many differences between IE8 compatibility view and IE7. So today I’m playing with Internet Explorer’s Virtual Compatibility images.

Interesting, this browser history appeared in my feed today after I posted this.

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What killed the public option?

$19 million and 5 purchased votes shot down the best change that could have ever come to this country.

Max Baucus got $7,734,102, Blanche Lincoln received $4,190,592, Ken Conrad took in $3,287,891, Bill Nelson was given $2,414,895 and Tom Carper accepted $1,592,380 from health industry interests. [Source, Intershame.com, Bought by the Insurance Lobby]

These Senators clearly voted against the wishes of their constituents who 81% favor the public option. Is this another example of the Government of the Corporation? In CEO We Trust.

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Now where’s my unicycle?

Years ago I had a unicycle. Years ago I was a mountain biker. As I approach 40. I lament that I may never do these things again. Perhaps I need to rethink that.(that was an awkward forced sentence because I don’t really feel that way) {Dear Reader, Fill in something here that connects the thought that I used to do these things and he still does as my Muse escapes me. Then skip all these words and just watch the video.} At 53 years old, Unigeezer is both unicycling and mountain biking like someone in their 20s!

Check out UniGeezer.

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Killer Stress

Stress will make my life shorter.

I woke this morning feeling hung over but I didn’t have anything to drink. For that matter, I had a decent amount of sleep, slept like a rock, and had ultra vivid dreams. I know getting a handle on my stress is essential. The side effects of stress that I’m experiencing are increased absentmindedness, memory loss (rather recall issues..I believe the memories are there but the ability to draw them out is hindered by stress), sore muscles, headache, blurred vision, and exhaustion.

I want to live a long stress-free life. Time to get back to Quad II.

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Sometimes I hate computers

I spent some of this weekend making the final transition back to my desktop so that I could give Tommy full custody of his laptop back. Of course, before I gave it back, one of the dogs knocked the laptop off my desk breaking one of the keys. Fortunately there was no other damage. Saturday Sarah’s Palm Centro died. Unfortunately it is out of warranty and after 2 hours on the phone, AT&T declared it a hardware issue. My phone has turned flaky as all get out randomly turning itself off even in the middle of a phone call. Then the icing on the cake, this morning my desktop computer quit recognizing the new hard drive. I wonder if Denso is hiring. I think I could handle a union, an assembly and a repetitive task.

Update: Just to keep the day interesting, we brought a plant in from the porch in anticipation of tonight’s cold weather, placed the plant in the bathroom, Cathy got into the bath, then the yellow jackets started emerging from the plant’s soil.