Everybody is talking these days about the financial cryis, that affects us all, but is it like this when it comes to special shopping events like Black Friday deals, Cyber Monday sales and such?
An easy way to see what happened in tha past years is to use google trends, which I did. You can see what I’ve found by looking at the picture below:
It’s pretty obvious that the crysis is affecting Black Friday Sales, but at a less level than how it affects daily online sales. Now the tricky part is to guess how sales will go this year. My take on this is that if the crysis begins to end sales will go up a notch, but if not expect another 20-30 % decrease during Black Friday.
I’m at least a geek when it comes to computers, I’ve said that and my friends said that too. I’ve always loved to use a dual monitor computer setup. I’ve been doing that at work and at home for the past months. Initially there’s the sensation of space: you have more room (pixels in this case), you don’t need to use ALT + TAB so often to switch applications and so on. You can really feel your productivity going up.
Then, with time you start feeling the negative side and start wondering: if I had three monitors will I work more, and how more, or what to do to keep focus and not be overloaded by the information displayed simultaneous to me. Then you find yourself watching a movie and reading the news at the same time (yes, it happened to me a few times) si you ask yourself if that is normal.
Now that the new elected President of the United States took the White House chair stories about George W. Bush administration started to appear. One such movie is W., a masterpiece by Oliver Stone. As you might expect it’ s a “chronicle about the life and presidency of George W. Bush”. I don’t know is the facts presented are true, and at which extent, but I incline to believe they are.
Josh Brolin, the actor that impersonates W. does a very good job at mimicking the President. The whole movie tries to unveil the history behind the worst President of USA (as a lot of people say), how he got the power and what he did with it. It’s a highly recommended movie.
I’m a gadget freak, always wanting the latest and the greatest and as expected I always try to be up to date with anything in my domain of interest, including upgrading hardware and drivers. Today I’ve learned of a big firmware problem for some Seagate hardrives. As I own several Seagate drives I’ve bookmarked the article so that I could investigate more when I got home.
Needless to say that all my Seagate drives (I have two, by the way) were targeted as affected by a firmware problem that could cause data to become inaccessible upon system power up. I got a little scared and thought to update the firmware from Seagate’s website.
On of the advantages of working in the IT Press, even remotely, is that you get to test the latest gadgets and be the one that tells friends what to buy, not the one that asks. This week we’ve received at the office the 5800 XpressMusic, the first serious touchscreen phone from Nokia.
I don’t want to write a preview, but just to make a short list of the ups and downs I’ve found for the Nokia Tube, as it was called before any official announcement, when was seen in the Dark Knight movie.
If you want to keep the money coming you have to keep the posts coming, that’s the essence of making money from your blog. You can’t expect people to come by regularly, read your thoughts, recommend you to friends if you write an article a week or month. Practice shows that a constant flow of articles has a greater chance of making a habit for people to visit your website.
Also in the era of RSS, constant good writing makes people subscribe to your feed. All sounds pretty easy to follow, but what do you do when inspiration is lost, as you can’t have good days every day? There’s a solution for this too: make a draft every time you have an idea, writing down a few words to remember you what the original idea was. This way you have a buffer of future articles that you can write and program to appear on your website on regular intervals.
Wordpress’s founder just turned 25. Imagine how many people got to do something in their early twenties that’s being used by 80% of the product’s target, bloggers that’s it. I don’t know anyone like that in person.
Congrats Matt, but that’s not what I want to write about in this post. I want to write about committing to do something right. I’ve been familiar with Wordpress since version 1.something (1.3 or 1.4 I believe) and it was not my first CMS to use (PHP Nuke was the first one). I’m mainly a content guy, meaning that most of the websites I’ve created or worked for were content websites or websites that used content in a significant percentage.
One of the reasons people think Vista is a crappy operating system is the that they’re used to Windows XP and can’t do simple tasks they did before as Vista changed the placement of some functions and intoduced new modules, trying to be an easy to understand OS for beginners. Unfortunately the large mass of people used to various Windows versions are confuzed when switching to Vista.
I, for myself, an early Vista adopter (since Release Candidate 2, if I remember well), as I’m always liked new things and as Windows XP was on the market for a long time I’ve wanted something else. But even now, after two years of using Vista I’m still confused sometimes when faced with simple tasks, like File Sharing without a password, which I needed a few days ago and just yesterday I’ve managed to do it right.
I’ve just accessed the Google Reader’s trends page and saw that in the past 30 days I’ve read over 15.000 items in 148 subscriptions. And that’s in a 30 days period when I didn’t had access toInternet at least 10 days… That’s a lot of news read, even if I just take a quick look at the title and scan for pictures of bold-ed words, it’s a lot of information.
A few years ago I wouldn’t dreamed of the Internet being so big and overwhelming sometimes. In it’s childhood we needed search engines to find information on Internet, not we need sorting websites, that bring in front of our eyes news that matter to us, not a pile of information.
Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a good website that puts together multiple sources of the same subject, with highlighted catch phrases. At least I can’t seem to find a website that does that efficiently and that can be trusted not to miss something important.
I loved netbooks from the first time ASUS announced the EEE PC. What’s not to like about a computer touted to cost 200$ and do basic office stuff, browsing and multimedia? The “crazy idea” caught up people’s attention and in less than a year every big notebook brand has it’s own netbook in their own product lineup.
One of the reasons people think Vista is a crappy operating system is the that they’re used to Windows XP and can’t do simple tasks they did before as Vista changed the placement of some functions and intoduced new modules, trying to be an easy to understand OS for beginners. Unfortunately the large mass of people used to various Windows versions are confuzed when switching to Vista.
I loved netbooks from the first time ASUS announced the 
G | 
Jack | 
