We’re all agreed this is nothing to be proud of. It is .37mi farther than I’ve run in the past 12 months combined though. So I’m not going to beat myself up too much.

The plan is to make it .25mi further than the day before every time I run until I hit 4mi. At that point I will work on speed.

If you want to motivate me/keep me accountable, let me know and I’ll invite you to be one of my motivators on traineo.

Neil is our in-house SEO pro. Aside from being a marketing junkie, Neil also enjoys testing the limits of his CPU. Checkout the man’s desktop - it’s amazing. Here are some stats:

• 8 Microsoft Word windows open
• 12 yahoo instant messenger windows open
• 10 Firefox windows open (my man needs to get acquainted with tabbed browsing)
• 6 notepad documents open
• and 1 explorer window open

If only windows featured Exposé.

Note: This is the actual layout - his left monitor swivels to display vertically.

Spent five 30 minutes playing the world’s most addicting game. My hi score was 9.36 10.38.

For months now, Yahoo! Search Marketing has been sending emails to salivating search engine marketers explaining all the new, sexy, features YSM will have in Q3 and Q4, while painting a bright, targeted and usable future for YSM advertisers.

Pull out your khakis and hiking boots, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Panama platform has gone live! Although the thoughts of new targeting and scheduling features are always exciting, this brings up another question. What’s the learning curve? Will all these new and potentially useful features help leverage online shopping to its full potential for the holiday season? Or will these functions confuse advertisers during the holiday season and become a stumbling block to the already familiar platform until the primetime season is over?
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The waiting room is located (no doubt strategically) out of the line of site to the service desk. We certainly wouldn’t want customers witnessing the mechanics sharing the state of our vehicles with the “service” reps. So, every 30 minutes or so a rep would open the glass door, single out a customer and share the sad news. “You’re vehicle really needs some work.” My wife witnessed one such customer get reemed a new one over a gas cap of all things. “Sir, you’re gas cap is missing - just so happens we’ve got one on the shelf. It’s only $25.00. Should we just add it onto your bill?” The man shrugged his shoulders in reluctant agreement.

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Spent some time checking out ebible.com this morning. This looks to be one more reason for me to get a mobile phone with WiFi. Among ebible’s features, one stands out to me as particularly intriguing - the user’s ability to tag or “book mark” a verse. In other words, anyone with an account can can add a tag (like “peace” “hope” or “thundercats”) to a verse. While I’m sure this is monitored, it would be interesting to know what criteria deem a tag acceptable.

Tagging the bible,while on one hand a very clever tool, could get rather complicated. Following are some questions for consideration … and possibly discussion?

1. Does ebible leave interpretation up to the user?
2. If so, is that a good thing? Why or why not?
3. Should there be a person of authority discerning the tags?
4. If so, who should that person be? What biases are helpful/unhelpful?

While I have a few reservations (including thoughts on advertising goods/services alongside the Bible) they are just that - few. I’m personally pretty stoked about this - especially some of the tools.

I installed the ebible FF search bar with one easy cliick. There’s a search bar available for IE too, but why would anyone want to use that browser?

I thought I would compile a list of problems I’m having with IE7. The objective here is not to flame, but to come up with a useful reference list for web developers transitioning and acclimating to Internet Explorer 7. My system is Windows XP SP2.

Browser Rendering Differences

This one blog article could not possibly contain a comprehensive list of differences and problems and problems with CSS rendering, but you can go to the following places to get started. As pretty much everyone knows now, IE7 can read some CSS 2.1 rules that IE6 cannot, but in many cases the actual rules that were being hidden from IE6 are still not rendered properly in IE7.

- IEBlog Article with details on the upcoming release of IE7
- De-Hacking IE7 and other articles on PositionIsEverything.Net are an incredible compilation of the findings of web developers worldwide.

I have started using IE Conditional Comments to serve changes to all versions of IE. If you want to target IE7 in your CCed stylesheet, use the child combinator (as in html>body p) to serve rules only to IE7 and later. If you have a rule that only needs IE6 adjustment, I find the underscore hack (as in _margin-top: 5px;) works well and is easy to spot in your stylesheet. I haven’t found a situation that could not be taken care of with one or both of these techniques.

Update: we have also found that using a flavor of the holly hack can allow a developer to target IE7 only. You can read about its workings here.

*:first-child+html ...

You can use any combination of descendant selectors after that prefix and it is completely valid CSS!

Windows Applications Compatibility

Upon rebooting after the IE7 install, I found that I could not login to any of my sites in the Dreamweaver 8 Site Manager. A quick search turned this Dreamweaver Technote, which provides the solution: Dreamweaver 8 for Windows loses FTP login settings. I only lost saved logins of sites which I attempted to open before applying the patch. If you apply this patch before attempting to load any sites, you will not experience any problems.

More will be added to this as we experience new issues. Good luck!

I noticed an article on the IEBlog mentioning that IE7 will be released this month. It sports improvements from IE6, but it is still Internet Explorer, and that means it needs the short bus special treatment. What does this mean for our clients?

I have opened a few sites in IE7 to get a feel for it, but I have not had time to sit down and do real QA. I am not a huge user of CSS hacks, so I am not expecting days of re-styling, but I’m no fool, and I expect at least a few hiccups.

Preparing for Internet Explorer 7

If you go to the article I’ve linked to, you’ll find useful links pointing to the latest RC build of IE7, a readiness toolkit, and a knowledge base for IE7. There are other tools for developers of programs which integrate with Internet Explorer to provide functionality (like Quicken’s ability to go download transactions from your bank).
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