Though my fellow Italian-American Frank Sinatra crooned, “regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention,” I am confident when I say I have no regrets.

Wouldn’t it be great to go back in time and change something that happened? The problem is, if we changed something we didn’t like, it could affect something that did happen to us that we did like. Plus I thought the movie Groundhog Day was a little annoying anyway.

There are a few things in my live that I wish I didn’t do or I wish turned out different or better, but there’s plenty more things that I am extremely proud of and thankful for. From being a DJ to managing my college radio station, to spending time in Louisville, Kentucky during a basketball national championship, to meeting my best friend and marrying her, to being president of the Boston Jaycees and speaking to a packed audience at Belfast, Northern Ireland City Hall, to experiencing the Patriots and Red Sox winning it all, to all of the people who have been with me along this journey... these are just a few of the things that have made it a great life, and there’s a lot more living to do.

So why am I reflecting? Today is my 40th birthday. I wrote this ahead of time and post-dated it to today and the time I was born in Dunkirk, New York… yes, that’s where the name of my business comes from. Though I am not worked up about hitting the big Four-Oh, it is nice to have this opportunity to look back and be thankful.

Diversions • (5) Comments • Permalink

Years ago I worked on a huge Web project for a huge company where the smallest problem became a crisis. We started getting reports of a “gray screen” problem for many users when they first went into the application. In the end, we found since these users were behind a proxy server, it took a few seconds for the first page to load, and as a result the browser was displaying a blank page in the default background color, which for Internet Explorer 4 was gray.

From that point in 1999 to today, I always override the default background color of the browser – which today for both IE and Firefox is white – to lime green. Why? It is a great way to test if a default background color is set, as well as if there are any images off even a pixel, as lime green tends to stand out.

Sometimes having lime green is annoying, but is necessary for howI work. For some reason, many, many Web designers and developers neglect to set the background color on a Web page. Why? I do not know. It’s not difficult to do. In CSS you can use the background-color property for the body selector and give it a hex value for white or whatever color you are using. And for the old schoolers the bgcolor attribute for the body tag, but let’s not go there.

So who’s guilty? Too many to mention here. One example is the much-hyped "new" design for the Chicago Tribune’s Web site. Here’s what the home page looks like to me:

What I found interesting is the entire site is not background colorless. When I read Eric Zorn’s blog, it is green, but Maureen Ryan’s blog is white.

Some of you may say what is the big deal – just don’t set the background color to lime green, Mike. Not setting the background color is sloppy and incomplete coding, and when there is a change later that requires a color, then having missing colors will cause for more work. Realizing there is a default color helps in the design of sites for those who require a different color, namely those with a visual impairment.

I’ll stay on my soapbox for a bit more if anyone has any comments.

Technology • (4) Comments • Permalink

File this under not communicating with your IT department about what is going on in the company.

On Monday, DVD rental service Netflix announced it was cutting its prices to better compete with Blockbuster's prices and in-store redemption service. Shortly afterwards netflix.com crashed and did not come back online until late Tuesday. It was said it was not due to the power outages in the San Francisco area, and though a specific reason was not given, it was reported the Web site was being updated to reflect the price changes.

Updating prices causes an entire network of Web servers to crash? Who wrote that software? When I worked for a publicly-traded company in the past, I was always on alert from marketing and investors’ relations whenever the company would announce earnings or have an investor’s call, as people would hit our Web site for the information or links. We had sufficient capacity with out Web servers and network, but hardware can always fail. This brings back memories of the crash of Wal-Mart’s Web site last year on “black Friday” or the busiest shopping day of the year the day after Thanksgiving.

Planning for such events and having the network, hardware and software capacity can prevent such events. Sure it may be expensive, but what price for such embarrassment?

Business • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink

One feature I like about Google Reader is the ability to subscribe to podcasts and play them on the Web page. However when performing my daily routine of reading feeds and listening to podcasts as I have my first of many cups of coffee, if I click on a new entry while listening to a podcast, the podcast stops and goes away – I have to go in and change the view to read all, and then restart the podcast.

Last week I noticed a "popout" link next to the audio player. By clicking on it, a small pop-up window with just the audio player appears, and I can play the podcast and continue reading other feeds with no problem. The screenshot in this post shows the feed for The Hot Iron audio version from Odiogo with the popout window on top of some of the text – click on the screen to see a larger version.

This is a great new feature and adds more fuel to the debate over what is the best feed reader. Though Google Reader could improve its batching and sorting capabilities, allowing me to listen to The M Show while I read my other feeds is an advantage over the others.

Technology • (1) Comments • Permalink

File this one under worlds colliding for the benefit of domain names at the expense of Hollywood disobedience.

Rob of TheRobboReport.com sent this article from TMZ.comon domain names, where it mentions that domainers with an eye towards Tinseltown have registered the domain names lohanbusted.com and lohaninjail.com back in May, prior to the rehab visit and subsequent arrest of actress Lindsay Lohan. The article even posed a challenge for someone to register britneymeltsdown.com, which was done earlier today.

TMZ.com is an entertainment gossip Web site that is somehow affiliated with AOL. If you think you may have heard of TMZ, you may have seen it featured on your favorite local newscast, as in the constant effort my local media to not cover local events, they prominently feature the escapades of celebrities... but I digress.

Domain names registered based on news events is nothing new, but the coverage of it by media sources outside of the tech world is, and is very welcome.

Domain Names • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink