Recently Slicksta has been checking out the action / non-action on the Shiba inu Puppy Cam. He finds its strangely mesmerizing and relaxing. Be sure you turn your sound ON!
Slicksta is in awe of Brad Sciullo who recently finished a 15 pound burger in about 4.5 hours. “When asked what possessed him to eat a burger that big, Sciullo said: ‘I wanted to see if I could.’”
Slicksta is sick of hearing about beta releases. Limited beta. Private beta. Public beta. Closed beta. Beta invites. “Beta” is a label slapped on sites and used as an excuse for bugs, sloppy design or poor performance.
Launch when you’re ready and deal with problems as a natural part of running a website.
There was a segment on NPR last week about the fishing industry. Needless to say, Slicksta was a little dismayed at what he heard:
Wild salmon get their orange flesh from a pigment in the krill they eat. Farm raised salmon are fed an artificial pigment to match this color. Their flesh would be light gray otherwise.
Fish suppliers sometimes pump carbon monoxide into tuna flesh to keep it bright red. The carbon monoxide reverses the natural oxidation process that turns the tuna’s flesh spotty and brown.
“Chilean Sea Bass” is the marketing name invented to boost sales of the unfortunately named “Patagonian Toothfish”
Slicksta just caught up on some weekend TV and barely made it through the 50th Annual Grammy Awards. What a disaster! Here is some Slicktified constructive criticism for the producers and directors of the show.
Quit it with the mash-ups. Having artists from different eras or genres perform together is more novel an idea than exciting a performance. And getting country singers to introduce rap categories or vice versa is not that clever either.
Don’t give out too many lifetime achievement awards. Paying tribute to great artists of yesteryear is great in Slicksta’s book but it seemed like everyone who recorded an album before 1980 got recognized this year.
Shorten the show puh-lease. The 3.5 hours was painful for Slicksta even with even the commercials fast-forwarded. Maybe 10-15 less lifetime achievement awards.
Resist the urge to design contests where fans can appear on-stage or perform live. Slicksta loved the Foo Fighters performance (Foo Fighters rock - YEAH DUDE!) but the violinist who got the most votes, from us the fans, watching at home in TV-land, contributed nothing to the song. She kinda just stood there with all the other violinists. Any viewers who paid to text-message in their votes was ripped off.
Throw some political clout around and get your winningest performer into the country. If Slicksta knew ahead of time that Amy Winehouse was going to win big he’d have called in some favors with the State Department (is that BitTorrent on your computer Condy?) and made sure she was at Staples. Hers was one of the best performances of the night and it was a shame that Cuba Gooding Jr. was the only America who got to see it in person.
Some companies make it really hard for their employees to use instant messaging programs at work. Slicksta thinks this is terrible and wants to help you stay in touch with your buddies! If you find your IM access blocked at work try one of the following sites:
There are many blogging platforms and services out there but Slicksta hearts the most. Aspiring bloggers whether technically inclined or not will find WordPress easy to understand and even simpler to use.
Easy to Install - The famous “Five Minute Install” is misleading. It usually takes Slicksta 2-3 minutes tops to get an new instance of WordPress up and running.
Easy to Configure - Out of the box zip file Wordpress is ready to go. You can easily customize the design of your blog and features like commenting, how the URL looks. All of this is done via a slick AJAXed admin panel.
Easy to Customize - Trick out your blog with one of many free themes and plugins. All you do is upload a theme/plugin to your blog and click a link in the admin panel to activate it.
Active Community - There are lots of people who love WordPress and they write themes and plugins for everyone to use. WordPress hosts an active forum where users share tips and help one another.
FREE - WordPress is free and always has been. You can even create a hosted blog and not worry about having to buy a domain name or FTPing files. Slicksta can afford free.
Looking to get into PHP/MySQL development? Building websites as a hobby can be fun and rewarding albeit time-consuming. These open source technologies make web development accessible to anyone with a computer and an idea. Here are a few sites and services that Slicksta found helpful when he was learning.
1and1 Hosting - Inexpensive, reliable and fully-featured. You can register a domain name and get managed hosting for under $5 a month.
Add the MySQL and PHP sites to your bookmarks. Slicksta still visits these at least once a day for code reference information.
phpAdmin - Download and install this database management program now. Do it! It’s the same program that you’ll use on 1and1 to manage your hosted databases.
Fire FTP - Transfer files in a FireFox window. No need to open another application.
