Okay, here are some pictures and videos of who we like to call, “Mersh.” This nickname has become a necessity because his first name is quite popular these days.
Mersh fought in two categories, “Men’s NO-GI Executive Novice” and “Mens GI Executive White Belt Middle Weight.” These are basically two beginner level categories. NAGA divides people up by their skill level, weight and age.
Fourth blue stripe on Brazilian Jiu Jitsu white belt
Yeah, it’s my fourth blue stripe on my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu white belt. That was easy. Do you know what it really is? It’s two months of rolling around and about 15 billion calories burned. Oh yeah, it’s also a lot of sweat.
This is my last stripe for this belt. The next step is a blue belt. To me, this is huge because the blue belt is a big leap. It’s going from nothing to being a force to be reckoned with. Seriously, blue belts have gotten pretty knowledgeable about what they are getting into. They can hold their own.
I’m excited because I have been putting a lot of work into this stuff and I like knowing I am getting somewhere. By the way, when I get my blue belt we are going to have a parade. You should really stop by.
So a lot has gone on at our club in the past few months. I attended my first seminar with a world champion Jiu Jitsu black belt. His name is Brian Johnson and he comes from Seattle Washington. Check out one of his videos. This is when Brian wins the 2009 Abu Dhabi Combat Club Regionals.
He is a really nice guy and we learned a lot.
Lately, we have been having guys from a few different schools come by to work out with us. It’s really helpful because we get some great exposure to different styles and techniques. The visiting guys love it because we have a nice club. They get to learn some stuff and we get to learn some stuff. There usually is a healthy variety of belts. We get some white belts, blue belts, purple belts and even two brown belts. The brown belts are really awesome to roll with because they offer simple but very effective tips. They don’t just beat us up. They kind of draw us out to see what we need help in and then tweak us to make whatever we are doing better. I picked up three really cool techniques that I have been incorporating into our classes.
I think there is a bit of a buzz about our school out there. A lot of guys are stopping by with big smiles. They love working out with us and, you know, this is the new year. You might like it too. If you live in the Hartford area, check us out.
Do you think I grew up living under a rock? I must have because I am the biggest loser when it comes to music. When people ask me what I like, I can only thing of something like four bands.
My lady and I merged all our music a few weeks back (now that’s commitment). Together, we have 393 albums. I have probably listened to about 10 of them.
If you remember back, by listening to one of her albums, I was introduced to “Days Of The New.” I have since then fallen in love with them.
Last night, I was cruising the albums and I decided to listen to this guy called Peter Gabriel. Of course I have heard of Peter Gabriel, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about him more than one day ago. After reading his Wikipedia page and watching about 20 YouTube videos, I am well versed in all things Peter Gabriel.
I am digging this guy. Again, I am well aware of my loserishness.
If you are closely tuned in to the web world as I am, you may have heard that Google may include “web page load time” as one of their ranking factors in 2010. I heard about this, saw a few videos about this and read about this. Apparently, when Google talks about changing what makes people’s websites rank differently, people listen…and then talk about it themselves.
I run a bunch of different websites. Some of them have rather large page sizes. The reason they are so large is because of additional files beyond simple HTML that each page pulls in to make the web page behave correctly. These files, such as .js and .css files can get kind of big. Over the years, I didn’t really dig too deeply into the page size issue because the sites get fairly good traffic. I just let things ride.
A few days ago, I came across a post on a forum that talked about mod_gzip or otherwise known as GZIP. This is software that you can install on your web server that compresses your web pages up to 70%. Google recommends that webmasters use GZIP to speed up their websites. Google likes to present its visitors with nice speedy pages in their search results.
I read that it’s pretty easy to deploy GZIP and that it really shouldn’t take more than a few minutes (if it’s already installed on your server). I decided to give it a try. So I did. It didn’t work. Hmmm.
I called my web host and started asking questions. I was like, YO B%^&*, what up with my GZIP??? No really, I was polite. I asked about why GZIP wasn’t giving me any compression results and they told me that I was running Apache2 and that mod_deflate was already installed, not mod_gzip. All I needed to do was to deploy it. I kind of like the name “GZIP” better than “DEFLATE” but who am I to argue?
By the way, here are some good resources on using GZIP and DEFLATE:
First, I asked the web host to deploy mod_deflate on only one domain. I wanted to gauge the results and also take a night to see if anything got screwed up from it. They were agreeable and did the following:
At your request I enabled mod_deflate for one domain on server 123456:
I checked out some stuff overnight and since everything looked fine in the morning, I gave the web host a call back and asked them to undo what they did to that individual domain and set it up server-wide. They put the server back the way it was and set up mod_deflate to compress all the websites on the server by doing this:
Created a file /my/path/mod_deflate.conf with the following line:
That was about it. Since Apache2 comes with mod_deflate installed already, all we had to do was to deploy it. We did this both for an individual domain and server-wide.
I bet you want to know about the results, right? Okay. Well, I can tell you that I had some web pages that were over 400kb. They are now running at about 165kb. I also had some web pages that were about 445kb. They are now running at about 45kb. That’s about 10% of what it was. Is that crazy? Yes, it’s nuts.
Next week, I am going to deploy mod_deflate on my other web server. That should really make some positive changes.
There are a few things you should know. The first thing is that if you decide to do this and have a cable internet connection where you are connected to the internet, you most likely won’t notice much of a change. I read that this has something to do with packets. I am not that smart, so I just took this statement as face value. Although, I run cable and didn’t really notice much of a change. People who use DSL and dial up will definitely see some speed improvements from the smaller web page sizes.
Also, if you are running a website and are using a shared server, you may not be able to use mod_gzip or mod_deflate. Since both of these modules use an increased amount of processing power, many web hosts won’t allow its use. If you aren’t aware, some of these web hosts pack like 10 billion websites on each server. Any increase in CPU demand is going to cause problems. Still, you should give them a call to see what they say. You might get lucky.
I read somewhere a few days ago that pictures and video on the internet don’t do the Motorola Droid justice. Boy, they were right about that. In person, this thing is phenomenal.
After Jiu Jitsu practice this afternoon, I somehow ended up in the Verizon Wireless store in Glastonbury. Don’t ask me how I got there, it was a blur. All I know is that I wanted this new PDA because the screen is much larger than my current Blackberry Curve screen and I can see the browser 100% better. Also, HTML emails show up as HTML, not text with code all over the place. It’s a superb business tool.
I am going to keep this post short because the Motorola Droid has been plastered all over the internet and television for that past few weeks. I am not going to go over all that again, but I will throw a nice little video in this post for you. Let me say this…the phone is awesome. Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts are seamless. Apps are just a few clicks away. The operating system is extremely intuitive. At first glance, I thought I would actually need the manual to learn how things work. About 15 minutes of playing with the phone gave me a good working knowledge of how to use just about everything.
The Motorola Droid is the best PDA device I have ever touched…hands down.
I’m not even sure I am going to head down this road. I don’t want to use too many tools offered by one company. It is a good idea though…
Here’s the problem. Google offers the tools that rock. I mean seriously. I have mentioned this before, but it’s true now more than ever. I use a lot of tools online that are offered by a variety of companies. The one company that seems to really get it right is Google. Somehow, they have gotten in my head and figured out what I want.
I don’t know how they did that.
Perhaps it’s the median age of their employees. I bet it’s the same age as I am. I also bet that many of Google’s employees like the same things I do and do what I do. We appreciate the same types of cars and read the same magazines. I suppose I am a market for them.
So, what’s Google Voice?
From Wikipedia: “Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral) is a telecommunications service by Google launched on March 11, 2009. The service provisions a U.S. phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. Inbound calls to this number are forwarded to other phone numbers of the subscriber. Outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations by dialing the Google Voice number or from a web-based application.”
Kind of reminds my of Skype, except Skype has video as well, which is really cool. I bet (if they don’t already), Google Voice will have that soon too.
Well folks, as you can see, this is where things are heading. Get ready to use your cell phone with some sort of a voice app on it. Also, get ready for video calls on your cell phone. Oh wait, that’s probably already available. Where have I been?
By the way, if you are interested in getting in on Google Voice, you can click here to visit Google’s blog post with instructions on what to do.
Have you seen this? I guess the launch was today, because the new “Dyson Air Multiplier” is all over the place on the web. It’s funny, because as I was looking for videos to post here, they were being posted to YouTube pretty rapidly.
Basically, this “bladeless” fan consists of a stand (with a fan in it) and a big round thing (with a slit in it) that the fan pushed the air through.
Some people are saying that this is simply revolutionary. Some people are saying this is just a fan with hidden blades. I say that this guy is a genius because he can 1. come up with such a simple idea, 2. create such a buzz about it, and 3. actually get people to spend $300 on such a device. Hey, you can’t blame him.
Check out the two videos. In the first one, you see a woman with a weird grin on her face who is just mesmerized by the cutting edge technology of this new fan. If you’ll notice the hair in this video, it’s blowing as if the woman and baby were standing in front of a traditional fan.
Now, take a look at this video. Do you notice anything strange? Yup, there is not a hair out of place. Also, it seems very much like these people are either hired or work for the company. What kind of person right off the street says, “It looks like another amazing new technology?”
So, what do you think of the Dyson Air Multiplier? Will it sell?
I just heard of this thing called Google Wave. Now, I use a lot of tools on the web and many of them are offered by Google, but when it comes to sheer continuity, this tops the cake. Google Wave basically merges many functions of GMail, orkut, Friend Connect, Picasa, Docs, Chat and probably many more. It’s pretty incredible.
For a while now, I have been wondering where some of these tools were headed. I mean, the last time I heard of orkut was a few years ago. I had no idea that there was a buzz about it and development of it behind the scenes.
Since I am really no good at tearing apart a video to regurgitate its contents, I’ll just post the video. Check it out.
This is the big news today. From what I am reading all over the web anyway. Microsoft has taken the beta version of “Microsoft Security Essentials” anti-virus software out of beta and allowing the public to download it for free.
For free? What? I did a little doubletake at this one. I have been looking for good free anti-virus software for a while. Well, ever since Norton AntiVirus started annoying me. Let me tell you why I got annoyed:
1. Every time I have to renew Norton, it seems like the price goes up. How much higher can they go?
2. Norton has this annoying feature that sets auto-renew to “on” by default. While this is good for those of us who forget to renew our anti-virus software, it can get annoying for us who can handle this chore. Personally, I like to give my options a yearly review. Good thing they send that email to warn me and to remind me to turn off auto-renew.
3. Apparently, Norton has had some issues with double-charging their customers when it comes time to renew the software. They did this to me. Hey, don’t take my word for it, just click here to see for yourself.
The reviews on Microsoft Security Essentials have been pretty good. I watched a few videos of the beta version and people seem pretty happy with what they get. Remember, this is free, but I think it only works on Windows. It’s a shame we just renewed three computers here at about $50 each. Yeah, I told you it was expensive.
Here is a video describing the free anti-virus software.
Oh yeah…if you want to download Microsoft Security Essentials, click here.
Sometimes, when I am just sitting here doing nothing, I’ll go over to YouTube and search for “prank.” What I find is sometimes horribly funny.
Here, I’ll show you one of my favorite prank videos real fast…
Isn’t it the best?
I have gone through so many of these. I really love the hair dryer ones. They make me cry.
A few nights ago, after watching many hair dryer pranks, I came across some videos called “Prank Wars.” These are pranks thought up by the funny guys over at collegehumor.com. I watched all of the Prank Wars videos. The following video is the final one (I think).
This was the ultimate prank. Mind you, there are all very elaborate. I think there are something like seven Prank Wars pranks. They started off small and then got bigger and bigger. You just have to watch them to see what I’m talking about. If you go to YouTube and search under “Prank Wars,” you can see all of the pranks listed there. Go ahead and watch them. Let me know what you think.
