meJoe.com

Like anyone, my life is marked by phases. There is a lot of overlap in types of phases. Some people have a healthy phase, family phase, watch certain show/director/actor phase, etc. During those phases, every ounce of your free energy is dedicated to the egoistic focal point of the phase. I love these, but lately mine have been far to pragmatic.

I realized today that I need a learning phase that has no end in sight. I need the chance to read and explore without expecting an outcome

Enter SXSW. Tony Hsieh from Zappos shared his inquiry into the scientific research available about Happiness. Obviously there is a reason he was interested in it, but I doubt he expects to deliver something specific.

If he has the time to do it, I should be able too.

“Fear of paying cash for your new car.” I try to avoid debt, but this is ridiculous. It must be a fear of banks or something.

Matthew Sachs has a great evaluation of the Rackspace Mosso Cloud offering. He did a performance test and his results turned out quite positively. From what I understand the test was unsolicited.

Firefox Plugins

• Web Developer Toolbar
• Firebug
• Firefox Accessibility Extension
• Firefox User Agent Switcher
• Fangs
• Colour Contrast Analyser

Internet Explorer
Web Accessbility Toolbar

Screen Readers
JAWS Demo - a popular screen reader

Web design tools
Dreamweaver - a common web design tool

Goosh.org - “not an official google product”

Wow, these guys are going through a really tough time. I can’t believe the severity of it:

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

The entire data center is down, including DNS services, customer portal, and who knows what else.

I’ve been calling my number and it does not ring. The website is also down. It seems this is not their first outage. I’m afraid I’m a bit overconfident about Google’s ability to maintain their services.

You’d think they could at least get a basic website up to tell us what is going on.

Here are some links to notes from varios presentation that caught my interest at SXSW 2008.

• Lost in Translation? Top Website Internationalization Lessons
• Lessons Learned at 37 Signals
• 20 Ways to Woo Users
• Zuckerburg Keynote
• Social Design Strategies

Growing Money: A Complete Investing Guide for Kids

At 7, I think my daughter is a little too young for it.  I intend to purchase it within the next 2 years.