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Month: January 2009

Snow Day

click here to see larger imageWe had our first snowfall of the season here in the DC area yesterday.  It wasn’t much – only about 2 inches or so.  But, as usual, panic set in and schools were closed, most events of any significance were canceled, grocery stores had record sales of bread and milk, and the local news media hyped it as the "storm of the century." 

During the early hours of the morning today, we had a weather event that is much more typical for the DC area – freezing rain that left everything covered with a nice coating of ice.  And of course, this elevated the panic to the next level.

But the panic is subsiding now as the temperature rises, the ice is melting and the bread and milk supply lines are opening up!

Fortunately for me, the one event that didn’t get canceled was the basketball game between the George Mason University Patriots and the University of Delaware Blue Hens.  So I ventured out into the storm and saw the Patriots win 78 to 55.  They are 10-0 on their home court so far this season and their overall record to date is 15-5.

Go Steelers

Only six more days until Super Bowl XLIII!  America’s "Real Team," the Pittsburgh Steelers (not those pretenders from Texas) will be playing the Arizona Cardinals for the NFL Championship.

Get your Terrible Towels ready to go.

Web 1.75 Ready

I’ve just finished the latest update to HalfVast.com’s look and feel.  This is the first major overhaul I’ve made to the GUI  and addition of any significant features and capabilities since November 2006.   Back in 2006, Web 2.0 was the buzzword of the day and many web sites displayed a "Web 2.0 Ready" or "Web  2.0 Guaranteed" badge to indicate they were using the new Web 2.0 concepts.

At the time, I declared HalfVast.com "Web 1.5" ready and did a post explaining my rationale for doing so.  That included the following:

  • it did not fully utilize the technologies that are included in most definitions of Web 2.0, such as AJAX.
  • it did not implement the Semantic Web model
  • It did not have mashups in the true definition of the term.

With this latest update, I have indeed made some progress towards joining the Web 2.0 club:

  • Technologies – there is now quite a bit of content that is based on Ajax.  However, this is not due to much effort on my part; it has come as a result of the continuing enhancements and updates to the software (WordPress) that the site is built upon.
  • Semantic Web – again, some aspects of this are now present due to the new features and capabilities in WordPress and the 3rd party plugins used on the site.  Some examples are free tagging, tag clouds, widgets,  and improvements in the RSS capability.  But HalfVast.com still has a ways to go in this area, and, realistically, will probably never become a poster boy for the semantic web.
  • Mashups -   There are a few things here than can more or less classified as mashups such as the "Big Box" and the "Blogroll," but other than those two,  the site still does not make extensive use of mashups and probably never will.

A couple of other things included in the new design are a few bright, shiny backgrounds and cleaner typography that mark many "Web 2.0" sites.

And that’s why HalfVast.com is now officially "Web 1.75 Ready."