Deviating from the funny videos from the last few days, this one is dead serious. It’s about a gang called MS-13 which has over 10,000 members in the US alone.

The video documentary is almost an hour long, so get you something to drink and get comfortable before watching it. Then be prepared to be shocked at some of the crap going on in our cities.
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Spoiler alert!!! Do not read this post if you haven’t finished reading the entire Harry Potter series yet! The following information covers the stuff that happens after the end of the final book, and it comes directly from J.K. Rowling herself.

Ms. Rowling sat down with Meredith Vieira from the Today Show and talked about all the things she really wanted to share at the end of the book, but held off on because she thought it would actually make the book better.
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A couple of weeks ago I came across this article on The Consumerist written by an anonymous former Circuit City employee. Having had a friend who did time at CC, I will say that this seems like a very real article and I recommend that everyone give it a read.

It sheds light into the sales tactics employed by Circuit City, and you should also keep in mind that many of these are similar to all other consumer electronics (and other) stores. The moral of the story… information will set you free.

One other little note. Instead of simply asking you to take this anonymous guy’s word for it, I’ve provided substantiating links within the various points where available for more background reading. Hope it helps.
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I know there are quite a few regular HTMLHelp.com users that frequent the blog here, so I just wanted to provide an update on the unbelievably pathetic service we are currently receiving from ValueWeb, aka Hostway.

We were notified about a month ago via e-mail that ValueWeb intended to physically take our two servers and move them to another data center about two hours away. But they claimed:

“We plan to have the back up service back online by 8pm EDT on July 28th.”

As worrisome as this sounded, we decided to stick it out with them because they estimated that the outage would be 12-15 hours. The amount of time it would take to migrate to another provider would have been more than this, so I suppose it basically just wasn’t going to be a big enough deal to change.

Flash forward to this weekend, and it’s looking like maybe we should have jumped ship. HTMLHelp.com has been down for more than two days - going on three.
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As many of you may recall, last weekend I was in San Francisco attending the Wordpress user conference called WordCamp. Well, I had a brief chat with Matt prior to attending and we decided that it would be a good idea to capture the lectures on video, so I went ahead and took my gear with me and played cinematographer for the weekend.

This first video which I’m releasing (they are coming out in no particular order) was actually the second session filmed on July 21, 2007 from 11am-noon at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, CA. John C. Dvorak and Om Malik led a public discussion entitled “Blogging vs. Journalism“.
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This is a little skit which was apparently first featured on the Taproot Blog. I have no idea who produced it or why, but it’s quite a funny parody of a politician explaining an oil spill.

I’m guessing it is from an Australian comedy TV show, so if one of you knows a little more detail about where this came from it would be great.
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This is really great. Take thousands of Koreans with colorful costumes, put them in a stadium and see what happens.

Seriously, this must have taken months of practice - and I still can’t believe they pulled it off.
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I bet that headline got everyone’s attention! No, I’m not starting up an illicit internet drug trade, but I am testing out a search engine theory. (By the way, if you want to help test this theory please link to this article.)

Aaron Wall proposed the question, “How Easily do Authoritative Sites Rank for New Keywords?” over on SEOBook.com, and he pointed out that Matt Cutts managed to rank pretty high by just using the words Buy Cheap Viagra in one post. His postulate is that the relative authority of Matt’s site (a Google PR7 rank) drove his rankings towards the top of the Google results for a search for the terms “buy cheap viagra”.

Well, I figured I’d throw a little weight in the ring and help test this theory. If Aaron’s postulate is correct, I would think that this article should eventually even outrank Matt’s post given that OMB has a Google PR8. Plus I have noticed what seems to be this effect quite often. After I write an article it seems to appear high for searches with the key words.
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In 2006 Sir Sean Connery received the AFI Life Achievement Award, and Mike Myers was there to give it to him!

Now, a lot of other fantastic actors and actresses have received these awards over the years, but I don’t think anyone ever got a speech like this one!
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I’ve been talking about how crappy airline service has become lately, and I just read this article from the Wharton School which I thought I’d share:

Wharton professor Serguei Netessine’s trip from Philadelphia to Dallas in May was an all-too-typical day in the sky.

After circling Dallas for an hour because of stormy weather, his flight was diverted to San Antonio where he spent several hours on the runway waiting for the storms in Dallas to clear and eating a bag of peanuts for lunch. He arrived in Dallas five hours late and missed most of his scheduled meetings, rescheduled his appointments for later in the day and succeeded in booking — actually overbooking, as it turned out — what he thought would be an evening flight back to Philadelphia. He had no choice but to fly home the next day after paying $400 for the only room available at the airport Park Hyatt.

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Although my partners and I have shared HTML authoring information with tens of millions of people on HTMLHelp.com over the previous decade, this is the first time that I’ve ever made available the brief introduction to HTML that I actually use when I’m teaching friends and family or giving lectures at universities or other speaking engagements.

I chose to share it in the hopes that it will be of use both to beginners and to educators looking for a good brief introductory document. In addition to the Web based version below, here is a PDF version that is formatted for printing (I think it’s easier to read).
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Ok, so this one is a little different. I think there is value in expanding horizons so I’m sharing this extremely talented yet uncategorizable musician. Matisyahu is a Hasidic Jewish reggae, rap artist, and frankly he is very good. Good enough in fact that Sting performed with him in Israel!

Here he is doing a song called Jerusalem on Late Night with Jimmy Kimmel. If you take a few minutes to listen to it I’d be really surprised if you don’t find it extremely interesting. Matisyahu definitely doesn’t live up to any pre-concieved notions and perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there…
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