I’m running Core 2 Duo 2.93 Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 500GB HDD – OS, 160GB – Slave, Nvidia Geforce 9800GT 256bit 1024 GDR3 and a 23 inch full HD LG display and Windows 7 64bit.

I’m looking forward to getting into all of the design work I’ve been wanting to, but never had the patience to do on any of my notebooks. Already playing around in blender a bit, I can seriously appreciate the benefits of a dedicated graphics card.

Now to start saving for atleast a 256Gb SSD to use for my OS and apps and then re-purpose the 500GB for storage. I’d also dig to add another graphics card and an additional monitor, but we’ll see, maybe the iPad launches in SA before that.

The place was full of dust but the maintenance crew did a neat and quick job breaking down the inside wall and have cleaned up most of the dust already, which is great.

We’ll hopefully have our air conditioning and flooring installed soon and then our desks. Looking forward to see the changes and an improvement in productivity.

Buzz is new and will probably take a while to stabilise but already it feels as if it will be adopted very quickly and I presume that it will draw more people to the Gmail platform.

I am glad to see the integration with Google Profiles, this is going to make Profiles more relevant and content rich.

If you’re not on Gmail yet the now is the time to open an account. I recommend Gmail to all of my clients as a system to keep track of all of your various mail identities and manage your digital life. Once you’ve got a Gmail account check out all of the other services offered by Google, most of them are also available directly on your mobile phone which is great.

The past twenty five years have been full of learning and a lot of work, not always doing stuff I wanted to but nonetheless earning some money and learning about business and dealing with issues and people. This year looks promising and I’m excited about all of the opportunities that lie ahead both personally and for MyEcommerce.

Amelia and I started off the day in a mad rush to get ready for Daniel and Marile’s wedding. For some bizarre reason, weddings always seem to invoke a form of natural chaos, even if it’s not your own wedding. The day was perfect, not a cloud in the sky, they had their service at the Moederkerk and their reception at one of the halls at Saasveld. The food was cool and they had the most awesome pumpkin dumplings in a caramel sauce and some really great desert too. Amelia and I left the wedding stuffed and jealous.

I hope that by next birthday I’ll be driving something with four wheels and hopefully be closer towards achieving my endless list of goals.

Welcome to Craig, Ryan, Dereck, Donald, Gerard, Nicholas and Kobus. Gregg and I look forward to working with you.

On a ownership level, MyEcommerce has now restructured and Deon Steyn now holds a 30% interest, Tienie & Gesie van der Merwe own a 10% interest, Gregg and I each own 30%. Welcome to Deon, Tienie and Gesie, we look forward to some exciting new projects.

Once everyone has settled into the new year, we will be rolling out a range of new product offerings.

This morning, I got a call from Jovan and was asked to play in the Fancourt, Members Bar to welcome 2010, and I was more than stoked to do so.

I kicked off with a mellow mix from 19:30 till about 21:30 then picked it up a bit as some of the guests were looking for a slightly more upbeat vibe.

While we were waiting for more guests to arrive, Amelia and I had an awesome seafood pizza, prepared by the La Cantina Chefs, along with some really good coffee. If you get the opportunity to visit Fancourt and enjoy seafood, I’d highly recommend you have one of their seafood pizzas, if you don’t like seafood, you can’t go wrong with the coffee.

The crowd streamed in from about 22:40 and it was pumping through till 23:50 when I called last rounds for 2009. At ten seconds to midnight, we started the countdown and welcomed in the new year. One of the guests lead us, in singing Auld Lang Syne after which, I brought the pace down a bit, with some chilled dance tracks and good old classics. I gradually slowed things down from then and finished off my set at 02:00.

Placing and Sound provided by Jovan & Thelma.

There were supporters dancing and drinking in the most elaborate outfits. We even had a guy who fell in love with a chair for the evening.

I kept things drifting between chilled and uplifting, with a spread of local, and international house and underground. I was on the decks till last rounds were called and began striking at about 03:00.

Outdoor sound was provided by AudioWorx.

After getting all the gear together, I decided to take advantage of McDonald’s 24 hour drive through and went there to grab myself a McFeast Deluxe… I ended up in the cue for about forty minutes, before getting my food, it was well worth the wait though.

With a number of Flat screens spread throughout the premises, some people were watching the rugby, while others were eating, and the rest were partying it up.

By 22:00 the night was alive and the party was happening outside under the Bedouin Tent in the Castle Chill Zone. I held the tempo through till just after 02:00 when I started slowing things down, as people started leaving.

All in all a good night was had by all.

Well, I did a fresh install and it was super fast. I was a bit frustrated with the fact that Dell didn’t send me a copy of the latest drivers. Windows didn’t natively support my integrated 3G, so I could not get online as fast as I would have liked to, thank goodness, Windows 7 had native support for Bluetooth and I could hook up my Sony Ericsson in a matter of minutes and downloaded the required drivers from Dell’s support site.

I have found Windows 7 to be an absolute pleasure to work with and had all of my programs installed and running in less than a day. I find the performance to be substantially better than that of Vista and it requires far less resources. Will make sure that I have got all the required drivers before I do a fresh install again.

If you have got the option to upgrade or you’re buying a new PC, if you’re not getting a Mac or going with Linux or Solaris, get yourself Windows 7 and be sure you’ll be happier than you were with XP or Vista.

IMHO I feel that as a development community we should simply not support IE, but according to W3Schools stats on browsers http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp we’re still looking at about 39.3 % of all internet users running IE, so as a Businessman I need to look at things from a WHO IS PAYING perspective and from a ROI perspective, also the purpose of the website or application in question makes a huge difference on which browsers to support. A corporate venture could not afford for 39.3 % of their potential clients simply not being able to navigate and view their site.

Chrome frame will be great if people actually install it, but in reality, end users who have not upgraded from IE6 and who are not using Fire Fox, Opera, Chrome or Safari yet are not likely to install Chrome Frame as they would probably not know how to install flash or Java Runtime either.

I guess at the end of the day to support Chrome Frame, one needs only support Chrome and then add the additional line of code to your pages initialising the Frame if it is installed.

But we will still need to support IE, at least 7 and 8 for those users who are on corporate networks or work for narrow minded organisations that don’t allow Open Source standards based products on their IT infrastructure or who are simply not interested in allowing users to control their own web experience.

Browser support boils down to your web site’s target market, which I see as follows:

1. Corporate Informational/Portfolio/E-commerce Site – Open User Group – Want to sell something, product or service.
   Generally you will need to support more browsers as you are not sure what your potential customer may be using and your site should look good no matter what they are using. For example a shop selling flowers online, is not in control of who visits the site and the end users environment, if a visitor working at a commercial institution browses to the site or finds it in a seach and wants to buy flowers for someone and the site does not support IE then the flower shop will no doubt lose the sale to another site that does support IE. Also anyone searching for information on a product or service, from work where the environment is restricted and are forced to use IE, would not get benefit from a site that does not support IE and would be forced to look for services/information from someone who can provide them access to the information while they are looking for it in the format that they are able to view it.
2. Web Application – Closed User Group
   If you are developing your application for a closed user group or for a company who is going to use it internally and you are able to control what environment they will be using to access the application, then I would say opt to run Chrome or FF, if you are using a lot of JavaScript then go straight for Chrome as V8 is SOOOO fast. We have done some tests on JS interfaces that we use on some of our web apps and Chrome performs extremely better than other browsers. The other option of course is to develop only for IE if the company or client you are developing for would like to use it, on their network, but I would recommend choosing an Open and more regularly updated browsers and basically motivate from a web standards perspective that they should opt to use FF or Chrome.

   Once you have agreed on a browser, focus 100% on making your app work in it and don’t’ worry about other browsers at all. Learn all the browser specific optimisation tricks and features that you can leverage from in the development language that you are using, so that when you do launch the app it will be really fast and look good.

   If you choose, FF or Chrome, I would recommend you consider building an extension/plugin, that runs in the browser, this way you can leverage more client side processing and have faster access to features, by running the some of the features natively from within the browser. Also building plugins for an Open Browser can usually be done using XML or JS so you’re probably already fluent in either of these languages if you are building a web app for a commercial venture.

3. Personal Blog – the world
   Depending on whether you are one to make a stand or not and whether you care if users can see your site in different browsers, I think support the open ones and then redirect IE users to http://abetterbrowser.org/ automatically.

   I haven’t got to that point yet for my own site, but will probably implement that soon, as I think it is good to let people know that their are more browsers out there and you can do so much more with an Open Source one.