The dentist was pretty shocked when he saw what had happened and told me that I might lose the tooth, or need to go through some expensive implants if he could not save it.

He needed to cut some of my gum away to be able to see what was going on lower down and to determine if he would be able to put a crown on. Thankfully, he was able to do a great job and saved the tooth and put on a temporary crown in the interim after doing some core strengthening work to stabilise the foundation of the tooth.

I must admit at one point it was quite nerve wrecking experiencing what I can only describe as having the remains of my tooth broken and scratched out using surgical tools, although I am not totally sure what I was experiencing at the time as I didn’t want to ask.

I’ll need to go back in a few weeks time, to get the official crown done, but luckily it can all be sorted out while I am in the chair. It is good to know that the medical practitioners whose hands you put your health in are knowledgeable and organised to do the things that need to be done to keep you going.

Amelia didn’t know that I was collecting the car today, so when I fetched her from work it was a total surprise.

I had some CDs ready and immediately hit the road and drove through to Knysna.

Amelia and I decided to stop at the waterfront and had some awesome pizza, coffee and tiramisu at Caffe Mario. We then took an easy drive back to George.

For the past few years I have been using a combination of Inkscape and Gimp, but I am looking forward to the learning curve ahead of me, getting familiar with some of the awesome tools that I have heard and read so much about.

The new Studio 1558 features, 500Gb 7200RPM HDD, Core i5 CPU, 4GB 1333 Mhz DDR2 and an ATi Radeon HD 4570.

So far battery life is about three hours and the embedded 3G connection seems a lot more stable than that of the 1555.

Right now I have got my eye on the new Dell U2311H as an add on to my workspace.

I have always liked the idea of a notebook with a big external display to be used as my digital canvas and a Dell monitor seems to be the perfect fit…

Microsoft has really come to the party with a higher performance and truly worthwhile business productivity suite.

For quite some time now, I have not been using MS office at all and have been an advocate for Open Office and all things open source, but I have recently grown closer to my proprietary roots and have developed much appreciation for the work and effort that goes into bringing out products like Office 2010.

The new version of the well know business productivity suite, is simply impressive. Office 2010, loads faster, can handle more diverse file types and offers a host of functions and embedded applications, for tasks that one would previously need to perform in external programs.

I have still not managed to pull myself away from using Gmail as my mail management system and I can’t see myself moving back to Outlook anytime soon, unless Gmail and Exchange can communicate with each other directly. Gmail simply offers me the flexibility and scalability I need to manage multiple profiles and access my info instantly from multiple locations on the go.

For business use and from a corporate perspective, I think the new MS Outlook is definitely becoming a player and integrated with MS Exchange 2010, it makes for efficient management of internal work flow and cost effective email.

I am looking forward to playing around with the latest versions of Project and Visio as planning and monitoring seems to take up most of my time these days.

All in all, the new Office 2010, is most definitely worth the spend.

What an awesome view, we live in a beautiful country.

The flight from George to Johannesburg was pleasant and when coming in for our landing we caught site of the new soccer stadium, it was already dark and the stadium lights were on. What an awesome sight. I am not particularly excited or enthusiastic about the soccer or sport in general but the view of the stadium from the air definitely gives one the sense of awe.

Herman, Konstant, Eugene and I had supper and Rhapsody in Pretoria, the steak and conversation were great, even though business didn’t leave the table for long.

It would be great to travel without needing to deal with business, or at least being able to bring Amelia with me.

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.

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.

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.