Scattered Mind

I’ve been waiting for this feature for quite some time now, since they started exploring with Google Docs Online with Google Gears I knew this was due to happen.

Source : Office Gmail Blog Post

Today we’re starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you’re offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you’re used to.

Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you’re connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer’s hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you’re used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re “borrowing” your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use “flaky connection mode,” which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. Our goal is to provide nearly the same browser-based Gmail experience whether you’re using the data cached on your computer or talking directly to the server .

I’ve been blessed ! I have a beautiful son of 9 month.  One of the things I make a priority is to keep him happy, entertained and show him the goods things in life.

Twice-As-Nice 4 Kids Foundation is a charity organisation which does just that, keeps kids entertained.

Raising funds throughout the year this foundation hosts an annual fun music and theatre extravaganza for children living in  various children’s homes, orphanages and with foster families.  Also, from the funds raised, not only does it go to this once a year event, it also donates a percentage to other child welfare organisations, thus where the name comes from : “Twice-As-Nice” it benefits the children TWICE!

If you feel that you would like to make a donation to this charity of any other, you can do this by visiting The Trust Website, which offers EFT and credit card donations. .

Twice-As-Nice Vision

Every child benefits from and deserves extras like entertainment and fun outings where they are the centre of love and attention. 

What Twice-As-Nice Do

Since 2005 Twice-as-Nice organises an event that is growing from strength to strength. In 2005 we invited 750 children to our first party on Constitution Hill, in 2008 we were proud to host over 2,000 children on the Walter Sisulu Square in Kliptown, Soweto. Currently preparations are under way for our extra special fifth anniversary event.

At the event the children are treated to a lunch, T-shirts and caps and a goodies bag. Exciting entertainment is provided by a host of renowned artists, over the years we’ve seen Gcina Mhlope, Tumisho Masha, Ed Jordan, Ronald McDonald and The Market Theatre on our stage. Street performers and African music and dance by Sibikwa create the lively party atmosphere in which the children are delighted to participate.

The event also provides a platform for corporate volunteering since we engage employees of our corporate sponsors as valuable helpers during the day. The interactions between volunteers and children are very special and create awareness and further involvement.

With a percentage of the funds raised Twice-as-Nice makes donations to selected partners in child welfare. With these partners we build close relationships which help us to identify sustainable projects that contribute to our vision of providing something extra to a disadvantaged child’s life. Over the years Twice-as-Nice has supported the Othandweni Family Centre to upgrade the cottages for the children and open a gift shop where arts and crafts made by street girls are sold. In addition Twice-as-Nice has supported arts organisations like Sibikwa to ensure that they could provide their worthwhile arts education to disadvantaged children.

This morning when I logged on I could not retrieve my mail and after some investigtion I  realized that my web hosting was suspended due to using too high CPU usage.

I’m currently hosting a couple of my domains on a shared hosting account with Pulse Hostings(reseller for Resellerspanel) which has a lot of bandwidth and disk space but you are limited to only 5% CPU usage.

I immediately logged into my control panel and contacted support, almost half and hour later my account was back online, ready for some action again.

The support staff actually came back with some very good advise and suggestions for me to optimise my robots.txt file and WordPress plugins by using WP Super Cache.

I’m still very impressed with the hosting, especially the fast response of support in this case, and would suggest it to anyone that is just starting off with blogging and building websites, you get a lot of bandwidth, disk space and databases, only limit is the 5% CPU limit though.

Here is a shot of my call with them this morning.

Do you live around Johannesburg, South Africa.

Then this coming weekend you have to get down to Swartkop Airfield in Pretoria. Why ?

The South African Air Force are celebrating their 89th birthday on Friday, 30 January 2009. Actually the Air Force was founded on the 1st of February, but this year it falls on Sunday, thus they’re making it on Friday.  I would like to know why they did not make it Saturday ?

This year they will have formal parades, fly pasts and capability demonstrations, and other activities to involve the public on a more sociable level.  The event is open for the public and will cost you nothing.  All you need to do is bring your own food, beverages, sun block,chairs etc.

More information can be found on the South African Air Foce Web Site.

 

 

If you cannot view this video, try viewing the video here.

If you cannot view this video you can also view it here.

Are you new to the whole marketing your blog area, and don’t really know everything about SEO, or are you looking for a tool to give you suggestions of what is needed or wrong with your website.

You can try out WebSite Grader, which generates a reports and suggests improvements you can make, like reduce your keywords, or reduce the number of images on your landing page.

Visit http://website.grader.com and enter your URL and get a complete reports in a couple of seconds.

I found this report quite complete and covers a wide variety of factors.

Here is a short extract of the areas covered in the report:

• Header Summary
• Image Summary
• Interior Page Analysis
• Readability Level
• Domain info
• Google PageRank
• Google Indexed Pages
• Last Google Crawl
• Traffic Rank (Alexa)
• Inbound Links
• DMOZ Directory
• Yahoo! Directory
• ZoomInfo
• BlogAnalysis
• Blog Ranking
• Recent Blog Article
• Social MediaSphere summary
• Competitive Intelligence

The report that was genrated for my site can be publicly found here.

You can now use this tool to also analyze your competitions’ details as well.

[Please excuse the short post, just want to highlight this issue]

Wow, I’ve never seen a blog post explode like Chris from IMods’ post regarding the poor developed IEC website which apparently cost the tax payer around R 3 000 000 !!

I’ve just seen that even Helen Zille is now looking at this issue as well.

You definely have to check out this post.

I’ve  been using Digsby for about 3 months now, and I must say it really is AWESOME!

Even Abner, who is the Network Administrator and general Mr. Know-It-All-about-Everything at the office have joined almost all the social networking groups that has to do with Digsby.

The reason why I’m re-posting about this little application is just to re-itterate the awesome-ness of  it.

All your Social networking, Email and Instant Messaging in one little application, and don’t forget about Twitter.  There is also some cool widgets that can be customised as well for your blog or website.

Today I found myself frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Reader when reading up on poker, and trying to read an ebook that I’ve received from one of my friends on some poker strategies that is involved in the game.

Today in my lunch time I wanted to start reading through this ebook, so got through about 3 chapters(reading on my PC) and then closed down Acrobat Reader.  When I opened up Reader again, it went to the start of the PDF document which is around 240 pages.

How frustrating especially when you read ebooks to remember the page number everytime.  Adobe Acrobat Reader does NOT come with a bookmark feature, and thus my hunt began to find me something that could help me out. I thought whatever I will find will be a big 3rd party plugin or even a paid/trial-ed product offering.

But to my amazement Adobe Acrobat Reader support various Javascript functions and I found a Javascript which gives you the feature of adding 1 bookmark and returning to that bookmark.

All it does is adds a Menu item under Tools->Bookmark and voila, now you can Add Bookmark, or browse to the bookmark, simple as that.

Was Installation easy – VERY!

All you do is copy the .js file to the indicated folder and it just works on the next startup of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

For more detailed installation instruction you can visit this page, or get the javascript file directly from PDF Hacks.