Watch: About Last Night….
Original Air Date: 11.05.08
While the country celebrates the outcome of the election, the new President-elect catches everyone off guard when he arrives at the White House prematurely.
Featured
South Park - About Last Night…
Singapore Grand Prix
Formula One Racing held its 800th race on Sunday in Singapore, with the Singapore Grand Prix - also the first Formula One race held at night. Organizers built, then lined a 5 kilometer track with over 1,600 lamps, said to be four times brighter than those used at football stadiums.
Twenty drivers drove 61 laps for a total of 309 kilometers at speeds sometimes approaching 300 kilometers per hour - in a country that once banned the sport, in part for promoting reckless driving. Driver Fernando Alonso of Renault won the race with a time of 1:57:16.304. [via Boston.com]
AIDS orphans in Kenya
Christof Putzel explores the lives of Kenyan children forced to live on the street after their parents die of AIDS. [via Current]
Some lorem ipsum
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
WordPress Theme: Futurosity Vero
Futurosity Vero: Yet another clean, minimal WordPress Theme by Robert Ellis of Futurosity. That makes THREE kick ass themes released in as many months but who’s counting, right?
View the result here - thoughts?
Futurosity Vero utilizes both the Blueprint and Sandbox frameworks - you can tell a lot of thought and planning went into this theme. I’ve made only minor tweaks, and enjoyed looking under the hood:
- Enabled home page ‘current month’ link / functions.php (manual)
- .current_page_item a styling in the paged nav (top right) / functions.php (this really should be fleshed out and allow any current page / item / navigation styling)
- Excluded pages from main navigation (top right) / functions.php
- del.icio.us links above comments / home.php
- Separated category and tag (keyword) lines / single.php
- Moved RSS icon to bottom / global
- Removed ‘about’ block / sidebar.php
- Added Mint stats to footer / footer.php
- Added weighted keyword list (30) to archives page / sidebar.php
Further ideas:
- Cabel’s FancyZoom for inline image thumbnail previewing (main content box is only 350px wide)
- Conditional navigation highlighting
- Comment Quoter
- Ad block
- Not so bad if you have old media (pics/video) at 435px or even wider - plenty of room on the right - saves you from going back and redoing old content.
Low res screenshot (home, single, cat, links):
Upstart Blogger’s MacBook Air Contest
Started in 2004, Upstart Blogger was recently acquired by professional jazz trumpeter turned blogger Ashley Morgan. The site’s previous owner and theme designer Robert Ellis now runs Futurosity. Details on the acquisition are covered in this post and for those curious, the price was USD$14,500. To the casual reader it may seem like a lot of money, but Ashley has a vision, saw an opportunity and is in the process of capitalizing on it.
Upstart Blogger is about how to start a blog, and how to become a blogging upstart—a blogger who achieves success rapidly. I’ll cover everything from creating and launching a new blog to maintaining, promoting, and profiting from a successful blog.
Upstart Blogger employs a number of methods to generate incoming links, traffic, and money:
WordPress Themes
As WordPress gains popularity, more people will be introduced to Upstart Blogger’s free collection of seven minimalist WordPress themes.
- UB Futurosity Magazine - based on a 6-column grid
- UB July07 - ajax sidebar experimentation
- UB Takimata - Sandbox design competition entry
- UB Modicus - available in two and three-columns
- UB Modio - clean with sliding sidebar
- UB Minim - simple and lightweight
- UB Purus - ugly duckling
Users (you) download theme from Publisher (Upstart Blogger). The theme install links back to the Publisher’s site. Both the Publisher and Author (Robert Ellis of Futurosity) gain noteriety and a link. Yay. I won’t be surprised if a custom theme were chosen as a contest prize, which brings us to free stuff.
Giveaways
People (users) like free stuff. Really free stuff, i.e. it costs you nothing (shipping is a maybe). And they also like winning things - or even thinking they might win.Monthly contests and product giveaways combine these elements into a recipe for success. Previous prizes have included an Apple iPhone, some iPod Shuffles, and a couple lucky winners even got a free month of hosting (actually $6.95 via paypal)!
This month’s prize is something that you don’t often see in a blog contest - a shiny new MacBook Air. Yes, the newest latest $2,000 fits-in-an-envelope laptop from Apple. Big prizes should generate lots of buzz about the UB giveaways - at this rate who knows what the next item will be - car - house - internet property?
Hosting Affiliate Links
Publisher signs up with Affiliate (in this case AN Hosting which owns Midphase and a few others). Publisher chooses creatives and places them on the site. Users click on ads (reliable hosting @ $5/month with few limitations) and get a good price on hosting, and Publisher gets a sizable commission. Win-win. And for those people who think ads are ugly, you’re right, but that’s the game.
Community Blog Projects
Ashley’s Building 30 profitable blogs from scratch in 30 days idea is genius. He helps 30 bloggers establish their internet presence and gets 30 hosting referral commissions (users get three months free), and any links these users generate.
Verdict
Ashley Morgan and Upstart Blogger provide a wealth of personal, tech, business, and wordpress resources and have big plans for the future. Subscribe to the Upstart Blogger RSS Feed and stay tuned. While you’re at it, you can add the elifoner.com feed for more half-baked attempts at winning a free computer!
Art Benjamin, Mathemagic
The 4 ‘random’ digit x 3 digit ‘random’ problem explained in the video comments. I found it interesting to hear his Mnemonic
New Halo 3 Maps
Monday, more information was released on the three new maps available for Halo 3. I’m eager to try them out - it can get annoying playing Snowbound six times in a row. From the Bungie site: In the US, the Heroic Map Pack will cost 800 Microsoft Points ($10 USD). Eventually, these maps will all be released for free, as they were with Halo 2.
Rat’s Nest
Rat’s Nest is a massive level set in the corridors and tunnels of a Human Base near Kilimanjaro. You may recognize parts of it from Halo 3’s Campaign mode. Effectively, it’s a giant Oval, kind of like an underground NASCAR track, with lots of vehicles and plenty of tunnels criss-crossing the center area. It’s designed for big team games, Objective and Slayer, but also works brilliantly for game types like Infection and Territories.
Foundry
Foundry is a very unique map – designed from the outset to be the most customizable Halo 3 Forge map ever created. It’s a large Warehouse, which can be empted quickly and then rebuilt any way you like, with a brand new palette of objects such as walls, ramps, Mancannons and more. Stuff you never had access to before and objects that can be used to create fully functioning level designs, rather than simply altering our existing map.
Standoff
Standoff is a big-ish symmetrical map, great for Team Slayer, excellent for Objective games and big enough for a couple of vehicles. It has locked-down Bunkers for bases and lots of cover for players trying to make their way from one base to the next. Although some say it has a similar feel to Blood Gulch, the geometry and terrain is very different.
Carrera GT
Flickr page for this photo, which belongs to the Carrera GT photoset.
