Do what all the sites like lifehacker.com suggest, but an idea book and jot good ideas down as soon as you have them because you will not remember them after work.

It’s actually quite hard to explain how much difference a good keyboard can make. Up until now I have been using a laptop style keyboard on my desktop, mainly to conserve desk space. But even after a few minutes of using the Das Keyboard I can not imagine going back to that again.

My typing speed has already gone up significantly just because I can tell immediately when a key has been pressed. While with other cheap keyboards you often think you hit the key but it’s so mushy that you can not really tell.

Anyway, this is not a full review. Just wanted to let all know about this company, and if you decide to drop the cash for a good keyboard these are worth a look. Well made and delivered on their site.

However when I was admiring the nice new design of Dan Cederholm’s new micro-blog theme I noticed that the only CSS directive he had was the following:

<!--[if gte IE 7]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen, projection" href="http://simplebits.com/-/css/bitstream.css" />
<!-- <![endif]-->

After looking at this and CSS for awhile I could not figure out how he handled the IE6 problem with all the transparent icons he is using. Then I used Adobe’s Browser Lab in CS Live to view his site in several browsers and he handled the IE6 problem by completely ignoring it! This makes me very happy because I have been considering doing this for a long time.

Obviously a personally micro-blog is hardly a mission critical site that must work, but I think having high profile web developers start to shun these poor browsers from Microsoft is a great start.

Modern Warfare 2 is a great game but their decision to use this model for multi-player gaming creates many problems vs the traditional server client model. I am going to go over some of them here.

Performance
My connection to the internet is current 35Mbs symmetric, and yet nearly half of the games I play have connections issues. Ranging from very high ping to dropped connections. These problems have nothing to do with my connection, it has to do with the fact that the game is choosing bad (for me) hosts for the game.

This is not a problem with the Dedicated Server model used by Counter Strike and other games, because I am able to choose the servers I visit. If a server is flaky, not local to me, or I just have bad connection to them then I can choose another server.

The lack of control given to the player when the game automatically chooses hosts can completely spoil the experience for users. And I can only imagine how bad this would be if my connection was bad already.

Cheating
Cheating is rampant in MW2 right now, nearly other game there is at least one person I am pretty sure is cheating, and one in four games there is a blatant cheater playing. What happens when we discover a cheater? Absolutely nothing. There are no vote kick mechanics, no vote ban, no reporting suspected players nothing. You basically just have to put up with them or leave. And if you leave and rejoin a “random” game you have good chance and being stuck back in the same gave after having lost all your kills for that round.

Counter Strike had many cheaters too, but I used to play on a handful of servers with people I grew to think of a friends. These servers had moderators and admins who were usually a IM away if there was someone abusing their server. If you could not contact an admin right then there was always the forums where you could report players and discuss problems.

So while in an ideal world cheating would be eliminated that is not going to happen. So the next best thing is to have a way to police the games and try to keep it clean.

Community
For me the biggest thing lost of the sense of community provided by dedicated servers. In Counter Strike I had two or three servers I would visit frequently. Overtime I got to know the regulars quite well, had meetups, communicated via forums, Instant Messaging etc. To this day there are several people I meet on these servers that I still play with today in other games.

After playing MW2 for several months I have made no new relationships like this. You basically get thrown in with completely random people almost every time. You just play the game like they are A.I. players and try to ignore the constant stream of profanity and insults coming at you over voice coms and chat.

Unless you group up with people you already know there is no teamwork, and little chance of forging any new relation ships.

For me the community was one of the most attractive aspects of playing Counter Strike, and what kept me playing for so long. MW2 however will be put on the virtual shelf as soon as the gameplay starts to feel a little stale.

Conclusion
For me I think the possible death of dedicated servers is one of the most disturbing trends in PC gaming. The PC has many advantages of Console gaming, but none are as important as the communities that are formed around games by all the forms of communication that are readily available on PC’s as you play.

While playing World of Warcraft you can easily have your guild forum open on another monitor, or in just in the background. Use any number of social tools to keep in touch with the people you play with when ever you want too.

What it comes down to is that people make these games special, MW2 would already be an distant memory if it was not for it’s multi-player. Counter Strike Source is still going strong despite it’s outdated graphics and game play because of the communities formed around it.

It seems that developers are loosing site of this and I really hope that they wake up and stop trying to make it harder for people to play the games they love how they want to play them.

Then recently on twit.tv I saw an ad for Hover.com and from the screenshots of the site I could see right away that they are doing things better. The site is very Web 2.0, clean efficient and just there to help you get your work done.

For example, before moving my domains to Hover.com I did a quick check of my site and realized that my RSS Feeds were down. The way my feeds are setup is using a CNAME entry in my DNS records to redirect my URL to FeedBurner (you can read more about that at quickonlinetips.com). Godaddy’s Domain Manager is so busy and confusing I never looked into doing this myself before, and always had to open a Support Ticket with my web-host and have them modify their Name Server for me, which last time took a day or two of back and forth making it work.

After reading the help section at Hover.com (this tutorial in particular) I saw how simple it was to use Hover.com’s name servers to point to my web-host, and Google Accounts for Mail. So I transfered the domain to Hover.com pointed my web-host and everything still works fine.

Then after reading another Hover.com Tutorial, which by the way is the simplest and best intro to DNS I have seen and should be read even if you are not with hover.com, I changed my CNAME record myself. Instantly I was able to refresh the URL feeds.codemonkeyx.net/cmx and it went to FeedBurner.com correctly.

This post ended up being a little more gushy about how great Hover.com is so far, but sites that empower me to do more and learn new things always get me excited.

Oh and before I forget the, the big thing… PRICE.

At first when I saw the $15 price tag per domain I thought, well that’s a little high. But then when I compared to GoDaddy which advertises much lower prices I realized that on top of the domain name I also had to pay for Private Domain registration which was another $9 a year just for that, and added another whole layer of crap that I had to jump through when I wanted to change or transfer. So Hover.com’s $15 fee is lower than what I was paying at GoDaddy! when you factor in the premium add-on.

With Hover.com all I had to do to make my domain Private was to click the check box!! Because it’s included in the price! So far no hidden fees, no “premium add-on” services except e-mail hosting. Just a simple site that gets the job done.

Note: If you decided to use Hover.com be sure to use twit.hover.com to get a 10% discount. I am not affiliated with hover or twit but 10% off is nice, and both hover and twit are great.

That is why proposed “battle” between Firefox and Chrome that TechCrunch is pushing does not really exist. They are both excellent browsers and both support the Open Web-standards. So does it really matter to anyone beside Google and the Mozilla Foundation which browser has a larger market share? I don’t think so.

For me this is the future of computing, a completely open set of standards and technologies that make the type of computer, phone, web browsers, tablet you are using irrelevant. They all talk to each other and work.

My biggest complaint about Buzz was that I could not read posts from people I followed without scrolling through several pages of comments first. After the comment collapse changes it is now much better. I can easily skim the people I follow, and if something is interesting expand the comments and join in the discussion.

Keep up the good work Google, Buzz still does not differentiate itself enough from Twitter and Facebook. But if changes keep coming I think it will find it’s place in time.

Say I am using twitter and some @replies me about a Tweet from four hours ago, I might reply to them “Good Point.” Now no one else following me stream has any idea about the context of that reply. They could probably piece it together, but it not worth the effort.

Facebook is meant to be much more closed off, although they are trying hard to get our personal information out there weather we like it or not. Facebook is much better at maintaining the contexts of comments by maintaining a comment thread. But the comments are not valued nearly as much as the original post. It can be hard to see if new comments have been added etc because posts are not bumped up when a new comment is made.

Google Buzz is like a hybrid of both Twitter and Facebook, it allows for completely public posting and followers, but at the same time you can do private posts to a group of people you designate at Friends, Coworkers, etc.

For me however the biggest difference is the way Google Buzz handles replies to Buzz’s. When a person replies or comments to a Buzz that buzz is bumped up in all the followers feeds. This effectively makes peoples comments as powerful as the original posters, and behaves much more like a traditional forum.

The way Buzz works right now is still a little un-wielding and I find it hard to follow public figures using Buzz just because the many people commenting keep all the “popular” buzz right at the top and drowns out everything else. This can be fixed with UI changes etc.

Buzz as a framework though is has some very powerful applications in integrating other services together, and I think might be a stepping stone to get people ready for the idea of using products like Wave.

Overall I am still using Twitter to keep track of things, and Facebook to stay in contact with Friends. But I hope that Google can make Buzz good enough that I can replace both of them.

WARNING: Backup all data before flashing your drive, or trying anything even remotely like this

However, the Crucial drive I have (CT128M225), like all the other SSD’s out there, require the drives controller to be flashed to support the new TRIM command. So I downloaded the iso and booted into the flash utility, but no drive showed up!

So it seems there is a little hiccup with the flash utility from Crucial, it does not have RAID drivers for the Intel P55 Express chipset on my motherboard. So I had to do a little trickery, basically you simply boot into the BIOS configuration and change your drive settings from RAID to IDE. This basically disables the RAID functionality and makes all your hard drives look like IDE drives.

IMPORTANT: do not let Windows boot with this setting changed, Windows will figure you removed the RAID, mess with drivers, re-assign driver letters and who knows what else.

After turning off RAID I rebooted using the Flash CD, flashed my Crucial drive, removed the CD and rebooted back into the BIOS. After changing back to RAID the system booted as normal all the RAID volumes were found again (I have my Crucial drive as the main, and two 750GB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for protected data drives).

Windows 7 required a restart again, I assume it updated drivers for TRIM? and now everything is running great.

You will not see a performance increase, but this will help keep your system fast while you use it in the future, and the firmware had some other bug fixes and features.