Grandpop, you were always there for me and my entire family. You always gave of yourself selflessly never asking anything in return. As I sit here trying to hold back my tears, I remember that you're going to a better place. You always kept your sense of humor, making us all laugh even when things weren't going as well as we'd have liked. You brightened the room every place you visited always making us remember the brighter side of life.

You passed down your knowledge and wisdom to my Dad and to me, who will pass it on to future generations of Wagners. You may have left this world, but you have gone to a better place, and your memory will last in my heart and I'm sure the hearts of many others forever. I love you.

I have so many memories of you.

I remember your trips to Dorney Park and Wild Water Kingdom taking the whole Wagner family, making my Mom worry more about you than about her own kids.

I remember your trips to the beach visiting us, teaching us how to body surf, showing us that boogie boards are only for "whimps" on the rough waves of the Jersey shore.

I remember your antics at several pool parties showing us how to really go off diving boards.

I remember how proud you were of me when I attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts.

I remember how proud you were when after 5 grueling years, I finally graduated from College.

I remember your sense of humor you brought with you everywhere you went. All the jokes and antics that at some points made my Mom nuts, like acting like you're going to eat an entire cake.

I remember all the Phillies games you took us to watching the team that I idolized play, with all the thanks you needed coming from a hug and the smile on my face.

You gave of yourself selflessly and will be missed by me, and many many others. We love you and will never forget you.

http://www.legacy.com/philly/DeathNotices.asp?Page=Notice&PersonID=105439607

Tags: life, prayers

First off, I want to preface this with the fact that the current build of Microsoft Internet Explorer is still in beta, so any issues I have found could very well be caused by the instabilities inherent with beta software.

Okay, now that that's done with, on to the good (or bad) parts. When I first heard that IE8 was going to be standards compliant I was impressed with Microsoft for actually doing something that myself, and I'm sure many others have wanted for some time now. Am I right? When the first beta was released, I decided to give it a try figuring I had nothing to lose by trying it out.

The first thing I was curious about, and rightfully so, is how does my website look under IE8 in "standards compliant" mode? I figured, "hey, my website looks fine in Safari, Firefox, Opera, even IE7, so this should be fine." Yeah, easier thought than to believe. In the default setting in IE8, the title looks like this:

Now this could very well me making a mistake in my HTML/CSS coding, I'm not the most experienced HTML/CSS coder out there and I know that, but then why does my site look normal, or should I say, like it's supposed to, how I want it to in every other browser I tested it in (IE7, Safari, Firefox, Opera, & Konquerer). It's just a table aligned to have both my picture and title text below the upper blue line. If anyone has any idea as to why its doing that and wants to give me a hint, please let me know, I'll be thankful.

One nice feature that IE8 has is particularly nice for developers. IE8 has the ability to emulate IE7 rendering. So for those wanting to see how the page would look like in IE7 need only press a button to go into IE7 emulation mode.

When you click this, IE is going to prompt you to restart Internet Explorer for the changes to go into effect.

This kind of surprised me as I was figuring that all it would really require to make the switch to IE7 emulation mode would be a page refresh. It's kind of annoying to have to restart IE to switch display modes (you do have to restart again to switch back). But I will say that I'm probably just nitpicking right now. I did notice that the switch often times did cause IE8 to crash, but I can attribute that to it only being a beta so I won't hold it against IE8...yet.

So now I'm in IE7 emulation mode, so I navigate back to my page to see how it looks with this mode. What do you know, just like in IE7, it shows up the way its supposed to.

Again, I could very well be doing something wrong so I can't hold this too much against IE8, but it just strikes me as odd that everything renders fine in the other browsers. And again, if you have any ideas, please let me know. I have noticed other minor oddities in other websites in terms of alignment, but nothing too major.

Another thing I was curious about was how Internet Explorer 8 did with system resources. With 1 tab open and at my site, resources did seem a bit heavy for what my site is, but not too out of the ordinary:

With 4 tabs open (my site, Digg, Mixx, and Space.com), the memory and VM usage went up considerably:

From what I remember checking before with IE7, it does seem a bit better, but with Firefox 2 clocking in with 65MB of memory usage with 47MB in virtual memory, IE7 and 8 are both considerably higher. But I will say its a step in the right direction and who knows, maybe the final release will be even better. One can only hope.

One thing Microsoft seems to be getting more into is social networking. The What's New in Internet Explorer 8 page lists Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Windows Live as "cool" places to get started at. There's a page menu that will even allow you to translate a page, send a page to a friend, and blog, all of course with Windows Live tools.

It also includes the standard options you'd see in other browsers as well. Wait, what the hell is Windows Live? It's still around? Does anyone actually use it? Okay, I apologize for that, I just never really saw that much potential in Windows Live, and with Google's Blogger, guess I'm just surprised people don't used Blogger, which I personally feel is a pretty decent platform for those who just want to blog and not have to worry so much about maintaining their own site. But at the same time I guess, setting it as the default option will get plenty of basic users to join as they may not know about other options, anyway, I digress.

In short, while except for my issue with my website and HTML/CSS rendering, I did see some slight improvements over IE7, overall, there's really not much that has changed. The UI is basically the same minus a few extra buttons:

(Click to view larger)

And it really just doesn't bring anything to the table to make it stand out over my preferred browsers, Safari and Firefox. Personally, I'd say that if you're a Firefox, Opera, or Safari user, you're fine where you are now. What I see so far brings me no closer to switching back to Internet Explorer as my primary browser, and not to sound too much like a Microsoft hater, IE8 beta 1 does not impress me at all really, and I don't see anything that the final release could possibly bring to make me change my mind on that.

So would you even consider going back to IE, or are you now enjoying the web with one of the other browsers?

Tags: reviews, thoughts, microsoft, internetexplorer, web

This is probably one of the best pranks I have ever seen. Philadelphia Phillies pitcher, Kyle Kendrick got tricked into thinking he was getting traded to Japan.

Tags: humor, baseball, phillies, prank

Because of the upcoming release of the iPhone SDK, I figured I'd list some of the apps I would like to see developed for the iPhone. Some of them can probably be done through the web apps with Safari, but I'd still like native apps to use if possible rather than going through Safari.

IM Client - This is probably the one I want most. A client similar to Adium or Pidgin that can run natively on the iPhone so I can chat with my friends using AIM or Google Talk. I'm not quite sure how I'd like it set up, but if done right, it would definitely be nice to have.

PDF Reader - The ability to view PDF files would be nice to have for the occasions neccessary. What would make this even better would be the ability to turn the iPhone and view the PDFs from both perspectives like you can webpages with Safari.

Twitter Client - It would be nice to see a native app that I can use to post and view Twitter statuses like so many clients available for Linux, OS X, and Windows. I might even try my hand with this one.

Notepad - The key to this would be synching with the computer. If a notepad like app would be developed that would allow for one to create text files on either the iPhone or the computer and be able to transfer them back and forth, I'd be interested. All I'd need would be for a basic notepad program, don't need any text formatting or any of those extra features.

Some Games - Maybe a few simple games would be nice to see, and I'm sure some will come. What would be even cooler would be some multiplayer action. The games could be as simple as something like hangman, sudoku, solitaire, etc. I know there are already some web versions of the games for the iPhone, but native ones could be nice as well as to not have to go through Safari.

Paint - The touch screen would be perfect for something like this. It wouldn't have to be anything complex, but a basic drawing tool could be interesting to fool around or play with. It could also be used for visual notes or something along those lines.

So, what apps are you looking to see created for Apple's iPhone?

Tags: thoughts, apple, iphone, mac, sdk

Apple's iPhone SDK will be coming out soon and rumors are going around that any and all 3rd party apps are going to have to go through Apple and be approved before they will be available for download and installation. This has some upsides and some downsides.

PROS

Malware, Harmful Apps Weeded Out - If someone tries to sneak in some app that harms the iPhone OS or causes an iPhone to be unstable, Apple should be able to pick these out rather quickly to prevent an unsuspecting victim from downloading and installing the app. Now granted, like computers, it could be up to the user to protect what he/she puts on the iPhone, but Apple at the same time probably wants to protect its name. Apple probably doesn't want some user to blame them for a 3rd party app that crashes that user's iPhone. In reality it wouldn't be Apple's fault, but too many people seem to blame the easy target, in this case Apple. (How many people blame Windows for a BSOD when in reality its a poorly written driver made by some third rate printer company).

CONS

Total App Control - Apps that Apple doesn't like for whatever reason could be blocked, even if they're good apps. Take P2P apps for example. Apple could take the stance that they'd only be used for piracy and shouldn't be allowed and block them from iTunes. (They haven't said anything on this, and it baffles the hell out of me why anyone would use the iPhone to download from P2P to begin with) With the power of total control could allow Apple to abuse that power.

Pricing - I haven't heard anything on the pricing of apps thus far but I would likely believe that they'd probably be mostly under $10. This alone wouldn't so much be a problem, but what if some developer wants to create an app and give it out free? Can they do this, or will Apple step in and charge for that app anyway? If they do, then I'd say its a bad thing. If they don't then this point is pretty much moot. Anyone know anything more about this?

Anyone else have any more pros or cons?

Tags: apple, iphone, mac, sdk