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dcfemella
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How fast is your site?
Google Webmaster Center (you are using it right?) just added a feature today called Site Performance that shows you information about the load times of your site. This couples with a recent launch from the Google Analytics team providing an optimized script for page load.
Load times have kind of been forgotten in the age of broadband but recently Google has hinted at page load times being factored into its search algorithm. Also - landing page load times affect your quality score when running AdWords.
Find out how your site is performing
Emil Filla
The beginnings of modern Czech art and painting, particularly Cubism, are inextricably linked with the name Emil Filla.
via calypsospots
Navigon enters crowded Android GPS space http://j.mp/5ZpQhr
A few days ago at iCE Amsterdam Navigon announced a GPS navigation app for Android, set to release on December 10th
Link: http://j.mp/5ZpQhr
Title: Navigon enters crowded Android GPS space – Android and Me
Source: http://androidandme.com/2009/11/news/navigon-enters-crowded-android-gps-space/
See who is talking about this page: http://j.mp/5ZpQhr+
Brought to you via http://bit.ly
- Navigon will launch the really awesome MobileNavigator GPS app on Android too. I have it on my iPhone and it's the best GPS I've ever had. Find more info about Navigon MobileNavigator here: http://g.clipotech.com/navigon
Death Becomes Her
The moment my mother died, I was talking to a boy on the phone. We met in a chat room in the embryonic days of my online life and bonded over 2400 baud. We hadn’t talked for very long, but it quickly escalated to pre-free nights and weekends so common post Y2K. This is before Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook and wireless. Snatches of conversation were planned in advance, due to the time difference with him in Florida and me in California. I was smitten, and so was he, and while I was in college, of legal voting and alcohol purchasing age, I was like a fourteen year old lovesick bubble-gummer. I think that’s often the case, or it was for me in 1995–before Will and Grace, Glee, and Brokeback Mountain.
On Halloween day my senior year, my mother went into the hospital to have her gall bladder removed. It was to be a routine operation, and one where she would most certainly be up on her feet within a few days. With just a couple of months left before graduation in December. I was looking forward to taking a year off and maybe working part time in a bookstore while studying for the GRE and looking at graduate school options.
Looking back, I don’t remember how or when I found out that the operation had been called off due to the cancer that was eating away at her pancreas, but I do recall the statistic that less than five percent of those afflicted with the particular disease are alive just five years later. Chemotherapy was scheduled and all things medical were in motion, but—and probably for the best—my brother and I were kept out of the conversation.
So, the day she was to come home (and she was in and out of the hospital in the month after her diagnosis), I was talking to a long-haired, bespectacled, scrawny boy from central Florida on a pre-paid phone card purchased from a 7-11. To describe what I felt and how I felt it is impossible. I’d sooner tell you what yellow tastes like or what the number seven smells like. But something happened. I knew it, and he knew it, we just didn’t know what.
It was when my father came home with my grandmother by his side, and my mother nowhere to be seen on the twenty-fifth of November, in the midst of Thanksgiving and the holidays, and my college career coming to an end before I figured it out. A glance at the death certificate a week or so later further confirmation.
Nearly a lifetime ago, it seems—The memory of the boy, faded denim; my mother, solid granite. And yet this has been probably the most pivotal and heartbreaking event in my life. This year marks fourteen years since the woman who birthed me into this world, left it behind. In many ways, she was all I had in this world. I certainly have never been as close to anyone then or since and that’s where the bulk of the emptiness in my life currently resides. The loss of a parent is something you never get over; rather it’s something you attempt to get through, and even that is daunting.
This has been a rough week. I haven’t felt this emotionally defeated since the moment that feeling peaked when talking to that since forgotten boy from Florida, but we pick ourselves and we move on. We trudge forward because we must, and my mother wouldn’t have had it any other way.
