Almost every day, Rob and I, via IM, will talk about an amazing range of different topics. Sometimes, I even have something that Rob isn’t already aware of, but mostly, he’s an extra layer of content processing that I’ve come to enjoy. In the last couple days, he’s had a Flash game, two animations, and an Alexa graph.

The Flash game was on one of his favourite blogs, ForgetFoo, which contains an amazing range of topics. The game did inspire Rob into an idea for his own Flash game, but I almost ignored the darn thing when I saw a link to this article. Ever since coming to Dyrand I’ve been more and more in-tune with security and other topics relating, and I couldn’t ignore someone who caused $38 billion dollars to be lost even though they had 2 layers of backup in place!

The two animations probably helped inspire Rob on his game idea, but they are both absolutely amazing, or as he put, inspiring. It’s a two-part setup, and can be viewed here and here.

Finally, the Alexa graph. Rob works for a company, Superb Internet Corporation, and has been since mid-November. The company recently released a new version of their site, and are really pushing forward. Not that Rob couldn’t be single handedly responsible, but I’m sure there are other factors at work in the trend. However, there has been a healthy jump in the companies traffic, and since Rob sent me a link recently, and this is about Rob’s links for the week, why not give his company a plug.

A couple of things making headlines lately are the Daylight Savings Time change and the newly released Canadian Federal budget. The Daylight Savings Time change has affected almost every company and many IT professionals were not only caught off guard by the change, they were unprepared and left pointing the finger, usually at Microsoft. While the software giant should probably take SOME of the blame for waiting so long to provide patches, etc., I hardly find them at fault for individuals being uninformed. One thing to note is that no matter how much you prepare for something like this, if you are operating or managing any large-scale network, or perhaps even several of them, you will almost certainly face unexpected hurdles. This article suggests that Daylight Savings Time being changed has a $3B price tage.

The budget had a new tax rate for investments in computers - Canadian companies are being allowed to deduct 10% more off their capital costs for computer equipment, bringing the capital cost allowance rate to 55%. For more information, check out this article.

So I finally got around to trying Yahoo! Pipes, and my first impression was good, I could copy other peoples pipes and change a variable and call it my own… But like any good developer, I wanted more, so here is the run down.

I wanted to run through my Blog RSS feed and do a content analysis to get some great keywords. Then take a keyword and do a Flickr Tag Search, not the generic Flickr site search included in pipes. Finally return an image or two back to the RSS Feed so I can see some images in context. Sounds great right? I thought so too.

So Pipes has showed alot of great potential, but there are still some limitations, and it dosen’t run quite well in IE6, which is odd considering it’s a Yahoo property.

I will keep playing with Pipes since I know it will get better - keep the faith, its Yahoo!

5. gPhone - It had to happen. Google wasn’t going to let Apple and Microsoft battle this one out on their own, especially when this creates a situation that a piece of hardware can solely run G-brand applications. My only concern is how long Google will have the darn thing released before they take it out of Beta mode!

4. YouTube YouSued - It wasn’t an IF so much as a WHEN for this, and finally someone has stepped up to the plate. Although it will still probably solved outside of the courts, this could cause some waves for Google’s ocean, and it probably won’t kill off YouTube, but it might make it the next Napster. 

3. Tellme - Microsoft owns voice technology. With the acquisition of Tellme, for less than $1 billion and therefore less than any of the rumoured Facebook deals, Microsoft can potentially leap-frog the search competition. Mobile voice search - just typing it gives me shivers.

2. Our new server - Obviously the biggest news for us in the last week is our site FINALLY being moved over to a new, faster server. I no longer have to suffer for five minutes to login to the site and create my literary masterpieces. We should be able to become consistent with our posts again and be of some value to the community.

1. 1 Year Birthday - When we started this blog it was completely on a whim, and the big milestone, from everything we’d read, was three months of blogs. The first month was non-existant, but we picked it up from there and have managed to hit our first birthday.

Quietly, JayAndSilentRob.com has reached an amazing milestone - 1 year of posts. A short clip from our first post:

The internet, in a way, is like a whole new reality, and the Internet has entered into Web 2.0, a whole new level in development. So our blog, that will discuss the internet and the internet’s trends, is named Reality V2.0.

Four servers, two trips to Seattle, one trip to Sunnyvale, and a whole bunch of posts later (163, but I’m questioning the accuracy of that number), I’d like to think that JayAndSilentRob.com is on its way to Industry respectability. This was of course hindered by our inability to locate a more stable server since first attempting to re-locate the site, but I’m confident that Rob and I will slowly re-gain and surpass our previously established prowess with respect to Internet and Internet technologies blogging. For those of you who have endured the journey with us, what were you thinking?!, and for those just joining, we hope we can convince you to do the same.