SpitFire Poetry

Today was another great SpitFire Poetry at (SCENE) Metrospace in East Lansing. I shot some videos and have posted them below. The winner of the poetry slam was none other than Ralph Paulk, who was featured on the Jan. 31st post and this post as well. There are six new videos in this post. Be sure to watch them all.

MSU Black Poet Society

Ralph Paulk, the BPS President, reciting at Sundays meeting:

How to fail at website

The internet has been in heavy use for a long time now. Browser wars have come and gone. There is now two dominant browsers in North America and has been for the past 4 or so years, yet there are still companies specifically targeting their websites towards a specific browser.

Point in case: Microsoft Outlook Web Access.

In order to get the really nice version, you have to use Internet Explorer. This means that I have to stop using Chrome, and fire up another browser just to check my email if I want to send an HTML formatted mail message.

So today after sending an email through IE, I decided to see if the only thing blocking Chrome was the browser sniffing done by Microsoft.

And the verdict is: ……………… Nope, the browser sniffing isn’t the only thing stopping Chrome from replacing Internet Explorer.

The Outlook interface is completely, I mean completely, unusable in Chrome. Messages can’t be read, folders can’t be switched. The full, unsliced CSS sprites are displayed everywhere.

If you’re curious to test this out, all you have to do is run Chrome with the –user-agent command line argument like so:

chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)"

Guess I’m stuck with either using the “Web Access Light” on Chrome or the full-feature switch to IE.

*I will continue to hope that Microsoft will start to care more about end-user experience*

MSU Black Poet Society

I recorded a couple poets performing at today’s meeting and have embedded them below for your viewing pleasure.

Our meetings are held every Sunday at 6:30pm in the basement of the MSU Student Union inside of the Multi-Cultural Center.

Reflections

Monday, 1/18/2010

I attended the Michigan State University Dr. MLK Jr. Community Dinner and heard from Trustees Ferguson and Owen and President Simon. I also learned more about the new exhibit at the MSU Museum with children letters to Rosa Parks and President Nelson Mandela.

Here is a video of President Barack Obama introducing the exhibit:

I plan to take a trip down to the museum soon. The exhibit will run until December 2010.

Tuesday, 1/19/2010

For lunch I met with @joshpremuda at the Travelers Club International Restaurant and Tuba Museum in Okemos. Josh is working on some side projects and we got to talking about starting a tech group in the Lansing area.

Wednesday, 1/20/2010

I went to my first Detroit Java User Group meeting and saw Mac Liaw give a presentation on Scala. The conversation was great and there were many in-depth questions asked. I was happy that the presentation wasn’t too beginner focused. The questions led the discussion for most of the time.