A C-Net article indicates Opera denies rumors of the company being aquired by Microsoft. I am not sure it would be a bad thing. If Microsoft decided to bring Opera to the masses in lieu of Internet Explorer it would improve the world. The article sure doesn’t reflect our experience however in browser market share … claiming that Firefox only has 8% of the market. We show Firefox/Mozilla at over 40% of our visitors! (See the sidebar to the right of our main page for our current statistics).

Well it appears there is a problem …. the cords won’t reach. What to do? It appears the mouse is on it as day four of the doodle hits us. Typical of a dog, the lazy thing is just watching …

Here is a post about some of Googles other holiday decorating including a track Santa feature.

This post makes me wonder does the doodle release worldwide at the same time, or is it released around the globe at a set time locally.

An article over at C-Net discusses the fact that many on-line retailers have strict return policies. It says that Best Buy for example has a restocking fee. That appears to be true for some items:

Restocking Fee
A 15% restocking fee will be charged on opened notebook computers, projectors, camcorders, digital cameras, radar detectors, GPS/navigation and in-car video systems. A 25% restocking fee will be charged on special order products, including appliances. These fees apply unless the item is defective or damaged, you receive the wrong item, or the fee is prohibited by law.

But the fact is that if you open it, they cannot sell it as new. If it isn’t broken, then every consumer coming after you will share in the cost of your return because the store will take a hit. Note that the fee does not apply if something is wrong with the item or you received the wrong item. They also offer extended return dates, but note that digital cameras and some other items have to be returned by January 8th. I guess the real message is don’t open it when you receive something until you are sure it is the one that you want! The fee only applies to opened merchandise at this retailer.

This clip will create a Definition List (DL) including building DT and DD tags.

This is posted in the wrong place … a version 2.0 of this clip is available where it belongs. Sorry for any confusion.

It now appears that the cat and mouse have put aside their instinctive differences to work together towards powering up the name Google in the logo. Where is this doodle going? We’ll find out more tomorrow.

Today I started to discover Ruby. It is a programming language that is meant to be “language” oriented to normal people. You can actually take a 15 minute on-line Ruby tutorial via your browser over here. What a great way to fiddle a bit and see what the syntax looks like.

I do have to honestly say that I found several things about the tutorial very frustrating!

• You must go linear and do just what they say to get to the next step … hit a typo and you a hurting … I wrote the guy and suggested a next button is in order
• In lesson 7 or 8 he has a link that blows away the demo blog programming that you just typed in … and you have to back way up into 7 to get past it
• You actually have to type everything out … how about an autofill … I understand the value of doing, but this got monotonous
• it doesn’t exlain when we use single and when we use double quotes … it doesn’t help you to understand why we are using upper case sometimes and not others, etc.

Still worth a run.

Rick Dooling just pointed me towards the Ruby on Rails project. It is an open source web framework that will allow a programmer to rapidly work though a project with less effort in minor semantics of coding. As it says, it favors convention over configuration. I look forward to digging in a little further, but this reminds me of when I first heard of PHP. This thing looks like it may have traction to go big. Who wouldn’t want to use this thing? It appears to be overtaking .net and Java deployments.

That led me to this random site called Quimble.com where you can get a survey up and running in minutes. Interesting site, supposedly built using Ruby on Rails.