(click on the pictures for a larger view)

I was taking some pictures around the office the other day and the staff decided to get together and have a little fun. I wanted to share a couple of the pictures that we took and give you a chance to see some of the people that you speak with from time to time. In this picture you will see our developers, sales and account managers, billing, IT, DCops, technical support, business dev., and marketing. If you’re one of our customers and you speak to us pretty regularly, or even just a couple of times - shoot me an e-mail with the name of the employee and I’ll be happy to point them out so you can put a face to a name: cpugsley@serverbeach.com.

How many of you are die-hard Firefox users? How many of you are constantly looking for tools, add-ons, or anything else to make your browser experience just a little bit better? I read an article today over at MakeUseOf.com that included 6 pretty cool extensions for Firefox that’ll save you some time -

1. Hyperwords 3.6 - Interact with all the words on the web, not just links!

2. Paste Email 3.2 - Paste your email address (or any other text) into text fields.

3. Read It Later - Save pages of interest to read later.

4. Shareaholic - Allows you to share, bookmark and e-mail web pages quickly without leaving your browser.

5. Next Tab - An add-on that improves the tabbed browsing.

6. TinyURL Creator - It takes a long URL as input, and gives you a short URL to use in it’s place.

Are any of you using some of these already? Do you have some neat add-ons or extensions to share? Let us know!

]]> http://serverbeach.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/firefox-users-check-it-out/feed/ kylistah http://serverbeach.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/peer-1-growing-pains-episode-two-10000-contest/ http://serverbeach.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/peer-1-growing-pains-episode-two-10000-contest/#comments Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:46:41 +0000 kylistah http://serverbeach.wordpress.com/?p=216

PEER 1, the parent company of ServerBeach, has launched today a new video contest and is giving away $10,000 in prizes to the winner! Along with the contest, the company has released the second episode of it’s award-winning short series “Growing Pains” which follows the trips and follies of a home-based business startup that grows quickly out of control causing new employees and servers to take control of the home.

PEER 1 is giving it’s viewers of the episode the opportunity to create their own growing pains video that shows their personal experiences for a chance to win a prize package of 12 months of free managed hosting, a 15-inch MacBook, and a Sony HD camcorder, at a total value of $10,000.

To watch the new episode of Growing Pains and enter the $10,000 Giveaway Contest, go to www.peer1.com/growingpains

Good Luck!

Episode 2 – “A Walk in The Park.” Some time after being tossed out of the house, Todd and Janet try to mend fences over a nice walk in the park. All seems well and the moment feels right, or so Todd thinks.

“An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.”

We all visit websites, leaving many of them quickly for any of the following reasons:

• Loads too slowly
• Too hard to navigate around
• Information you’re searching for seems like a game of hide ‘n seek

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout Six Revisions has posted some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

A couple of tools listed on that site include -

ClickHeat, which is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored

Crazy Egg, who offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

Check out the rest of that list and see if your site can benefit from any of those tools.

I ran across a YouTube channel today about online marketing. It’s huge - as of this morning its had 201,532 views. The host Charles Lewis is an online marketer for Pop Labs who goes by the name of “The Poetic Prophet” . He likes to rap about his subject of expertise, SEO. His videos are not only entertaining, they’re remarkably informative.

This guy knows his business.

Where can you find a powerhouse server at a great price? You guys know the answer…

The Beach of course!

ServerBeach is a self-managed dedicated server provider built on the rock solid PEER 1 network. We give you a server loaded up with power, bandwidth, DIY tools, and support:

• 24/7 Support
• 24/7 Live Person available by Phone
• Personal Account Manager
• Lots of Bandwidth
• Free Reloads
• Free Rapid Reboot
• Free Rapid Rescue
• Rock Solid Network Infrastructure
• Choose between 3 data centers across the US: East Coast, West Coast, Central

Check out the server packages in Categories 3 and 5 that we have to offer and get free setup + 1GB RAM.

May 3, 2008 is starting to draw a lot of attention around the internet. On this day, people from all over the world will shut down their computers for 24 hours.

In todays world I often wonder how difficult my life would be without my computer. Considering that it’s become a part of my daily life for both work and personal tasks. If I didn’t have it.. for just one day, would I be able to cope? Of course. Well…probably. OK, who am I kidding? As I type this blog post, I realize just how dependent I’ve become on my laptop to get me through the day or night. If I’m not doing work on it, I’m reading news and current events, e-mail, IM’ing, or shopping. Sure, I could certainly come up with other things to do - such as work in the yard, relax by the swimming pool and what not. Perhaps on May 3rd, I just may do that.

Now that I’ve shared that with you all, I’m sure many of you are thinking, “Wow, get a life!” But I’m also sure that many of you are sitting there nodding your heads, wondering what you’d do without your computer for 24 hours.

Check out what many are talking about over at a website titled Shutdown Day, which they’re claiming will be “one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the Internet.” The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

I have always loved candidness from businesses. I get tired of hearing corporate canned sales pitches or canned responses to the press. When businesses are open, honest, frank, and to the point about their products whether it be good or bad - it’s always a win.

For those of you familiar with NVIDIA’s CEO - Jen-Hsun Huang, you know that he’s a very down to earth man who speaks candidly. During the company’s recent financial analyst meeting, not long into the call Huang began to speak what was on his mind -

“We’re going to open a can of whoop ass,” he told analysts, who quickly broke out into laughter.

Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, along with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. The sole reason for this battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it. Jen-Hsun Huang doesn’t hide the fact that his company is spending nearly a billion dollars each year ready to take on Intel’s graphics offerings.

Throughout the bulk of the conference call, Huang continued to lament Intel for poor graphics performance. He hints at another Intel slide deck that claims Intel GMA 3100 is Windows Vista Premium compatible — a claim which was debunked by Microsoft employees in a recent lawsuit.

Intel fired back minutes later, sending emails to analysts detailing NVIDIA’s poor track record when it comes to Vista crashes due to incomplete drivers. Almost on cue, Huang responded once again.

“NVIDIA has to support several new titles every week,” he said, alleging that Intel’s graphics just have to support the basic office packages. “You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago,” he said.

The statement clearly struck a nerve with Huang, who paused for a second before adding “How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?”

You can read the full article here.