FraPort, Jumbos Are Everywhere
Maxime Chaya, A Lebanese Hero
Maxime Chaya is the first Lebanese to climb Everest on May 15th, 2006, 5:50 a.m. local time, as the last of his Seven Summits.
Maxime Chaya completed the second pole (South Pole) of his Three Poles Challenge on December 28, 2007. He called Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora from there and expressed his wishes that all Lebanese pursue their goals in life just as he did. If he completes his third pole (North Pole) as scheduled in 2009, he will have been only the 14th person in the world to have achieved the Grand Slam – 3 Poles & 7 Summits.
Maxime Chaya became a Lebanese national hero when he raised, for the first time in history, his country’s name to the highest place on earth.
Maxime, was officially nominated a Seven Summiteer after reaching the highest summit in the world, Mount Everest.
Check Maxime’s Blog here: TheThreePoles.com
EE – Going To Tallinn, Estonia
Estonia, the smallest of the Baltic States, was ruled for many centuries by Danish, Swedish, German, and Russian factions.
When the former Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it gained its long-awaited independence.
Official Name : Republic of Estonia
Population : 1,268,000
Capital City : Tallinn (379,000)
Languages : Estonian
Official Currency : Kroon
Religions : Lutheran, Orthodox Christain, others
Land Area : 45,125 sq km (17,423 sq miles)
US: xerox New Logo
Xerox announced today they’re junking their 40 year old logo for a new “modern” logo, complete with bouncing ball icon.
Xerox unveiled what it says is the most sweeping transformation of its corporate identity since it dropped “Haloid” from the Haloid Xerox name in 1961. In a broadcast to employees, it announced that it would retire the staid red capital X that has dominated its logo for 40 years in favor of what Richard Wergan, vice president of advertising, calls “a brand identity that reflects the Xerox of today.”
The new logo consists of a bright red lowercase “xerox” that sits alongside a red sphere sketched with lines that link to form a stylized X. According to Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox’s chief, that little piece of art represents the connection to customers, partners, industry and innovation.
Xerox and Interbrand, a brand consultancy that is a unit of Omnicom Group, spent more than 18 months interviewing some 5,000 people across the globe about their associations with the Xerox name. Then they set about figuring how they could best retain the nice things it stands for (dependability and stability), jettison the not-so-nice (formal, somewhat stodgy) — and, most importantly, add in such attributes as modern, innovative and flexible.
The new branding will go live on the Xerox Web site today but Xerox said it expected that it would take as long as two years to finish converting all of its packaging, marketing materials, office stationary and signs to the new look.
Online Invoices
Endeve is a Spanish startup offering an invoice management program for people and businesses.
With endeve, you can issue your invoices, manage your clients and check your revenues fast and easily. Your clients will receive an invoice copy in PDF, improving your service quality.
You’ll save time. You won’t need to write every email. You just have to write the message you want to send to your clients, and the system will use it in all your mailings.
Endeve will never access your invoices and clients data. Your data will be only accessible to you. Daily backups of all your data.
GR: Stayed Here In Athens
Dekelia Hotel
The Major Incidents of The Internet In 2007
The Great Skype Outage
Anyone using Skype will remember this one. Back in August, to the great frustration of its millions of users, Skype stopped working for almost two days. The culprit? Windows Update, apparently.
RackSpace truck incident
In November, a truck rammed into a power transformer and cut power to RackSpace’s Dallas data center. When their backup power kicked in, the chillers failed to start, and lots of customer servers had to be shut down. Among the affected were GigaOM, 37 Signals, Webmaster World and Laughing Squid.
Google Analytics takes a break
Easily the most popular website traffic monitoring service on the web, Google Analytics can’t have problems without a lot of people noticing. And they did…
365 Main data center power outage
This major San Francisco data center outage back in July may have affected more big-name websites and services than any other incident in 2007: Craigslist, Technorati, LiveJournal, TypePad, AdBrite, the 1Up gaming network, Second Life and Yelp were among the affected. Let’s just say that backup power won’t do you much good if your generators fail to start, which is what happened here.
Twitter Troubles
Twitter seems to be the service that can do no wrong in the eyes of its users. Not even a total of six days of downtime has stopped the service from becoming one of the big successes in 2007. A recent move to a new data center will hopefully help their performance in 2008.
Ubuntu.com crashed by eager downloaders
When the 7.04 release of the popular Linux distribution was released in April, the Ubuntu.com website drowned in traffic to the extent that the site stopped working, and later had to use a simplified landing page to handle the load.
Shaky Blogger service
Google’s mega-popular Blogger service has had several hiccups in 2007. That, and Google also managed to remove their own blog by accident.
NaviSite data center migration goes wrong
When more than 175,000 websites are left stranded for several days, you just know that someone will notice…
T-Mobile data center flooded
Their main data center in Seattle was flooded after a torrent of more than four inches of rain early in December. The T-Mobile website, their activation portals and several other services stopped working.
Black Friday too much for e-stores?
People love a good deal. So much, in fact, that several large e-commerce websites couldn’t handle the pressure on Black Friday, including Sears.com and Macys.com.
Media Temple grid grinding
This web host has had a tough year after introducing their much-hyped grid hosting service late in 2006. In December, Media Temple gave their grid-service customers two months of credited hosting fees and apologized for recent performance problems.
The Registerfly drama
Major customer dissatisfaction with failing domain name renewals that struck this company early in 2007 wasn’t exactly helped by the significant amounts of downtime clocked by the RegisterFly website.
Cisco trouble
They may be responsible for a large part of the internet backbone, but they are definitely not immune to website trouble.
