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Just Born, NPLF.org

The Nashville Public Library Foundation is a local nonprofit that promotes the initiatives of and raises funds for the Nashville Public Library.  Their offices are in the main library campus downtown, and they have been a lovely bunch of people to work with. 

Here’s what their website says about their mission:

“The Nashville Public Library Foundation seeks and stewards funding from private sources to enhance the programs, facilities and collections of the Nashville Public Library.”

We are really proud of this website design.  It’s elegant, easy to read and navigate, and has a visual style that feels modern-yet-classic all at the same time.  We hope you’ll check out the new NPLF.org. 

 

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Virtually Tour Nashville With Google Street View

Remember last year when Google unveiled their new Street View feature on their maps?  At first, the feature only worked for New York and Los Angeles, but Google promised to slowly start adding more and more cities. 

And now they’ve added Nashville, which is pretty sweet.

If you’re totally clueless as to what I’m talking about, let me briefly describe Google Street View.  You probably already know that you can choose to view a Google map in one of three ways:  traditional, satellite, and hybrid (the first two views combined together).  Satellite is, well, satellite photos of the mapped area.  So you can see real pictures of the tops of buildings. 

Well Street View is a revolutionary new way to see Google Maps.  It gives you an image from the angle of the street.  You can rotate 360 degrees and look all around you.  So you could run a Google map of a location you’ve never been before, and then after you get your directions you could choose Street View and get a feel for the neighborhood you’re headed to… find some landmarks to help you make sure you don’t get lost on the way to your destination.

So here’s a shot of the Ryman:

And now one of the Parthenon:

The way Google accomplishes this impressive collection of images is with a special new camera.  They mount the camera on the top of a van or car, and the camera is like a big ball, that actually has 8 or more cameras pointing in all directions.  Then, as they drive down the street, they capture images all around them. 

It’s pretty dang cool.  I spent several more minutes than I should have “touring” Nashville on Google Street View–checking out old houses I’ve lived in, finding landmarks like The Exit In or LP Field.  Hey look… there’s the corner outside the Sommet Center where I always buy my Nashville Predators tickets from a scalper! 

 

Neato. 

Anyway, check it out when you have a chance.  It’s WAY more addictive than you think it will be.

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Keystone University to Offer Bachelors Degrees in ...

Okay, so our Keystone University doesn’t actually offer a Bachelor’s Degree in anything.  But if it did, it would be in the areas of Fun and Eating.  We have a tenured, experienced staff of instructors who basically majored in those areas themselves. 

What is Keystone University?  Well, I sure am glad you asked, because the whole point of writing this post was to tell you about it. 

Keystone University is a free, hour-long class, taught by Keystone Business Solutions professionals.  Each session covers a different topic in the area of technology like “Everything You Need To Know About Search Engines” or “Why Your Company Needs A Blog.” 

We’ll feed you lunch, teach you something useful in a fun way, and we’ll even throw in a free “Keystone University” T-shirt!  Now how can you turn that down? 

If you’d like to learn more about our upcoming classes, or how you can sign up to be a part of one, stroll on over to our official site.  Classes are limited in size due to the fact that only so many people will fit in our conference room, but we’ll gladly reschedule extra classes when the demand is high.  We want to make sure we’re providing the kind of technology advice our clients find useful, so we hope you’ll check it out.  Maybe you have an area of interest we’re not currently covering, and if so… we’d love to hear your suggestions too. 

Hey, no textbooks to buy, no papers, no final exams.  It’s all the good stuff you remember from college, minus the tuition! 

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Posted by Jeremy Scott | 0 Comments

How Much Time Do You Waste Sitting In Traffic?

Well, if you live in the Nashville/Davidson County area, you spend an average of 40 hours a year sitting in traffic.  That’s a lot.  For the mathematically-challenged, it’s almost two entire days.  I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot of things I could accomplish in 40 hours that would be far more rewarding than bonding with my fellow travelers in bumper-to-bumper traffic.  During those 40 hours of not going anywhere, we Nashvillians waste 25 gallons of gas.  Ouch.

But it could be worse.  A new study ranks Nashville as the 28th-worst American city, in terms of traffic and congestion, which means there are exactly 27 places where traffic is worse than it is here.  Atlanta, for instance, tied for 2nd worst (no surprise there), with its drivers wasting upwards of 60 hours a year in gridlock.  Los Angeles won the top spot, with it’s commuters spending 70 hours a year in traffic clogs. 

Officially named the 2007 Annual Urban Mobility Report, the study ranks cities from worst to best, and contains a lot of interesting data besides just the “wasted hours” column. 

You can see the Nashville-specific report (in PDF format) here. 

You can view the full report, including the cities by rank, here. 

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Keystone’s New Servers & What This Mean...

Yesterday there was a brief period (about 20 minutes) of downtime for our web servers in Atlanta.  Seems there was a power outage downtown that, according to the server facility spokesman, is being attributed to the recent heat wave.  The outage not only knocked out power to the facility, but also fried the activator that should have turned on their backup generators.  As a result, you may have experienced a few minutes where your website was down.

First of all, we apologize.  We know that your website is important to you, and it’s equally important to us.  We hate it when this kind of thing happens, and work very hard to keep instances like this from occurring. 

We are very pleased, therefore, to announce to you that we are moving our servers to a local facility in Nashville.  Dolphini Networks, located on 10th Avenue South in downtown Nashville, is housed in a $27 million Lucent facility.  From the Dolphini website:

“Dolphini has a 20,000 square foot data center and over 10,000 square foot of office space which is completely surrounded by its own firewall, fire prevention and security systems, making it completely autonomous from the rest of the building.”

We have met with these folks on a couple occasions, and have personally toured the facility.  We feel that this is a much better overall solution for our web hosting needs, and that outages will be significantly more rare.  More imporantly, perhaps, is that this new facility is close enough that our networking personnel, led by Mike Miller, can be in the building with their hands on the actual server within minutes of any problem that might arise. 

Our top priority has been to find the right solution, not just the first solution we stumbled across, and we are confident that Dolphini is the answer we’ve been searching for.  We will be installing the new servers in the next couple weeks, and there won’t be any downtime related to the switch.  We look forward to continuing to offer you the best service possible.

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