I’m settling in nicely to my new job over here at Federated Media. I’m working on some great stuff. And to that end, I wanted to let everyone know of an event that FM is hosting in June here in NYC.

So I’m proud to announce the 2010 CM Summit, which will take place on June 7th and 8th at the Hudson Theater and Millennium Broadway Hotel in NYC. We will have some amazing speakers and conversation, which I will let our fearless leader John Battelle speak to in his post on the FM blog. As a preview, some of the booked speakers include Avner Ronen of Boxee, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of The New York Times Corp. Here is the full list of speakers.

Some additional resources for your viewing pleasure:

CM Summit Website: http://www.cmsummit.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cmsummit
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/CM-Summit-NY
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1005697

So book early. Every previous one has been sold out. Its going to rock!

A guy named Paul Yperman spent the past two years constructing a scale model of the Star Wars Droid Control Ship from scratch, using schematics he found in a Star Wars Cross Sections book in a bookstore.

He found a software on the Internet that helped him figure out the orb in the middle and then he continued from there. 30,000 pieces later and 2 years of building, he was finished. The God sent idea was finally done, and as a result, he constructed one of the worlds most elaborate Star Wars LEGO creations. Forget the small 200 piece builds you can buy off the shelf. This one was carefully executed and took some custom ordering to fit the purpose.

This is just another amazing example of the super cool things that can be built with Lego.

Tron. Now this is a movie remake that I am looking forward to seeing. For its time, the original was a pretty ground breaking flick with a decent cult/geek following. The modern technology of today will bring it to a new level.

For all you Syracuse fans out there, here is the video of the 2003 National Championship win for your viewing pleasure.

Throughout the years, there have been several unique characters, signs and stunts at the Dome that have helped get those huge crowds revved up – there was Dome Eddie (a scrawny guy wearing a big Orange wig), the Dome Ranger (a guy in an Orange Lone Ranger outfit who ran up and down the length of the court), signs telling Boeheim to “Unleash Tony Scott” to name a few. And now, there has been a new twist when a genius SU Grad Student brought a five foot high picture of Jim Boeheim to a game. From there its expanded to Wes Johnson and, hilariously, even Juli Boeheim, Jim’s wife.

Over at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Communications blog, there is a great interview with Pat Manley, the aforementioned grad student who came up with the idea for the “Big Head Boeheim”. And yes, for all you Syracuse fans, he is part of that same Manley family who’s name was on the old fieldhouse.

So here we go, this is what college hoops is all about. May the best team decked out in Orange win!

A rare and high quality copy of Detective Comics #27 was sold at auction for $1,075,000. The record setting auction price came just three days after an original Superman comic sold for $1 Million.

Both Detective Comics #27 and Action Comics #1 were originally published by National Allied Publications, a company that later became Detective Comics and then DC Comics.

In the 15 minutes that Tiger Woods had his contrived, staged, talking…like…this…because…I…got…caught press conference, the markets on Wall Street literally stopped what they were doing until he finished his speech.

A British bookmaker has set odds at 4-to-7 that Woods wife, Elin, will be with him. William Hill didn’t stop there, however. It offers 8-to-1 odds that Woods will announce he is getting a divorce, 12-to-1 odds that his wife is pregnant and 100-to-1 odds that he is retiring.

My house during the recent blizzard that hit the East Coast of the US.

I also created a panoramic view of my street, taken from my front porch, during the blizzard.

In looking around at different button styles, I settled on Richard Davis’ SexyButtons set because they were lightweight, flexible and offered lots of different color schemes that could be used in different circumstances on my site. However, when I installed the SexyButton code, there was a minor bug on the homepage of my site with the “Next Entries” button.

Problem

Since the posts on my blog’s homepage are the most recent posts (my most recent post through my tenth most recent post), obviously there are no “Next Entries” to go to, and therefore that button does not need to be displayed on the Homepage. The issue is that while the Wordpress Loop code did not output any text, the SexyButtons still recognizes the code that is present on index.php template page and renders the grey background of the button style I chose (see highlight in red box above). To take this scenario one step further, if you clicked through the “Previous Entries” link at the bottom of the main blog page, you would get to “Page 2″ of my blog that would have the next 10 posts I created, and at the bottom of that page, the “Previous Entries” and “Next Entries” buttons would be rendered and linked accurately. The code I originally used to render the above screen shot is below, which is the combined standard Wordpress code and the SexyButtons code:

My Solution (Or, My Hack)
The nice thing about Wordpress is that since its built on PHP, there are tags and code for practically every element of your blog. In this case, the <?php (is_paged ()) { ?> tag is available for you to specify functions or actions on the paginated pages of your blog (yes, poor English…but I digress). So knowing this, I just strung together a couple of PHP “if” statements that keyed off of the “is_paged” tag which is noted in the code below.

The first “if” statement basically says “if Wordpress validates that the page is “is_paged”, then drop in the start of the button tag. Then, I left the “previous_posts_link” alone as was provided by Wordpress. Then, I put in another “if” statement to close out the button tag.

I then took this code and I put it on my index.php Wordpress template page, in place of the standard “Previous/Next Entries” code provided on most Wordpress index.php templates.

I am not about to admit that this is the cleanest way to solve this minor issue, but it works for me. Hope this helps someone out there on the internet. Or, I hope someone can help me if there is a simpler solution out there.

• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.Six months ago, this was 250m…This means over 40% growth in less than 6 months.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase.
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.