Google Suggest is the search engine’s feature that auto-completes the text as you type in search terms. There’s been a number of funny suggestions discovered, and even a website dedicated to them. Bust Out Solutions is in good company when it comes to suggestions from Google: fraud, burlesque, mafia wars, bail bonds… Wonderful.

One of my favorite quotes by Ruby on Rails founder David Heinemeier Hanson was at Minnebar 2007 when somebody asked him if Ruby on Rails was ready for the “Enterprise.” His response was something like, “To me ‘Enterprise’ is just steak dinners, strip clubs, and expense accounts.” (Anybody have the exact quote?)

Whether you hold The Enterprise in high esteem or not, introducing new technologies into large IT departments is a challenge. It’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, and that’s especially true for large corporations with a lot of inertia.

That said, we’re honored to be mentioned in the InfoWorld article about the Top Underreported Stories of 2009. Sitting at #7 is the respect for Ruby on Rails in the enterprise, and our work on Best Buy IdeaX is used as one example.

We recently moved bestbuyideax.com to Heroku, a Ruby hosting platform that runs in the Amazon cloud. We’ve been incredibly happy with their platform, as well as their service. Thanks to Oren Teich for writing up a success story about Best Buy IdeaX.

It’s often the case for anybody in the industry to neglect their own site as they focus most of their time and energy on client work. We’re not exempt from that at all. The Bust Out website has finally gotten a minor, rushed, temporary face lift while we work on a total relaunch of our site, due to be complete before the year’s end sometime soon.

Bust Out Solutions has undergone many stages of evolution this year, including new office space, several new team members, and our very own t-shirts for sale! Business has been very good in 2009. We continue to service a few dozen existing clients and have had the pleasure of meeting several new clients this year such as Travel Beyond, Best Buy for Business, Quantum Retail, and Pedal Brain. Lots of exciting stuff going on!

Dan Grigsby’s SEO competition at the University of Minnesota is back. This year, the word is “Zompire Dracularius,” and just like last year I am honoring link requests from the first students to contact me. Good luck to these sites:

• zompire-dracularius.com
• sonhuynh.net/zompire-dracularius
• zombiedracolaris.com
• zompiredraculariuszompiredracularius.com
• zompiredracularius.net
• sites.google.com/site/andymgmt3010
• zompires.org

Thanks to David Reese for this great tip. Instead of this:

text-indent: -9999px; height: 20px;

you just do:

height: 0; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 20px;

On the off chance this may help someone…

My mother recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. It seemed that the upgrade went smoothly, but a couple of days later, she had trouble opening certain .doc, .ppt, and .xls files with Office 2004. The error messages were obscure. Messages from Excel complained about not having read permissions on the file. PowerPoint would complain about not being allowed to open the specified file type. And Word had no error message; some docs simply wouldn’t open. There were lots of Google results, none of which helped.

The problem? It turns out she had a “#” character in the name of a parent folder. Once we removed the “#”, all was well.

I understand that “#” is an unusual character, but come on! This is 2009! I should be allowed to use whatever characters I please when naming a folder.

This is one of the most comprehensive tutorials on how to install WordPress on Mac OS X Leopard: http://lettersandscience.net/software/tag/mac-os-x

I’m pleased to announce the launch of Best Buy Idea X, a website where you can share, vote for, and discuss ideas that will help make Best Buy a better company. The site is built using Ruby on Rails and runs in Amazon’s Compute Cloud.

We’re far from done with the site. There is already a list of 20+ new features and enhancements that we will be developing over the next 12 months. If you have any feedback or great ideas for the site feel free to let me know. Or, better yet, post an idea in Idea X itself and let the community decide if it’s a good one.

Thanks to Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt at Best Buy for being the muscle behind this project, Barry Judge for executive support, and to my team for kicking ass – Paul Cantrell, McClain Looney, Eric Grossnickle, and Andrew Bessler.

According to Minneapolis Police, the alarm going off in our studio office at 4:20 am was a false alarm. Officers responded to the alert and after investigating, determined the place to be secure, despite the fact that the exterior door to the building was forced open, our office door was open and splintered, and our 55-inch television was ripped off its mount. But at least they left the Mario Kart and the wii. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we lost all our scores and race history?