with the impending demise of itools/.mac/mobileme, i realised i need to move all the stuff i’d accumulated in my idisk over the last 15 years (yeah i was early adopter), so for the sake of keeping it on the internet i’ll be posting some it here. not because it matters, but because i can.
Archives For techology
still as fascinating as when i originally posted about it in 2004
Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour`s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.
this april will mark my sixth anniversary of maintaining a blog with five of those being with the recently defunct journalspace. luckily i had most of my entries stored offline as i was trying to migrate them here. there are a lot of people that are not as fortunate.
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I’m at the claims office waiting to give the adjustor my police report and took a moment to test of wordpress iPhone app. I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I can tag and add categories and it’s taken less than 90 seconds to get most of this text typed.
this make actually get me posting more often because I can write as I think about it, save a draft and come back to it later and just post and edit later.
oh technology, thou art sweet.
not that it matters or anyone even noticed but i’ve changed hosting providers. i registered and hosted the domain with Hostway. i have no clue who they were outside the fact the bought Valueweb, the web host that i’ve used for the last seven years. Hostway sucks, there is no other way around it. in the first two weeks that i had the domain i had 10 days of down time, things came to a head during the Memorial day weekend when i spent two hours waiting to speak to a supervisor, after much bullshit he finally came out and admitted that the ticket on the mysql error that kept me from setting up the blog had been open for at least eight days. since memorial day it had been up mostly, but the underlying problem was never fixed and aside from a promised phone call after the holiday to say someone was working on it, i haven’t heard from them since.
i loathe crappy customer service and i loathe when they try to treat me like an idiot, which is why i moved all my personal domains to a new server, well i’m waiting to for the migration to propagate. which brings me to my other question why do hosting companies make it so difficult to terminate service. they’re like the new aolhell.
my new host is eleven2 and thus far the service has been exemplary, hopefully it will continue.
it’s been a while since i posted and there have been a lot of things on my mind and hopefully i can manage to get them out in some cognoscent order here. in the last week, i enjoyed a child like glee as a number of things that i desired, fortuitously came together. on sunday i got my wii and friday night i got my iphone (for free, sometimes working retail pays off in interesting ways) and then the final harry potter book. which in itself was a conundrum, do i read, then activate my phone or activate my phone and then read. i chose the latter and less than 15 minutes after i got home my phone was activated and i was on my way with The Deathly Hollows. i really enjoyed the book and i think it was a tremendous ending to a fantastic series and i will be the first to admit that i got teary at the end. as for the iphone it’s beautiful piece of hardware, of all the features, i love the phone the most, it works better than any phone i’ve ever had. on to other things besides my retail obsessions.
we took a road trip in early july, just after the holiday to des moines to see friends and i was making the blog rounds on the 4th i came across a re-posting about ‘Why I love America’ and while i didn’t agree with some of the reasons, i had no real objections until i came across this paragraph:
“I love that America was one of the very first nations in the world to put an end to slavery. The story of slavery in America was no different than anywhere else except that we stopped a lot sooner. That needs to be mentioned whenever the topic comes up.”
this was so inaccurate and untrue i felt the need to post a comment and that’s where i began my slide down the rabbit hole. i learned three valuable lessons:
1. there’s a class of people that believe that factual information is untrue when it doesn’t agree with their point of view,
2. the same class of people have a scary sense of entitlement as evidenced by this quote
“… the US MUST act on what is in our countries interest at the time. The carribean is in our back yard, so it is fair game.”
3. the reason the country is in such a mess is the inability to have open discourse without rhetoric.
then there is this administrative order, which allows the administration to ‘block bank accounts and any other financial assets that might be found in this country belonging to people, companies or groups that the United States deems are working to threaten stability in Iraq.’
i don’t know about anyone else, but with the major betrayals of trust and power abuses from this administration, you begin to wonder if you’re paranoid enough.
after 5 years of yeoman service the backlight on my laptop has died. the machine still works, it`s just not portable anymore. there were plans afoot to buy a computer this year, but we`re realising with vic going to school in one direction and me working in the complete opposite direction our days of effectively being a one car household are over. getting to class and work currently have more priority than a new machine at this point.
we`ll live. i`m typing this on the same machine, for which i`d fortuitously bought a keyboard at the store`s fire sale last weekend. i must have sensed that the end was nigh. i`ve been bragging about this machine in the store to customers and co-workers alike, it`s a little abused but it`s been a constant companion for a long time. it`s not anywhere the fastest machine in the world but it still produces paying work and for that i`m very pleased. in computer terms, 5 years is a incredibly long time and the fact i`m running the latest OS and producing paying work is testament to the durability of this machine.
there had been talk of replacing the battery which gives about 10 minutes of charge now but if it`s going to be sitting on the desk, there is no point. i could get the monitor fixed but there is also no point in spending almost $600 to fix this machine. i love it and i`m happy with it, but realistically there is no justifying it. we`re just going to have to soldier on with it as desktop until we can do better. i`ve had a second monitor hooked up to the laptop to have an extended desktop to work on. now i`m working with the laptop closed off the 17″ that i had connected, so i`m just going to have to readjust to having one monitor again.
i was chatting with a friend this morning about computing and i realised that i`ve been a computer use for an incredibly long time. more than two thirds of my life. and it`s fascinating to see how far we`ve come.
from tape drives and an entire OS fitting on a 20Mb drive and some of the more popular applications fitting on a 800k diskette. i was in the store looking at the price and size of drives and remembered when the company i was working for paid over $800 for a hard drive that held less that the contents of a CD. and you could only burn a CD with a proprietary burn. i don`t necessarily long for those day, i`m just kind of stunned when i think about how much has happened in a such a short period of time.
i`m got more hard disk space on the desktop i`m using at the office than the entire art department had at my first job, time has flown. and not really meaning to bring this back to the apple processor switch again but i`m quite excited by it, i`ve been through the ups, downs and lateral movements for the last 13 years. i was using macs professionally when they switched from 680×0 to the PPC, i was still using them during the clone wars and i think this is just another one of those necessary changes that probably wont turn out as badly as people think it`s going to.
this is difficult. there was a fairly momentous announcement from Steve Jobs yesterday and i`d really like to throw my 2¢ in the ring, but i can`t. one of the things i agreed to when i took this job was not discuss the company in a public forum.
i`m going to say what i can; yesterday, Apple announced that they were going to switch to Intel processors starting 2006 with a complete transition by 2007, there`s been a lot of commentary in a number of places, a lot of people feel betrayed but honestly i think this is for the best. this is not the official word from on high, i just think it`s a step in a new and interesting direction. it`s thinking different taken to an incredibly logical extreme.
and that`s all i can say about that.
edit:
a fairly reasonable article on the whole situation.
If you have an e-mail address you probably received unwanted e-mail of some sort, this is known as spam or junk mail. There is no sure fire way to stop spam, but these pointers may help reduce the amount of messages you have delete on a daily basis.
1. Create a separate e-mail address for signing for lists or online services.
Spammers tend to trawl mailing lists and online discussion boards for addresses, by creating another e-mail address you can ensure your main address is smothered by unwanted e-mails.
2. Use a service like BugMeNot (www.bugmenot.com).
BugMeNot is a service created to bypass logging into websites like the New York Times that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information.
3. Blind CC your forwards.
Actually this guideline was initially, don`t forward anything, but that would be almost impossible to convince people to do. But to prevent spamming yourself, your friends and family, use the BCC or Blind CC field to address bulk e-mails thus ensuring privacy.
4. Use your address book
Most, if not all e-mail applications; even the free online ones; include an address book. Using the address book to keep the e-mail addresses of your friends and family address, as well as the mailing list administrators; if you`re on mailing lists, allows the junk mail filter of these applications to work more efficiently. If an e-mail shows up from someone not in your address book it will get flagged as junk.
5. Don`t click the remove button
A lot of spam comes with an option that offers to stop sending or remove you with a simple click. In an ideal world that would work, but most spammers are operating illegally, so clicking on that button only confirms your e-mail address is valid and causes more spam.
If your current e-mail account is already overwhelmed by spam, now might be the time to set up a new account; using the current account as the spam catcher; implementing these rules and see how your inbox fares.