Last week, I signed up for Microsoft Office 365 and, even though I’m on a Mac, I thought the online email and team and website services would be a good and solid backup for the life I have heretofore entirely and exclusively run on Google Apps.
I was right and I was wrong to try Office 365. This is the story of how it all played out.
I’m going to date myself but bear with me. When I was a kid, long before the age of always on internet service providers, I would get up extra early before going to school to use my 2400 baud modem to connect to Bulletin Board Systems. Two important things to bear in mind here — one of them being that only one person could be using the system at once — hence why I would get up so early. The other thing was that everything was incredibly slow.
Janna is currently in Iowa visiting her mother. I miss her heaps, and I am happy to help whenever the call for assistance arrives from the Midwest into my Google Voice Inbox via SMS. Janna has her iPad with her and her creaky, water-soaked-and-barely-usable, iPhone 3G. Her 3GS was stolen. We skipped the iPhone 4 in indignant principle. We will move up the iPhone 4S or 5 or whatever it will be when it is announced.
After four years, we still hold the one-year Masters degree in utter disdain. I recently learned that an old adjunct friend of mine was forced to get an MFA degree — a Master of Fine Arts — in order to keep her college teaching job.
Imagine the following scenario: you go to your kitchen to pour yourself a glass of water only to find that no water comes forth from the tap. Looking in the cabinet underneath the sink reveals a small computer display that reveals the following: you have reached your monthly quota of drinking water for the month and so you are no longer permitted to pour more water until the beginning of the following month.
I feel that if we have learned anything from what happened in Egypt, it is that an all powerful Internet “Kill” switch, with the might to entirely shut the entire population off from accessing the internet, is a terrible thing and should not be brought into existence — assuming that it does not secretly already exist.
Do you know About.me? I didn’t. I do know. About.me is a new website/social aggregator/homepage you create to connect things “About You.” I guess. I’m always sort of late to these burgeoning online enterprises, so when I read yesterday that About.me was sold to AOL for tons of money after only being live four days, I decided to hurry on over and grab a username and root around a bit to see what about the fuss was about and — http://about.me/boles — is now mine, along with all a bundled bucket of obnoxious TypeKit Fonts that still take forever to propagate and load on a page:
If you haven’t visited the New York Times Opinion Pages online lately, you’re missing one of the truly dramatic textual aesthetic events in a generation. As you can see in this screenshot below of a Frank Rich article published on Saturday — the fonts, and the complete look of the Opinion Page are crisp, precise and beautiful and look just like the printed page you buy on the street or pick up from your front doorstep — and that magnificent spectacle didn’t happen on accident.
Continue reading → Drama of the Textual Aesthetic and the New York Times
We’ve written about Continental Airlines in the past — and today, we’re having at them again — because they consciously make it incredibly hard to get a complaint filed. We are grateful we have this public outlet to express our ongoing dismay with their service and to warn you against a similar fate.
The tide of uncontrolled anger on the internet — think Juicy Campus and FML and Lori Drew as previously excoriated examples — rises anew in a wave of awkward hatred as Dirty Phonebook crashes against our moral shore.
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