If you spend any time doing business on the internet — “Branding Yourself” — is an important part of the process even if it seems shameful and unseemly and selfish: Enjoy it! It’s what you’ve become by being here!
Continue reading → On Branding, Own the Generic: Why I Became “David Boles” on the Internet
Living and working on the internet provides many interesting and resistive conundrums. You want to share information, and learn things, and try to propagate knowledge forward with some semblance of permanency and purpose; but there are always — The Others — also online, who appear to live to thwart any attempt at compulsive fact collecting. Sure, we all know the Comments Troll — but there are other ugly demons that abound, just waiting to leap at you and waste all your time.
Continue reading → The Internet Others and the Art of Never Not Always Responding
Ever had the feeling something was direly wrong, and you knew you were right about the cause of the trouble, but all external indicators were inexplicably pointing to you as the cause of the problem? It’s an unnerving, uncomfortable situation — and I’ve rarely found myself so cornered with no way out as I did a few years ago as a new Google AdSense publisher — but now, after reading an informative Pastebin post from a former Google employee, I finally have a sense of closure as to why my AdSense was shuttered by Google.
Continue reading → Now Losing My Google AdSense Account Finally Makes Sense!
I am concerned about the abolishment of reliable, mechanical, communication when it comes to “plain old telephone service” — POTS — and the future of voice and data communication.
Hurricane Sandy has shoved forward the end of the copper telephone line. Big communication companies have decided it is in their best interest to push people onto cellular networks instead of rebuilding what was lost: Traditional “communication by wireline” that has been a staple of everyday communication in the USA for almost a hundred years.
The changing landscape has Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies itching to rid themselves of the cost of maintaining their vast copper-wire networks and instead offer wireless and fiber-optic lines like FiOS and U-verse, even though the new services often fail during a blackout.
“The vision I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chairman and chief executive, said last year. Robert W. Quinn Jr., AT&T’s senior vice president for federal regulatory issues, said the death of the old network was inevitable. “We’re scavenging for replacement parts to be able to fix the stuff when it breaks,” he said at an industry conference in Maryland last week. “That’s why it’s going to happen.”
Yesterday, I was checking out the “new and improved” Google Now feature on my iPhone, and when I pulled up the weather card, I was met with this remarkable temperature: 125 degrees in the light rain in Jersey City at 11:18 in the morning.
What?
Huh!
I quickly checked my other favorite weather site — forecast.io — on my iPad, and learned the actual temperature in Jersey City was a balmy, but humid, 75 degrees with scattered rain. A 50 degree bogus increase in temperature is a really bad result from a company you pay to trust.
It was a little alarming to see how bluntly and boldly Google Now delivered the absolutely wrong — and dangerous! — temperature. Sure, mistakes happen, but there was no subsequent notification, or even acknowledgement later, that the 125 degree temperature was a hiccough in the Google world — and that should concern us all.
When Google burps, we all involuntarily swallow.
The University of Notre Dame published an interesting study on “Event Boundaries” that cause the everyday each of us to lose track of who we are and what we were planning to do:
We’ve all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.
New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.
“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” Radvansky explains.
“Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”
Continue reading → On Creating a Möbius Strip of Internet Event Boundaries
The Good — well, we did it — it took us awhile and happened in a very ramshackle manner. We moved ourselves with the help of a cast of extras. One ancient tractor, a front-loading “bin,” two borrowed trailers, the land rover, some Bulgarians, our neighbour Manuel and our friends Joachim and Zee.
Continue reading → The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Moving House in Portugal
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