Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!

I am not one to live in the past or have any regrets.  History cannot be changed and regret only rots the promise of tomorrow.  In putting together this new Boles Blog to reflect what came before in 14 other instances of thoughts and writing, I came upon the old Awards page for the now retired Go Inside Magazine; and I found great joy in looking back at those wildly created and brightly colored animated .GIFs, and I decided to share them with you here now.  I moved the images off the now dead GoInside.com domain and placed them on the live Boles Books domain for serving, but I left the historical, clickable, URLs intact as a compendium of the greatest hits of what was, really, The Original Internet.

Do you recognize any of these websites?  Animated .GIFs were big back in the mid-1990’s, and one good way to promote your new website was to “give an award” to another website — there were no blogs back then — and require a link back to your award website.  The most elite award we won was from, at the time, the fledgling “Microsoft Network.”  MSN was starting with a big bang and a booming promise and it was a Big Deal to get that congratulatory email from Microsoft telling us we were “The One” for a day.  That single award from MSFT doubled our readership for the rest of our being.

4anything.com award!Innovation Award! (28155 bytes)

The Microsoft Network! 2825 bytes) awardit.jpg (3096 bytes) Ravi's Elite Website (4628 bytes) Great Gig Award! (9052 bytes)

NealWeb Award Winner! (8465 bytes) Cool Bananas! Laziness Central Site of the Day! Star Site Award (3753 bytes)

PC Webopaedia Outstanding Page Award Dynomite Site of the Night Cool Site of the Hour! Pirate Pete's Catch of the Day

Top 100! Rocking the Web! Top Ten! Top Fiver! Top Five!

Continue reading → Blast from the Go Inside Magazine Award Past!

The Microsoft Office 365 for Mac Review

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.

Continue reading → The Microsoft Office 365 for Mac Review

OnLive Desktop Plus Review for iPad

UPDATE: February 24, 2012
I was using Internet Explorer via OnLive last night and the speed was so fast I decided to see if I could get quantification for download and upload speeds for the Plus service.  I couldn’t get my old favorite, Speakeasy, to load on OnLive, but I was able to get Speedtest.net to work and here are the results:  An astonishing 88.05Mbps down and a fantastical 70.72Mbps up.  Now that’s some fast internet!  NYU slowly turns green

Today, I just shelled out my first $5.00USD monthly fee for OnLive Desktop Plus for my iPad 2.  I decided to go the money route for OnLive Desktop Plus to get priority access because the free version is incredibly slow and monotonous.  I also wanted to see just how fast the Internet Explorer 9 interface was on the iPad going through the OnLive Desktop Plus backend.

Continue reading → OnLive Desktop Plus Review for iPad

Nebraska Bribed into the Microsoft Cloud

I was surprised to read the news that the University of Nebraska are moving their email system from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud.  When I saw Microsoft paid $250,000.00USD to get Nebraska to choose Office 365 instead of Google Apps for Education, it all became clear.  Nebraska took the money and followed the bribe.

Continue reading → Nebraska Bribed into the Microsoft Cloud

Your Facebook is Leaking

Did you know your Facebook privacy has been leaking?  As that social network expands to flow like a never-ending molasses across the grimacing façade of the nameless masses — suffocating us in pokes and Mafia War requests — we need to pause a moment and step back to wonder just what’s happening to us beyond the velvet curtain.

Continue reading → Your Facebook is Leaking

Why Did MSFT Buy Skype?

Why did Microsoft drop $8.5 billion on Skype?  Are they that terrified of Google Voice that they’ll drop major change on an acquisition they don’t really need?  The deal is ridiculous and upside down and backward.  What was Ballmer thinking?  Is MSFT really going to embed Skype in their products, or was this a proactive buy that leads to a mercy killing?

Continue reading → Why Did MSFT Buy Skype?

Exporting Blog Content from Spaces to Blogger

Do you have any idea how hard it is to extricate your blog content from Microsoft Spaces and import it into another blog hosting platform?

Continue reading → Exporting Blog Content from Spaces to Blogger