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The Scotia Register Wormhole

It isn’t often you can take a trip through a wormhole, and survive, tumbling back in time, from whence you began, and then arrive back in the future from which there is no escape; and so I have described my recent journey tripping through the online archives of — The Scotia Register — a village newspaper that was published weekly, on Thursdays, in Scotia, Nebraska (population 291) from 1895 to 2003. Paging back through The Scotia Register archives was like being watched and recorded, from afar, years ago, with the perspective, and perception, of the now.

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Beware the Ides of February: Your Identity Has Been Stolen!

It’s tax season! Beware the Ides of February! Yesterday, Janna and I were disappointed to learn someone filed a tax return in our name. We discovered this identity theft when we diligently filed our 2015 taxes online via TurboTax and quickly learned our returns had not only been rejected by the IRS, but also by the New York and New Jersey tax offices! I later learned if the Feds reject your return, the States, in turn, will automatically reject your return, too. That’s good there’s some sort of communal, emergency, trigger that is in place for this homegrown brand of unsophisticated, commonplace, thievery.

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The Internet Others and the Art of Never Not Always Responding

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.

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Ten Years of Teaching Online: 500 Free Hardcore ASL Streaming Videos!

This week, Jann Sweenie and I are celebrating our 10 Year anniversary of teaching American Sign Language online at HardcoreASL.com!  As part of this ongoing decade celebration, we are now offering more than 500 of our ASL video streaming teaching videos at no cost to you!

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Two New iPhone 5s are On the Way from the Apple Store!

I relived my good old technocrat, Standing in Line at the Apple Store, identity this morning by awaking at 2:49am to place an online order for the new iPhone 5s at 3:01am Eastern.  I was happy to stand in line in my underwear instead of beneath the naked glare of the 5th Avenue Apple store streetlights.

The online Apple store was still offline at 3:01am, but by 3:04am, I was able to quickly get into the system and order our iPhones!

I initially ordered the iPhone 5s for Janna and me, in a single order, but the Apple store told me I could only order one iPhone at a time!  Ugh!

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Paying Cash for Online Shopping

For the majority of the history of shopping, the way to get goods was to march your way over to the retailer (or in the case of door to door salesmen, have them march their way to you) and to exchange your cash for their goods. This eventually gave way to checks and even credit cards, which is less of a way to directly pay a merchant than to have an intermediate party pay the merchant on your behalf. All of this was turned on its head when stores began selling their merchandise online and you at no point had to have any interaction with human beings.

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