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Felons, Fascists, Freeloaders and Fools: Not My Utopia!

Utopia is a new, $50 million, reality television series from Fox that is supposed to run for a year — but I don’t think the show will make it to the end of October because of horrible casting decisions and even more miserable ratings.  The producers get some things right and most everything else wrong.

The technical aspects of the show, the live feed, the landscape, and the idea, are all right — but the casting is completely and horrifyingly wrong — as is the creepy-pervy peeping-tom-ish host who ruins the television show with his “stalkeristic” vibe and prissy mustache and bizarro hat and glasses.

As well, when you choose a convicted felon to be the center of your show from the git-go, and he’s also the initial online presence for your show and live feeds portal, something terrible and awful has gone wrong on a deep DNA level that cannot be cured by God, a false baptism, or human infusion.

Continue reading → Felons, Fascists, Freeloaders and Fools: Not My Utopia!

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How to Make Your Non-SSL Website HTTPS Secure

Last month, Google shook up the hosted online content creator world with news that their search rankings will start to reflect HTTPS security. That’s big news. Google wants a secure web, and to get us all there — kicking and screaming, if need be — they will reward those who leap on the SSL bandwagon with higher visibility.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

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Donny vs. Derrick: Big Brother 16 Brands Your Morality

It’s that time of year again — to lament the downfall and the displeasure in how the most recent incarnation of CBS’ Big Brother “reality” television show is, once again, unfolding before us — and the thing that bites me today is the sort of person CBS lures onto the show to live an exposed life 24/7 for 90 days.

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The DiJiFi Review: Film, Video and Audio Restoration, Preservation and Translation

[UPDATED: June 26, 2014]

I have been writing and working in film and TV and radio all of my life.  I started young and I’m ending old!  I recently decided to upgrade part of my Boles.com website into a Prairie Voice archive of some of my previous work so it is more readily accessible and referenceable by collaborators and others.

I have so much film and videotape and audio stored that I didn’t know where to start the archiving process.  Then I decided to just get the scripts and other documents online that I had within hands reach — and that included some film and video and audio, too!  I contacted Parlay Studios in Jersey City for help transferring all this analog work into a digitized form for web streaming and Parlay pointed me to — DiJiFi in Brooklyn, New York — and that was best piece of pointery I’ve received in the last decade.  Continue reading → The DiJiFi Review: Film, Video and Audio Restoration, Preservation and Translation

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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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The University as Hospital: An Inalienable Obligation

[Publisher’s Note: Howard Stein, Boles Blogs author and inspiration, died at age of 90 on October 14, 2012 in Stamford, Connecticut. This article now appears in print as an equalizing effort to preserve Dr. Stein’s teaching and thinking as David Boles shares this, and other works, from his private Prairie Voice archive. Howard wrote this article in the Spring of 1984 and, 30 years later, the lessons are still ripe and rich and damning.] 

For those suffering the wounds of life, the university has become a hospital.  For the woman in her middle forties whose husband has left her for “a young thing” after twenty-four years of marriage and four children, the university is the first thought where she may go for help.

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The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good

[Publisher’s Note: Boles Blogs author Howard Stein died on October 14, 2012 at 90 years of age.  In an ongoing effort to preserve his legacy and memory, David Boles is sharing articles and preserving other works from his private Prairie Voice archive. The following article was likely written by Dr. Stein in the early 1980’s — and his point still rings true, and still bites us with a bitter hardness of the flat truth — three decades later.]

Public education in the minds of the parents, schoolboards, teachers, and local politicians seems to have as its purpose either the preparing of the young for higher education (preferably private education), or the preparing of the young for a variety of jobs and trades.

Continue reading → The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good