August 7th 2008
I recently took A List Apart’s survey for people who make Web sites. If you make Web site, please take the survey as well.
From A List Apart: Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.
July 22nd 2008
I have been playing with the idea of expanding my categories by adding two more of my passions, photography and film. I am breaking into the photography category with a Flickr set from one of my favorite photographers, Thomas Hawk, who is also a founder of Zooomr. $2 Portraits is a project that Hawk undertook a few months ago when he realized how vain he was acting by ignoring a homeless person. More of a compassionate human than I, Hawk decided to change his way while pushing his photography in a new direction. Hawk has vowed to give two dollars to any homeless person who asks for change in exchange for the opportunity to photograph them and hear their story. Though this project was criticized by a few early on, it seems that most comments he receives are in support for it.
In and Internet full of constant pestering distractions, Thomas Hawk’s $2 Portrait photo set is one place I continuously go back to.
June 17th 2008
Inspired by Tom Merritt’s word cloud of his novel Boiling Point (view it here), I created a Wordle of LiTechSci. I think it gives a good overview of the content within without having to skim through pages of content. Wordle could actually be useful in the SEO world if they added an application to crawl Web sites.
Click to view the full size image.
May 9th 2008
I know, just what you need is another invite to some social application. You’re thinking: “I’m on MySpace/Facebook, why do I need anything else?”
First off, those social networks are so 2006, secondly, they’re tied down to your computer and logging in to the network.
Forget social networks, it’s time for social applications. With the freedom I discovered by getting a mobile device that connects to the “interwebs” from anywhere (okay, there seems to be a dead spot in the middle of the Hussey Sound), I have gotten wrapped up in social applications. I know, it’s a lot for all of you non-geeks out there to handle. But, trust me when I say that you’ll be just as enthralled if you give it a shot. There are only two problems with these applications. One, there are a lot of different things to handle, I can find myself staying up until 1am checking all of my different services (like last night). Two, none of my friends are geek-ish enough to take part yet, so the whole social part of it is pretty one-sided for me right now.
That’s why I introduce to you friendfeed.com
This is a message posting/conversation site that is similar in a way to pownce or twitter. The difference is that it integrates all of the other social application that you use into one feed. So I, for example, have my blog, my digg, my flickr, my gmail status, my pandora, my picasa, my pownce, my linkedin and my twitter accounts all connected to friendfeed. When I update any one of those it will be posted on my friendfeed. Basically, if you join friendfeed and subscribe to me, you can eavesdrop on me all day long. On top of that, many of you already use a couple of these applications, so even if you never return to friendfeed, everyone else will still benefit from you making an account and connecting to your other services. (Other services include: Google reader, StumbleUpon, Jaiku, YouTube, iLike, Amazon Wishlists, Netflix queue, and others…35 total).
Once you are all set up, you will see a list of all updates to these applications in chronological order. Your friends not only catch up and keep up with what’s new with you, but they can comment on anything and start conversations on each feed.
So, check it out. It’s a much more up close and personalized way to stay connected than those networks that are infested with Fwd: surveys and single-flavored, re-skinned applications.
My friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/cadebro
April 11th 2008
I received this email today and thought I would pass it along to anyone who thinks having technology entrepreneurs in Maine is important:
Hi Cade,
Maine needs additional financing vehicles to attract new companies and ideas and to fund and retain our current entrepreneurs. We are entering the last days of Maine’s current legislative session and one of the remaining bills is the TechMaine initiative for the creation of a private equity Venture Capital Fund of Funds to support Maine’s technology entrepreneurs and grow Maine’s economy. Maine can secure a competitive advantage in New England by implementing a Fund of Fund investment vehicle.
The legislation is titled:
LR 3568: An Act To Attract New Capital for Innovative Businesses through Equity Investment in Maine
WE NEED YOUR HELP ensuring this important legislation becomes enacted! We need you to take action and contact your legislators to let them know your support for this initiative. We’ve created a Website at www.MaineFundOfFunds.com to supply you additional information and help through the process of reaching out to your elected officials.
Contacting your legislator is vital! On most issues, legislators and other elected officials receive very little input from their constituents. This seems to be especially true of technological issues.
Being contacted by even just a few voters is often enough to mold or shift a legislator’s stance on an issue, especially if they have not had much voter contact on that issue before. Every e-mail and call is important.
Please visit www.MaineFundOfFunds.com today, spread the word, and help create a new vehicle to grow Maine’s economy!
Thanks!
Joe Kumiszcza
April 8th 2008
Two years ago I began working as a freelance Web designer. My intentions were not to make big bucks, but to help people and organizations out who could not afford to hire their own designer while gaining experience. Having little experience with Web hosts, I referred to the results of several Web host ranking Web sites. I thought I made a good choice when my research turned up OneHut, a very affordable host with average customer service and a non-WYSIWYG interface.
I was a fairly happy customer for several years. Customer service was not entirely responsive and when they did fix an issues, they were not very good at communicating that to me. But, I figured I got what I paid for.
Well, did I ever get it.
This past weekend all of the sites I manage went down, and did not come back. With the help from a friend and a little research I soon realized that OneHut went out of business without warning any of their customers. Not only have I lost all of the pages and assets to several sites (including over two years of work on my brother-in-law’s Web site), but it appears that good ole OneHut registered my domains in what I am guess is their parent company’s name. As a result I might not be able to transfer my clients’ domain names.
Research uncovered this blog by another unhappy customer, this forum string on the Web site of the user interface OneHut used (the only feature with which I was content), these reviews from unhappy customers, and the Better Business Bureau’s report on the company.
With little else to do, I decided to try to contact the company with which my domains were registered, names4ever.com. That URL directed me to aplus.net (with a little more research I discovered that these urls do as well: abac.com, server4me.com, websolo.com). I spoke with customer service and they directed me to contact support@names4ever.com and said they will set me up with access to manage my domains (which is strange because names4ever directed me to aplus.net). After not hearing from them for four days, today I emailed customer support at aplus.net retelling my tragic story and hoping for a little serious direction.
Now, I am no expert on the clientèle of Web hosts, but upon googling “ABACUS America scam” (ABACUS America being the company that owns names4ever, and apparently the names sake of abac.com and aplus.net), I was returned a long list of escrow scam sites, all hosted by said ABACUS company. For some reason I don’t think I will be getting any help from this company, and in the end its my clients and my reputation that will suffer.
Let this be a warning to all out there thinking of finding a cheap Web host. Go with a trusted name, it’s worth the extra cost.
Update (4/17/08): A few days after I published my blog, all of my Web sites miraculously came back up. The most disturbing part is that there still have been no communications from any company about OneHut. I can only assume that another company bought OneHut as they went out of business and they are now hosting my sites. I still suggest to all of my clients that moving to a reliable host would be a good decision to make.
Update (6/24/08): I recently contacted support@names4ever.com and asked for domain information pertaining to one of the sites I manage. They promptly responded with this message: Please contact escalations@aplus.net. They are currently handling the account changes for the closed OneHut reseller. Hope this helps anyone who is still without access to their site.
April 1st 2008
Here are the winners of the local (Portland, ME) 700 MHz auction. For those not familiar with it, 700 MHz is the spectrum that is currently being used by analog television, but will be handed over to the auction winners in 2009 when public television goes completely digital. Also, realize this does not mean high definition (HD); there is a difference between DTV and HDTV.
In case you were wondering, King Street Wireless L.P. is a subsidiary of US Cellular.
What does this mean for local cellular services?
March 15th 2008
On the Sword and Laser forum for the current cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, a question was brought up about the reason for using product brand names in the novel. Many found this to detract from the story, and here was my response:
There is the possibility that Gibson was saying something about branding and our culture by purposely mentioning them. Needless to say, it’s a pretty bleak (if not interesting) portrayal of the world. People spending more time out of reality than in it, and when they’re in reality, they are busy killing each other or taking enough drugs to forget about it (sounds pretty close to the truth to me). People are unhappy with themselves to the point of grafting machinery into their bodies in order to overcome their inadequacies. To me, in a future like this…I mean, like that…branding holds a lot of weight.
This is not distracting to me, I think it strengthens the setting. More distracting (and not Gibson’s fault) are the lopsided technologies. Like using a magnetic strip to open doors, and having a hard-lined phone. Again, Gibson has done the best he could at foreseeing technology trends, but in this day and age a lot of it feels awkward.
To wrap up, the decision of using true to life names (beyond just brand names, such as celebrity names, city names, etc) comes down to whether or not you want the plot to be timeless. By creating artifacts in a story, you have the chance of making it more relevant, but run the risk of the story becoming inconsequential. To this point, science fiction typically is not timeless since technology often progresses beyond what authors can dream up. This can make brand names more helpful than hurtful as it creates a mental connection to plot and atmosphere of the story.
March 13th 2008
Google Calendar has a new-to-me feature of being able to sync with Microsoft Outlook.
You can choose to sync both ways, Outlook appointments to Google Calendar, or Google events to Outlook Calendar. You can also choose how many minutes should pass between syncs. I tried it out (syncing Google Calendar with Outlook appointments), and was disappointed to find that it only synced with appointments that I had created, not ones that I have been invited to and accepted. So, I quickly uninstalled it. Though I wouldn’t suggest using the sync application, a good feature that I did discover (not in any way connected with the sync application) is that if you invite your Gmail account to an appointment while setting it up, it will automatically add the event to your Google Calendar.
Find out more about Google Calendar Sync
February 12th 2008
The AP announced today that the Tolkien Trust and HarperCollins are suing New Line over the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies that were released in 2001, 2002, 2003. The Tolkien Trust was only paid $62,500 instead of the contracted 7.5% of gross revenue. If my trusty calculator works properly, 7.5% of $6 billion (worldwide gross revenue) is roughly $450 million. The Tolkein Trust’s suit is for $150 million, an unlisted amount in punitive damages and the termination of any rights that New Line may have over Tolkien works.
The Tolkien Trust is a registered charity organization in the United Kingdom established by the Tolkien estate. They have given nearly $8 million to charitable causes in the past five years. Up to this point they have tried to settle the conflict out of court to no avail. A successful court battle will certainly put a lot of food on hobbitses’ plates around the UK.
A side effect of the lawsuit is that it might put an end to the production of The Hobbit, which was slated to be filmed in 2010. It’s a pity that fans of the book and Peter Jackson’s silver screen adaptations will lose out as well. I wonder if New Line will be pulling the Hobbit announcement off their home page?
