The toy is dead.
Category: Tech
Google Be Gone?
This weekend, I started then stopped booting Google from my computing life. I like Google products and services, but worry about the company’s potential abuse of power.
On Thursday, on my work blog, I wrote about “The Google Problem” Google’s increasing search and online advertising dominance greatly disturbs. Situation might be less worrisome if Google wasn’t so damn secretive. The company controls large trolls of information, while keeping its own disclosure to a minimum.
Apple Store Isn’t Your Space
Crave quoted an unnamed Apple Store employee: “MySpace is a big issue for the Apple stores because people come in, Photobooth themselves—using Macs’ built-in webcams—then stick their picture up on their MySpace account and loiter at machines for hours.”
I’m So Not Getting an iPhone
The impending release of Apple’s iPhone is good time for me to explain how the device led me to purchase another mobile—my first Nokia, the lovely N95.
When Apple announced the iPhone in January, I used the Samsung BlackJack, gotten mainly for the 3G Internet. But in the six weeks leading up to the iPhone announcement, I found that 3G wasn’t doing much for me. The reason, I think, was the Windows Mobile 5 software. There wasn’t much compelling there. In February, I ditched the BlackJack, returning to the boxy and thick Sony Ericsson S710a. I was thinking an iPhone might just be in my future, and the S710a was good prepartion, because of the size.
So Much for Transparency
Four days ago, the mailman delivered the April Wired, which has a great story on Microsoft’s Channel 9. I have closely watched the Channel 9 blogsite since its launch in April 2004. I blogged back then about what I expected: “Channel 9 is a brilliant marketing concept. Marketing is the key descriptor. The site is run by people paid to evangelize Microsoft products. Their job is to win over developers to Microsoft products”.
I also worried that Microsoft would use Channel 9 to replace journalists: “Company-controlled blogsites could be given first—or only—access to key product managers or executives; the insiders’ view, just like the Channel 9 positioning, but in reality managed dissemination”.
My Google Twin is Me
Houston Chronicle story, “Google twin—a strange obsession,” looks at people who search online for people with their name. Heck, I don’t even Google my name about me, let alone someone who shares the same name. So, I find this kind of Googling kind of funny.
Painful Changes
My blog relocation has turned out to be quite an exhilarating experience. On Saturday, I managed to delete all the content and my Movable Type export file. Everything was lost! Oh, it’s a harrowing tale.
Some background: I made the move on Wednesday to pmachinehosting, which a few days later changed its name to EngineHosting. I also moved from Movable Type to ExpressionEngine. I lacked two things: A new design and fix to a troublesome problem, that ExpressionEngine inserted index.php/comments in the path of posts (e.g., http://www.joewicox.com/index.php/comments/painful_changes.
Spoof Me, To Hell With You
I have reached a point where managing a domain is becoming too arduous—at least from Webhost Yahoo!. There has been a marked increase in comment spam. Worse, yesterday my domain was spoofed by spammers.
Around 3:12 p.m., my inbox started filling up with returned e-mail from my domain name at my domain name. No such e-mail address exists. Someone had spoofed that address off my domain to make it seem like spam messages were coming from me. The returned messages probably represent a fraction of the thousands sent out over the last 24 hours.
Get Your D80, Folks
As I walked by the Ritz camera at White Flint Mall this afternoon, I saw a Nikon D80 box on display in the window. So I checked inside, because I thought the camera wasn’t going […]
More MacBook Goes to Guatemala
Earlier in the week, I blogged that my sister the missionary would be getting a MacBook. Today, she sent around an e-mail updating about her Guatemalan mission. She mentioned the laptop, which her husband likely will use.
MacBook Goes to Guatemala
My sister the missionary—I have two others, but not missionaries—asked my buying advice for a new laptop. In the past, I helped outfit her with a Sony VAIO S Series notebook. This time, after much […]
We Should Do Something
Each year, Kensington, Md., holds an annual Labor Day parade. For pictures I took last year, I held back one of the best: A very young girl sitting next to an American flag. Her facial expression and composition evoked the patriotic sentiments of the day. But her tank top had partially fallen down to reveal a nipple. As much as I liked the image, I kept it from my online collection of the day. I know that out there, scouring the Internet, are pedophiles that get off on pictures of kids.
Millions of people use the internet each day to watch adult pornography which is perfectly legal, and because it’s so popular more and more free porn sites are now available ones like hdsexvideo, unfortunately there are those that use the internet for darker purposes and troll through social media sites looking for pictures of kids. You might think that posting a picture of your kid taking a bath on facebook is completely innocent and to you and many others it is, but there are some out there that if they saw that picture would look at it in the same way as a normal adult would look at a picture of a naked woman or man, you don’t want to think that there are people out there looking at a picture of your kid in a sexual way but unfortunately that’s the hard truth these days.
Today’s New York Times story “Using Nearly Nude Pictures, Child Sex Sites Test Laws” takes a stark look at this dark underworld of online predators. But the predators aren’t just pedophiles. The story looks at the lurid world of child modeling, which pictures skirt the definition of child pornography.