Category: Web

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So Much for a ‘Classical Education’

I wanted to attend St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., after graduating high school. But my admission application was rejected, and attendance costs would have been too high, regardless. But I tried. Mine is a “don’t give up” attitude, until there is no other choice. The school specializes in a classical education in the truest sense: Learning from and thinking like dead Greeks or Renaissance-era Europeans, among others.

“Through close engagement with the works of some of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers—from Homer, Plato, and Euclid to Nietzsche, Einstein, and Woolf—students at St. John’s College grapple with fundamental questions that confront us as human beings”, the school’s website explains. “As they participate in lively discussions and throw themselves into the activity of translating, writing, demonstrating, conducting experiments, and analyzing musical compositions, St. John’s students learn to speak articulately, read attentively, reason effectively, and think creatively”.

Maybe attending the school would have prevented thinking myself so clever today—only to be rightly, and smartly, corrected later on. Live and learn, eh? 

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Photo Credit: Julia Folsom

What 2014 Life-Changing Tech Means to 2015

Three weeks ago, at BetaNews, I asked “What tech changed your life in 2014?” Readers answered there and on Google+. As the new year starts, I wonder what will make all our lives better. Apple Watch? I doubt it. Shake me awake from the nightmare if the wearable isn’t the most successful flop of 2015. Windows 10? Skipping nine is a good sign, but is giving users more of what they don’t want to let go life changing? Eh, no.

At the precipice of looking ahead, this is a last look behind. Once Consumer Electronics Show leaks and early announcements rush the InterWebs, all eyes will turn forward—blind to what many people have, focusing on what they want instead. That’s because “aspiration” is the defining word of the technology era, and the promise if you buy newfangled This or That your life will be better for it. Sometimes the promise is true, but too often not, which is why I asked the important question three weeks ago. 

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Bye, Bye, Network Solutions

Yesterday, I initiated four transfers that formally end my customer relationship with Network Solutions. When the process completes, all my domains will be with GoDaddy. The end is long-time coming. I registered my first domain, editors.com, with what was then InterNIC, managed by the U.S. company, in August 1995 (I regrettably, in retrospect, sold the web address a decade ago).

Customer service and costs are main reasons for the registrar change, which is quite the turnabout. Three years ago, on December 29, I joined the “Dump Go Daddy Day” bandwagon, moving my domains to NetSol for affordable $6.99 each plus $6 private registration. Now I am absolved of my original registrar. 

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Self-hosted WordPress or WordPress.com?

That’s the question I asked over Black Friday weekend 2014. But searching online for comparisons brought little meaningful results. So I answer here, for others posing the same question, based on my experience.

We all make mistakes, but whoever really admits them? I do today. Simply stated: On December 1, I migrated my two sites—Five Minutes with Joe and Bunny Bows Pressfrom shared self-hosted WP to WordPress.com. I now regret the decision, returning to hosted WordPress 14 days later. 

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The Flickr That Lights a Firestorm

My good high school buddy Winchell Chung shares Dazed story “Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos (And no, you won’t see a single penny from it)” today on Google+. Now there’s a clickable headline, eh? Zing Tsjeng’s article is an aggregated synopsis of good reporting done by the Wall Street Journal (naughty, naughty, do you’re own work, Zing). Herein, I reference the November 24th piece, “Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos” with dek “Yahoo Starts Selling Canvas Prints From Free Pictures Uploaded to the Internet Sharing Site”.

Gist of the news is this: Flickr plans to sell photos with Creative Commons Commercial license—50,000,000 from a staggering 300,000,000 CC pics on the site . Yikes. My photos are licensed CC non-commercial, so I shouldn’t give a frak about the plans of Yahoo (Flickr’s owner). But I don’t trust the license will be observed, and there is no easy way for me to confirm this. 

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Google, Give Thanks!

It wouldn’t be U.S. Thanksgiving without my writing about gratitude, and why some tech company’s executives, employees, and partners should prostrate and pray “Thanks”.

This year I to Google, which continues a great run that started with Larry Page’s return as CEO in April 2011. If he’s not all smiles this Turkey Day, someone should slap that man aside the head. I could tick off a hundred things for which he should give thanks. For brevity’s sake, so you can get back to the big game and bigger bird, I select some things that might not come to mind. 

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OK, Google, That was Easy

For my summer “Microsoft All-In” experiment, which also meant for a time giving up Google, I moved my main email domain from Google Apps for Business to Office 365—the latter through my registrar rather than Microsoft directly. I had used the domain on Apps for five years.

The registrar did all the setup for MX records and such, and I expected to do it all for myself when switching back to Apps—that was my experience half-a-decade ago. My how things have changed. Setup was scarily easy—much, much more than expected. 

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WTF is the Right Domain Question

I must thank Todd Bishop, whose tweet about a GeekWire story alerted me to the then forthcoming .wtf domain extension, which is now available. Generally, I think these dot-com wannabes are just plain stupid, but someone wants them—or ICANN decision-makers believe so. I ignored every domain registrar solicitation to grab one until .wtf.

My first concern is brand protection. I’ve pissed off more than a few fanboys over the years and I worried about someone snagging joewilcox.wtf and using that as a platform against me. You should worry, too, if you have any kind of brand to protect. “What the fuck?” is right. If your name is your brand, grab .wtf before someone else does.

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Yahoo searches for Itself

Ah, shucks, I missed Yahoo’s 19th birthday yesterday. That’s okay, because 20 will matter more. Yahoo is cloud computing’s elder statesmen, long before anyone used the term. Just a handful of first-wave dotcoms—Amazon is another—are public companies today, making the transition from venture-backed startup with a dream and no viable revenue source ahead.

Yahoo is a warrior. A survivor. A transformer. I use the latter term not to describe a company that transforms industries but one that transforms itself. Yahoo is many things over 19 years—search engine, web portal, and media mogul to name a few. Under CEO Marissa Mayer, the company changes again, but still seeks new identity. Good luck with that.