Category: geek of technology
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Wherein I reveal that I’m actually a big fat liar
For a long time I’ve told people “I’m not really a coder. I hate programming.” It’s true that when I took Assembly Language and C++ in college, I barely scraped by and mostly hated every minute. The only part I didn’t hate, in fact, was when I finally wrote something that worked, and this was…
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WordCamp Utah 2010 — a belated recap
One of the things I heard at WordCamp Utah was that it’s not what you learn at WordCamp as much as the research and stuff you learn once you get home and start trying all this stuff out. In that sense, I don’t think I actually left WordCamp at approximately 5:30 Saturday evening a few…
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Google America
If you were to take a poll today of approval ratings for Barack Obama, I can guarantee that the number of supporters in this country of our President is far surpassed by the number of people who use Google services on a daily basis. How did this happen? How did we become so complacent? How…
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Going Google-less
So, I’m still bothered by the Google thing. I’m bothered by how reliant I am on Google’s products the same way I was bothered by how reliant I was on Microsoft’s products. It happened so subtly that there was never a conscious decision to use Google products and services exclusively. It wasn’t something where there…
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Don’t be Google: A battle-cry for Net Neutrality
By now you should have heard about the closed-door talks that Google isn’t having with Verizon that absolutely wouldn’t destroy Net Neutrality as we’ve known it (and Google has argued for it) for the last several years. Here’s the rundown: The New York Times published an article that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement…
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Avoid holding your iPhone 4G
There’s a phenomena with the new iPhone that, since I don’t own one and have a waning interest in ever owning one, I was unaware of before reading a blog post in the New York Times. It seems that, for many users, if you hold the iPhone in a certain way, the very act of holding…
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vision of the future
I just finished reading Nicholas Carr‘s The Big Switch in anticipation of getting a copy of his new book The Shallows. This troubling excerpt towards the end of the book hints at where he takes The Shallows and gives a less-than-utopian view of our dependency on all things web-related: The printed page, the dominant information medium of the…
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my favorite new WordPress trick
this little functions.php hack makes me all giddy… use this to rebrand your WordPress back-end with your own logo: //hook the administrative header output add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘my_custom_logo’); function my_custom_logo() { echo ‘ ‘; } and here’s what it would look like in action: by default, the WP logo is 32px square. so what do you do…
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lala.com closes their doors: a case study in how to alienate your core userbase
Once upon a time there was a website called Lala. I think I first heard about them in an issue of Wired as an alternative to filesharing. Because, when Lala got started, it was all about cd trading — put the cd’s you don’t really care for anymore up in the pool, create a wishlist…