truetech

When Elephants Dance. Interesting article.

eSchoolNews Report: Some web filters might reflect bias. Unbelievable. I can’t believe how many people seem to have enough free time to research this kind of stuff. Here’s the point of the report: because many companies that provide Internet filtering to schools also provide Internet filtering to conservative Christian groups, the filtering companies are obviously showing bias toward Christian and conservative things. Nice use of logic, there. I should point out that eSchoolNews is not making those claims, but a report, entitled “Filtering Software: The Religious Connection” and written by Nancy Willard does. eSchoolNews is just reporting on the report, so to speak.

The massive network problems at work seem to be over, as evidenced by the fact that I can post this over my lunch break, when traffic has usually been at its heaviest over the last few weeks.

Good jokes from yesterday:

1) Bare Bones Software’s “Personal Analog Device“

2) AOL buys Blogs

3) iTivo. Video available here. OK, this was kind of stupid.

By Monday, April 8, I should part of the Comcast network. Finally. After four years of waiting, calling, listening to excuses and evasive answers, and more waiting, my cable modem is actually in the mail.

And this isn’t an April Fool’s Joke, either!

But, it wasn’t without its wrinkles. When I called Comcast, the very friendly rep (their reps have always been friendly, even when contradicting each other) told me there were three ways to get online: wait for a self-install kit, wait for a technician to come out and hook me up, or go to Circuit City and buy the kit and modem, in which case I could be up and running today. Hey, I’ve been waiting four years already, so I went out to Circuit City.

The nice fellow at Circuit City took my info and then told me that I wasn’t able to sign up for service because it wasn’t available for me (despite my having been told just the opposite by Comcast thirty minutes earlier). Then, he offered to sell me the cable modem anyway, but said he couldn’t sell me the self-install kit. I just looked at him. I said, “Well, this won’t do me any good without the install kit, now will it?”

“Well, no,” he said. I placed both items back on the shelf and left. It’s one thing to tell me I can’t get the service when I can, but then to try to sell me a $100 cable modem that would be useless to me without the service . . . unbelievable.

So, anyway, another call to Comcast and I’m waiting for my self-install kit to arrive via UPS. They said it will arrive by Monday.

Happy Easter!

Or, as my pastor likes to say, Happy Resurrection Sunday! He rightly points out that the name Easter has no real ties to the Christian faith, but rather to Paganism.

Thanks for everyone’s encouraging notes about Jen’s surgery. April 9 is the big day.

I’ve posted a note about Jen’s upcoming surgery in the articles section, along with a few other things to read.

A styrofoam computer case. Interesting. Apparently the guy assembled all the pieces without the case and then just sprayed it with foam. Lightweight.

Several folks wanted to know what kind of surgery Jen is having. I’ll write something up about it this weekend. It’s a long story.

Holy Cow.

HealthGuard comes through. They will pay for Jen’s surgery. All of it. What a relief. Now we can spend our tax return on a swing set for Gracie, just like we wanted to.

Network problems that you just can’t figure out really suck. That’s what I’ve been working on for a week.

Hey! I’m in a video testimonial for MacAcademy/WindowsAcademy on their website! Just click on the link, then click on the icon next to Brad Rhine when you get there. I remember filming the testimonial in Florida in February of 2001, when I was attending the FileMaker Pro Users’ Learning Summit. They asked for volunteers to be in testimonials, and I thought about it. Then they said free T-shirts for anyone who signs up. What can I say? I’m a sucker for schwag.

And yes, I found it because I was ego surfing.

I have updated my old Mindspring sites so that they all redirect to my Music page here. Hopefully I’ll be abandoning Mindspring soon anyway. I mean Earthlink, not Mindspring. They used to be Mindspring.

Top Ten Stupid Things to Engrave on Your iPod. This was funny.

Wired: Bad News. Slashdot: Very Bad News. Here’s what Dave Winer has to say about it.

Dave Winer. Sometimes I find him witty and insightful. Sometimes I find him abrasive yet informative. Sometimes I find him thoroughly annoying. But I think that mix is exactly what he’s going for.

Dial-up sucks.

I upgraded my Manila server at school today to Mac OS X and Frontier 8.05. Wow — talk about a speed boost. Very cool. Almost worth all the frustration it took to get it running on OS X. What a pain that was.

Apple Remote Desktop. Pretty cool, but bittersweet. The controller app runs on OS X, and the client runs on anything from 8.1 to 10.1, but the controller app won’t run on 8 or 9. That’s bad news for those still running a dual platform shop. I like to be able to sit at any computer in a lab and copy out from there. I won’t be able to do that using ARD unless I upgrade all my lab computers to OS X, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Macintouch asked readers for their WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference) concerns and ideas. They got an awful lot of hardware suggestions for a Developer Conference. My favorite is the hosehead who says: Migrate features from MacOS X like preemptive multitasking and Memory protection to MacOS 9.x without bringing the UNIX baggage with it. This can be done now more than ever before due to Carbon is making this possible. Ummm, isn’t the impossibility of that task the whole reason for Mac OS X? Remember Copland? Remember Rhapsody? He goes on: As for virtual memory, memory is cheap, and MacOS application footprints are tiny. Most Mac users turn it off anyway. Good idea. Memory’s cheap, so we don’t need virtual memory. Memory protection although may save your OS from crashing, does little to prevent data loss as a result of a crashing application. To say nothing of the other running applications that won’t lose data as a result. Hosehead.