Posts tagged “internet”

Blogs have made journalism obsolete. Reporters were just middlemen connecting chatty experts to curious readers. Now experts blog directly, readers find them via search, and knowledgeable bystanders synthesize the conversation. Newspapers will die, but reporting will improve. Targeted advertising means better returns on smaller budgets, enabling niche businesses to thrive.

Obama gets technology in ways Hillary simply doesn't. His policies on net neutrality, privacy, open government and appointing a national CTO show real understanding of how deeply IT shapes our economy. Any candidate ignoring technology in 2008 isn't ready to lead through 2016.

TV's future looks like radio's present: background noise for some, occasionally appointment viewing for news and sports, but mostly replaced by on-demand content we seek out ourselves. The creativity and money will follow. Bring it on.

A Dish Network telemarketer called my brand new landline and tried to convince me that 1.5Mbps is faster than 6Mbps because "smaller numbers are faster." I work for Yahoo. I hung up. Also: back pain, percocet, and I now officially exist thanks to my social security number arriving.

I "do the web": I surf it, build on it, theorize about it. Blogs, CMS, e-commerce, web architecture -- it's basically my whole life. I like it enough that that doesn't even seem sad to me anymore.

Invented the word "sacrospinnicus" from something I saw online. First to guess the source wins £10, minus £1 per hint I give.

I have internet again! New flat is gloriously 80s, grey and shiny. Close to the tube, got a dishwasher and a great view. Downsides: extortionate tech support, a shower that's only warm at waist height, and being slightly further from Popstarz.

Offline but not dead. New broadband on the way, so normal service resumes soon. Bear with me while I ration my expensive temporary connection.

Check out this blonde joke — possibly the best ever. Not PC, but I couldn't help laughing out loud.

I have an Amazon wish list if you want to buy me something. Also, I finally secured my WiFi after a neighbor started hogging our bandwidth. Sorry to any innocent freeloaders, but they left me no choice.

I love this optical illusion from Defective Yeti involving a kitten.

I have at least one close friend I would never have met without the internet.

I'm refreshing CNN at 11pm waiting for the Pope to die, even though I don't care when it happens. I just need the information to exist so I can have it. I'm basically a lab monkey hitting a button for brain chemicals. I should probably go to bed.

Back online after 2 days without internet, thanks to my housemates' planning getting our ADSL sorted early. Still need to set up my computer properly, but I'm back!

Giving up broadband to cure information overload is like ditching cars for horses. The answer is to go forward, using RSS and email filters to cut the noise. This guy is an idiot.

My site was down for 24 hours due to an underground fire in Baltimore. The internet is a wonderful thing. Normal service restored, no data lost. Also fixed some broken RSS permalinks.

Stalkervision is back. Catch me on webcam from 7-12pm GMT, when I'm not at work, naked, or sleeping. Yeah, that's a narrower window than it sounds.

I got a GoogleWhack with "luddism exobiology" — though it won't last once Google indexes this post.

The information revolution mirrors the industrial revolution: cheap data is just raw material. The real innovation will be in mass-producing quality information. Social interaction matters not as an end in itself, but because it improves information quality. Build the barrel-making machine, not the barrel.

Google appears to be hitting fundamental scaling limits, producing bizarre results and workarounds instead of a painful full recode. We've grown dependent on its godlike ability to find anything. What happens to how we use the web if Google simply doesn't scale?

Speaking at a BBC seminar tomorrow about how the Internet is overtaking TV. They want me there because I've stopped watching television entirely, just downloading shows instead. There's a free lunch, but apparently an NDA too. I'll share what I can afterward.

Clay Shirky is worth reading, especially on why cheap Internet telephony is inevitable.

Verisign has hijacked every unregistered .com and .net domain, redirecting typos to their ad-laden search engine. It breaks spam filters, violates DNS standards, forces accidental ToS agreements, and lets them intercept email to nonexistent domains. It's illegal, it's enormous, and I'm furious.

Just back from Edinburgh (fun) and After Dark (awful), but too hot to think straight. Moving tomorrow to a broadband-free zone, so updates will be sporadic until I wrestle ADSL out of BT. Ciao for now.

Yes, someone really did make "Weapons of Ass Destruction," starring Arnold Schwarzenpecker. I went looking after the Onion mentioned it as a joke. Rabbit hole also led me to "Shaving Ryan's Privates" and "Gone in 69 Seconds." Porn parody titles: apparently a thriving genre.

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 68% Hardcore Junkie (61% - 80%)While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What's that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don't get a repetitive wrist injury... The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Stvlive.com! ...saved only by the fact that I have more friends in real life than online.

Reluctant blogging today yields a link dump: Monopoly Tycoon, a 20-minute HIV test, magnetic pole flipping, web standards research for my ambitious Web2 project, KaZaA popup fixes, UI shame, Mozilla vs IE, and a possible Edinburgh master's. Also: antibiotics. Yuck.

Sitting inches from a window at 1:30am, watching ducks hunt worms in the rain. Meanwhile: laser cannons, Phoenix browser's chaos-inducing "open all tabs" feature, Microsoft acting like IBM post-antitrust, Nokia's garish phones, a Beckham kidnap plot, and a skateboard for your AIBO. Links ahoy.

Scott Adams keeps selling out harder than ever. Also, I fell down a rabbit hole from Slashdot to the deeply disturbing story of Gary Heidnik, a man who kept women chained in his basement. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Back in Winchester, the world's only one-horse city. Staying at Erasmus Park, surviving on dialup, table football, and shameless self-documentation. Mass emails feel pushy, so the journal it is. Projects pending: my third-year project, a site update, and GayGeeks.org, my transparently desperate attempt at internet dating.

Surprising news: the major labels are offering legal downloads at reasonable prices. Meanwhile they're also poisoning file-sharing networks with fake songs. Plus a roundup of cool links: credit-card cameras, a Unix Rosetta Stone, mind-blowing nanotech storage and more.

A dull Easter vacation with spotty internet. Highlights: the iBong, stern Russian greeting card chickens, a Java drawing BBS, some useful Windows tools, a brilliant mashup track, job rejection for being a student, CMS nightmares, and a fat dancer leaving a band.

Planet Timmy is brilliant sad-git comedy gold. Watch the PrettyBoyTim video for some fantastically random geek humour.

A real Magic 8-Ball in a Lego Mindstorms shaking cradle with a webcam is filling the etch-a-sketch void nicely. Also, spooning is way less interesting than Sex and the City made it sound.

Ralph Nader wrote a great letter roasting the DOJ's pathetic Microsoft settlement, which actually protects Microsoft from open-source competition. Also: Internet2 and Geant are doing amazing things with bandwidth. And there's a girl on the BBC who really should be a lesbian.

Clippy is dead, and even Microsoft is celebrating with flash movies and a terrible song. Not very funny, but marketing weenies get points for effort. Also: rowing through office hallways is apparently a thing, and genuinely hilarious.

Week 2 of fast Internet brings anti-Bin Laden jokes approaching All Your Base levels of overkill, random URL exploration, and a flood of new software including ZoneAlarm, Morpheus, and GhostScript. Broadband is clearly bad for productivity.

Finally got ADSL and it's glorious. 576K downstream and I couldn't be happier. Also learned BT's pricing is actually mandated by Oftel, not greed. NTL still useless though.

Pig Brother is Big Brother but with actual pigs in a luxury sty, streaming 24/7. I'm voting for Widdecombe. Also, a strange German person linked to me, so here's my reciprocal link. Long live internet back-patting.

Interesting global internet stats: English speakers are now a minority online. Plus some Register amusement: Manchester Business School's plagiarised logo, NTL broadband getting a suspiciously biased review, Novell's mystery patch, and Yahoo being blamed for chat room dangers, which is absurd.

The Internet is more connected but less decentralized than you'd expect. Also: multitasking is scientifically unproductive, which vindicates me against those seven-things-at-once braggers and should embarrass every boss who interrupts you fifteen times a day.

Accidental nanotubes, undetected nuclear smuggling, Bush wants more reactors, and we're basically screwed on energy either way. On the bright side, my font choices reveal I'm boring, and someone's planning an interplanetary Internet.

Ed's stick-man kung fu is hilarious. More seriously, the looming AOL vs. Microsoft war is terrifying because one of them will win, and both are evil. I'm done giving either my money. Time to switch to Linux before I end up a slave to Bill Gates or AOL.