I have a gaggle of terrific domain names (bar.com, pub.com, grill.com, etc.) that I’ve had Since The Beginning. Over the years I’ve pondered what to do with them and always come back to “sit tight” as my strategy. I saw a great article today that lays out the reasons why. Here’s the link:
http://www.domainnamenews.com/domain-development/mass-development-flawed-model/8058#more-8058
This is a post to test a geek thing — trying out the Wordbooker plugin to connect my blog to Facebook. This gizmo should be great for posting to Facebook from my blog, pulling Facebook comments into the blog and blog comments into Facebook.
[comment from the 2019 future – ah, these were simpler times back in 2010] Continue reading
Here’s a series of Morning Walk panorama shots — a nice perspective on the farm. I have a new camera that has this cool setting where it takes 100 pictures as you swish it across a wide scene and then immediately stitches them together for you. Not technically-better pictures. But really neat pictures… Click on the thumbnails so you can see the big versions.
Very neat news today out of ICANN. Whit Diffie is this monster figure in the crypto world — he’s one of the founding folks in that circle. He worked at Sun for ages and now he’s joining ICANN.
Click HERE for the ICANN press-release.
Click HERE for a starter-page at Wikipedia.
Click HERE to watch him on an episode of Cranky Geeks (with John Dvorak) to get a feel for what’s he’s like in person.
I’m really glad to hear that he’s joining the ICANN gang. It’ll give us some depth that we badly need in this area.
I take lots of pictures, and every once in a while I get a lucky break. This shot resulted from some great clouds and evening sun coming together while I was sitting on the couch at the farm. I ran outside, took this photo and 2 minutes later the sun went away. You can click on it to get the full-sized version.
Actually the headline promises more than I can deliver. I don’t really know why I returned my iPad after 3 hours. I guess it just didn’t deliver $600+ worth of smiles. But here are a few things that contributed to the decision… Continue reading
UPDATE
Ooops. The law hasn’t passed yet — I misunderstood Rick’s letter… Here’s the salient quote (down near the bottom)
pass the law (well, getting closer anyway ““ should be next week!)
Sorry about that. I’ll leave the original stupid/mistaken post here, but you can ignore it. On the bright side, I’m hoping for the opportunity to write another “Woohoo” post if the bill does pass.
Sorry about that…
Mikey
_________________________________________________________________
Woohoo! We did it! Continue reading
Gracious. A fella gets going fixing one little thing on a music-making workstation and the next thing you know a year has gone by and about 42 jillion other things have broken and needed fixing. Meanwhile, no music has happened.
So today I just pushed through all the crud and said “dang it, today I’m going to produce a tune for the blog, no matter what.”
Click HERE to listen to the result.
This is one of a long series of “notes to myself” which won’t be very interesting to normal people. I’ve been diagnosing blog and wiki problems for weeks and never found a blog post that had this solution, so I’ll post it here for others. Continue reading
ah… The taxes are done, with hardly any damage to the checkbook. This is the goody I found when I took a little tour of teh Internets as a reward for a job well done…
Click HERE to read a great post (and discover a great blog) about getting rid of surface noise using wood glue of all things. And then click HERE to get the latest and greatest — ‘turns out that thread generated a LOT of discussion.
The key deal — the kind of wood glue makes a big difference. The gang on that blog tend to think that Titebond Extend is the bees knees. I may have to try this out. The results are pretty darn spectacular.
Yesterday it was still winter here at the farm. Today, Spring came with a vengeance. Here’s a series of pictures from yesterday’s Morning Walk…
Here’s a picture of the end of our driveway where it meets the road. Pretty impressive mist, no?
Well, that mist has been here all week. Here’s the story, as told by one of our weather stations — practically a week straight of 100% humidity as the snow melted. Continue reading
Complete geek heaven. Great band. Great Rube Goldberg device. 4 videos describing the collaboration they put together. Must see, if you’re a geek.
This is a piece by Jeff Lange in Volume One, Number Three of “Spread the WORT” — the newsletter of WORT-FM (Madison, WI) just as it was going on the air in 1975. I’ve always loved this description of the consensus decision-making process we used to run the station. All due apologies to Pogo…
The big deal? The sentence that really catches it for me is “we ad WORT don wanna tred up on the wee miroridy vuponts, so we jus wade undill eberyone am finely agreed.” Still works for me today, some 35 years later. Thanks Jeff!
Here’s my translation, since many of you aren’t native-English speakers and might find this pretty tough to read in Jeff’s native Pogo-style language. Apologies to Jeff for any mistranslations.
Yes, it’s a curious fact, that nobody is ever able to quite explain, how decisions get made at this particular radio station. But they do. This is a grievous hard and ticklesum thing for newcomers to digest. Take, for example, the familiar caller who, in a fever pitch of excitement, has phoned up the station with his or her (or “it’s” for that matter) idea for a program. Rnnng. He (let’s just say it’s a “he”) says “My dog can bark heavy metal rock n’roll — can he have 5 hours on Tuesday nights?” Well, the person at the station (say it is a person) says “Isn’t that the same thing as what’s on WBRK every night?” The caller replies “Yes, but my dog barks badder!” Then that, says the person, is a question for the Program Committee.
The best thing then is if the caller hangs up, thinking all is well for the Program Committee will do its duty. But if the caller says “Oh, what’s the Program Committee?” then the person has to explain: The Program Committee are all the people that come to the Program Committee Meeting. You can come. So can your mother. It’s Friday at 8pm. No, they never vote on anything. Voting is against the rules. So is parliamentary procedure. They just talk about things until everyone is agreed, and that is consensus — the highest form of unanimity.
Then the caller says “oh.”
Then the person at the radio station should continue: “Yes, it’s a curious fact, but it seems to work. So far, at least. We at WORT don’t want to tread on the wee minority viewpoints, so we just wait until everyone is finally agreed. Nope, it’s never failed yet… which just goes to prove: you can make some of the decisions all of the time, and all of the decisions some of the time…”
Then the caller says, “can you put me through to the general manager?”
“No, there isn’t a general manager. Would you like to talk to Sarah-Gene?”
“She the owner?”
“Nope. She’s just another volunteer.”
I did a nice geek project over the weekend — repairing the weather-stations here at the farm. We’ve had a couple stations (one on the ridge, one in the valley) for a couple years. I had this lash-up gizmo put together with a couple of machines, each talking to one weather station and then trading data, to come up with a single (crummy) web site. In short, a kludge. The whole thing died when I pulled the plug on one machine and upgraded the other to Vista. The weather stations still worked just fine, but they couldn’t share their weather goodness with the rest of you…
Until this weekend. I finally got off my rusty-dusty and figured out a whole buncha stuff to get them back on the net. Here’s their new web site:
[a voice from 2019 says – try this one instead http://www.prairiehaven.com/weather/stations.html ] Continue reading
… that really do a good job of summarizing the security situation and the dilemmas it poses.
Leading off with Michele Neylon’s post which explains his reasons for skipping this meeting and the need for thoughtful discussion (comments are really good on all these posts by the way)
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2010/02/13/personal-reflections-on-icann-nairobi/
Maria Farrel posts a very balanced/detailed note about the situation here (Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO, posted in the comments)
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/12/14645/
Kieren McCarthy (until recently the ICANN staff person responsible for remote participation) posted a followup here — which really does a great job of turning lemons into lemonade in my view by saying that this may be the event that really pushes the remote-participation capability to new levels
http://kierenmccarthy.com/2010/02/12/why-icann-nairobi-may-be-a-blessing-in-disguise/
Nick Ashton-Hart (current ICANN staff person in charge of remote participation) posted this in the comments to Michele’s post;
“Thanks Michele for your thoughtful and balanced post. I, too, would like to echo the call that people respect each other’s choices about attending or not attending the meeting. I think that characterising the choices of others in negative terms doesn’t really benefit anyone.
We are working very hard internally on remote participation for this meeting; I’m the overall coordinator of the effort. I think everyone will find that things RP-related at Nairobi take quite a leap forward from previous meetings.
You will find that when the schedule is posted on the 15th, detailed information on remote participation for all sessions is published along with the session information. More details will follow shortly thereafter too.”
I’m still on the fence — read those posts for the reasons why I’m still leaning towards going. But we’ll see…
