Comments (0) Marcus Ranum has suggested that it might be a good idea (if difficult) to make separate identities expensive. While acknowledging the importance of allowing anonymity, he argues that increasing the incremental cost could dramatically reduce on-line spams and scams.
This led me to reflect on the fact that I routinely use a truckload of e-mail addresses:
Continue reading 'Too Many E-Mail Addresses'»
Cousin Jon sent me a link to David Pogue’s recent column on “Why We Make Home Videos.”
Pogue starts by complaining about how consumer video has gone through several recent media transitions, making it very hard to view older videos. He’s developed an almost industrial process for copying his Mini DV tapes to a hard drive “in the background” while doing other work. The Mini DV format is disappearing since modern recorders just use built in flash memory.
I remember moving a lot of Hi-8 and VHS video to Mini DV when it first came out. I transferred several Mini-DV tapes to DVD, but the task remains unfinished.
Personally I’m ambivalent about having a huge family video archive. It’s nice at times, but lots of it is arguably nonsense. Pogue addresses this question, coming down in favor of family video.
I’d prefer to work with only one company when doing a particular type of thing. It seems somewhat convenient that Turbotax and Quicken both belong to Intuit, and I do payroll through Intuit as well.
So, when it came time to do Form 1099 filing, I tried to do it through Intuit Payroll. Well, guess what: Intuit Payroll doesn’t do 1099s. Dumb, perhaps, but true. So I ask Google for advice and find myself to something with the uninspiring name of “eFileMyForms.Com.”
The site seems to work fine. The hilarious part is that a couple of days later I get an e-mail from Intuit – they too offer that service. As far as I can tell, though, the only way to find it is if they e-mail you the link. (Or you can click here).
Continue reading 'Uncoordinated Companies'»
I’ve just made OpenID work on this blog. If you want a taste of single sign-on, you can get a free personal ID from Verisign through their PIP program. You can then use it to log in to any OpenID enabled site.
Thanks to Will Norris, author of the WP-Openid plugin.
Back in the carefree days of youth, I met a kid named Larry (Serle at the time, though he reverted to Grinnell as an adult) and we spent a lot of time on various geeky kid activities, mostly stamp collecting, watching bad TV, and hanging around the local hot spots like the Smithsonian Institution. Larry just wrote a blog entry about our days in DC and how it led to his visit to an unrestored Enola Gay. Continue reading 'Greetings, Larry!'»
I’m the chairman of the local scouting district, and our new district executive has taken the lead on moving our web site to a content management system. The council is using Dot Net Nuke for this, so we just had a morning of training on it.
So I’m taking some time here to write down my thoughts on how to organize a district web site. These observations take a particular eye towards using Dot Net Nuke as the host platform. Continue reading 'Thoughts on a District Website'»
WordPress announced an upgrade of their blog software the other day. WordPress is the software that hosts this site.
The last “big” upgrade was tricky – enough changed so that a few things stopped working.
This one wasn’t too bad. The WordPress site claimed that most things should be compatible with this upgrade, and that seems to be true. Continue reading 'WordPress Upgrade'»
I’ve posted graduation party pics for David Reilly and Ted Collins. I’ll leave them up for a while and then delete them.
Composer and video artist GeHof contacted me a while back for permission to use the Hastings May Day photos in a video.
He posted the result on YouTube: Continue reading 'May Day Video'»
Comments Off “never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to incompetence”
This is a diatribe I wrote about the discomfort caused when my home ISP went through a very badly managed domain name change in early 2002. This is ancient history now, but it’s an example of how perceived corporate expertise has a way of evaporating in the face of a real-world problem. Continue reading 'Moving the Maypole Web Site'»
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