As of this fall, I’ll have been “on the internet” for 17 years, pretty much uninterrupted. (The longest single break I had was Boot Camp in 1999.) I think that’s probably enough time to have a good idea of how the internet has shaped discussions and changed how we interact with one another, and further to figure out how to react and respond to it.
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Just a little chest-clearing, real quick, if I may (and I may, it’s my damn blog).

I’ve noticed this meme a few times in the last couple of months; coming along with the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, and with the Ocean Marketing fiasco. In formulation, it went something like this: “Oh sure, you all can get up in arms enough to protest this kind of dick move ( Read more... )

This year, unlike, I think, the last two years, I’m only sort of participating in NaNoWriMo. I actually started the novel I’m working on back in September when I came out of a very productive retreat having thought really hard about working on three different first chapters for three different novels, and ended up just writing one of them well ( Read more... )

Here’s a link to what appears to be an Obama 2012 campaign Google+ account.

Here’s a link to a public discussion on a friend of a friend’s Google+ account.

(Quick recap: Obama account appears to be reposting legit Twitter stuff. The discussion features “Obama”-supposed to be a campaign staffer no doubt-rebutting the notion that all Muslims get ( Read more... )

I feel like I’ve blogged on this before, but… I don’t feel like losing the rest of my day to my blog/LJ archives, so I’ll just pretend it’s new. Well, it’s at least an ongoing problem so it’s always relevant.

Anyway, my problem is this: I use too many computers.

Part of that is occupational. I’m an IT guy after all, and it’s hard not to hear the ( Read more... )

Last night Kathryn Allen posted a rather interesting story about an attempt at phone-based scareware. I’ve been dealing a lot with scareware on the job(s) the last couple of years. This is the kind of stuff that pops up as you’re visiting a website and tells you that your computer has 323 viruses found or something. And you click it and it ( Read more... )

One of my biggest pet peeves are those e-mail forwards that breathlessly purport outrageous facts, usually with the subtext of, “They’re all out to get us!” I remember particularly one which seemed popular when I was in college back in the late 90s that peddled screaming outrage over an effort by some atheist somewhere to keep Christian radio ( Read more... )

Like a stupid smiling thing, every time I watch it. Enjoy, if it does the same for you:

Click to view

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

The vast majority of my WordPress comment spam comes in to this post about Howard Tayler. Don’t know why-maybe because of his overwhelming popularity on the internets.

In other blog housekeeping news, I’m going to add a Twitter plugin for the sidebar. And I upgraded to 2.7.1 on Wordpress without a hitch. I’m digging the new back-end lay out, an ( Read more... )

(Testing the Dreamwidth Crossposter, like a good beta tester)

I would love to have, for my work laptop screensaver, a 3D fly-through of the notional internet. You know, there could be a giant Google-branded pyramid in the center and millions of little Google-branded spiders crawling all over everything. 4chan would be a swirling vortex of suck, ( Read more... )