It happened again this morning. I got an email from LinkedIn with the headline, "Mary Mankiewicz wants to keep in touch on LinkedIn!" I scratched my head. No recall of Mary Mankiewicz. I went to her LinkedIn profile page. Interesting, ambitious woman, eight or nine years younger than I, lots of experience in publishing. But no least clue that I ( Read more... )

I hope all of you know by this time not to fall for any advertising pitch from Classmates.com. Their service can be useful, as we found when we put together our 40th grade school reunion back in 2006. However, I've seen a multitude of reports that their constant email come-ons are completely fictional, and (as far as I'm concerned) fraudulent.

( Read more... )

Last night I did something I hadn't expected to do: I signed up for Facebook. As Terry Dullmaier almost immediate wrote on my Wall: "Apparently we all end up on Facebook eventually!"

Indeed. And I guess I signed up for Facebook for the same reason I bought an XP machine: Sooner or later, I'm going to need to know something about it, so why not now ( Read more... )

• Pete Albrecht alerted me to Collecta, an interesting twist on a general Web search engine, in that it gathers news being posted Right Now, and displays it item by item on the screen in realtime While You Wait. Alas, most of what it seems to index are tweets, which may just barely count as information, for small values of "information."
• And yet ( Read more... )

I made a decision late last year without saying much about it: I won't be using AdSense ads anymore. Now, I'm not going to remove them from existing pages, and I'm not going to shut my account down, but as you might have noticed if you've perused my articles over on junkbox.com, my new layouts do not contain ads.

There's not a lot of point. The ( Read more... )

I'm a little disappointed in the new Chromium-based browser SRWare Iron (see my entry for April 18, 2009) or perhaps I should say a little disappointed in SRWare itself. The browser has worked extremely well the last couple of days here on my quad-core XP machine. After only a little sleuthing I made the ad blocker work: All you have to do is ( Read more... )

I've been pretty focused the last three or four months, so I mostly missed the whole discussion about Google Chrome and its pros and cons. Parts of Chrome are very impressive, particularly the "sandbox" security model--and parts are about what you'd expect from a monster company that makes its money on Web ads. I caught snatches of the debate here ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Back in the spring of 1976, my friend Gus Flassig showed me an issue of a new magazine called Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, a thin but sprightly fanzine-ish item full of articles on programming the Altair, the Kim-1, and other primordial micros. The opcodes were thick as flies, but it was very cool in a slightly goofy ( Read more... )

Yesterday I discovered Mikogo, a Net meeting/remote desktop technology that would be a lot like VNC and the others I've played with, except that it can be configured to piggyback on Skype. There is a Mikogo Skype "extra" (what Skype calls its plug-ins) and I will be using it ( Read more... )