geek of technology

If you were to take a poll today of approval ratings for Barack Obama, I can guarantee that the number of supporters in this country of our President is far surpassed by the number of people who use Google services on a daily basis. How did this happen?  How did we become so complacent?  How […]

So, I’m still bothered by the Google thing.  I’m bothered by how reliant I am on Google’s products the same way I was bothered by how reliant I was on Microsoft’s products.  It happened so subtly that there was never a conscious decision to use Google products and services exclusively.  It wasn’t something where there […]

By now you should have heard about the closed-door talks that Google isn’t having with Verizon that absolutely wouldn’t destroy Net Neutrality as we’ve known it (and Google has argued for it) for the last several years. Here’s the rundown: The New York Times published an article that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement […]

There’s a phenomena with the new iPhone that, since I don’t own one and have a waning interest in ever owning one, I was unaware of before reading a blog post in the New York Times.  It seems that, for many users, if you hold the iPhone in a certain way, the very act of holding […]

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr‘s The Big Switch in anticipation of getting a copy of his new book The Shallows.  This troubling excerpt towards the end of the book hints at where he takes The Shallows and gives a less-than-utopian view of our dependency on all things web-related: The printed page, the dominant  information medium of the […]

this little functions.php hack makes me all giddy… use this to rebrand your WordPress back-end with your own logo: //hook the administrative header output add_action(‘admin_head’, ‘my_custom_logo’); function my_custom_logo() { echo ‘ <style type=”text/css”> #header-logo { background-image: url(‘.get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’).’/images/custom-logo.gif) !important; } </style> ‘; } and here’s what it would look like in action: by default, the WP […]

You are a Twitter addict.  You maintain multiple blogs, connect with friends and classmates on Facebook, are never far from your iPhone to check in to Foursquare and are a frequent reviewer on Yelp.  In short, you are a social networking junkie. In that case, probably you don’t need to read this post, because probably […]

Once upon a time there was a website called Lala.  I think I first heard about them in an issue of Wired as an alternative to filesharing.  Because, when Lala got started, it was all about cd trading — put the cd’s you don’t really care for anymore up in the pool, create a wishlist […]

Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains | Wired Magazine. This article has forced me to think hard about a couple things: 1) that I should reconsider my notification settings for Twitter and other social media.  As the article says, most of those live, up-to-the-minute updates aren’t actually all that interesting; most of […]

Adobe launched a new ad campaign today along with a response to Steve Jobs’ declaration that Flash will never be supported on iPhones, iPads, and iPods last week.  (In fact, they’ve added a whole new Freedom of Choice section on Adobe.com.)  There are a few amusing (and somewhat contradictory) statements in Adobe’s open letter (like this one: “If […]

don’t get me wrong: facebook is — despite everything…or, at least, despite most things — an incredibly useful app and is — right this very second — changing the web.  where, once upon a time, we found links that were designed to be useful to us based on a highly complex algorithm, facebook wants to show us […]

i’ll spare the discussion of how Flash is dead because Steve Jobs says it is. while i agree with him on all of his points, i’m not really into the all bow to the great and mighty Steve camp, even while the rest of the industry bows to the great and mighty Steve.  (i may […]