Starting Up

The Next Web has an interesting article about a German woman named Alice Zappe who spent 3 months building a pretty cool web project. She seems to be a smart and passionate self-motivated hacker who really knows how to get shit built.

But what’s with the tone of this article? The title is “See what this guy’s girlfriend built 3 months after learning how to code.” Why do the authors think he’s important? Read the rest of this post »

Today’s XKCD comic is absolutely on point.

I agree one thousand percent. Klout is useless.

Well, as is wont to happen every now and again, my hosting provider decided yesterday would be a great time to totally kill my performance.  After suffering 4-5 second page-load times (and after royally mussing up my DNS settings) I’ve re-launched the blog on a much more stable and powerful host.  Load times are down in the 200ms range, the new theme still has that new car smell, and we are back in business!

My friend Peter Mueller has written a kick-ass children’s book!  It’s called Hagar The Harfowl, and it’s wonderful.  And what’s even more wonderful is that I was able to build an iPad app around it (with some help, of course).  And to top it off, it’s now available in the app store!  Yay!  You can get it by clicking the image below:

Enjoy!

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is slated to go to a vote today.  Why is this important?  Well, it includes provisions that would allow the Department of Justice to shut down a website to U.S. viewership if it infringes any U.S. copyright.  It’s being backed by the MPAA, who, despite making record profits this year, have repeatedly stated their need for bills like this to help recoup profits lost to piracy.  Because, you know, people pirate movies just to be mean.  It has nothing to do with the poor online availability of legal movies and shows.  Here’s Cory Doctorow on that point.

Why should you care? The bill basically makes the creation of content on a website a potential crime, meaning the future of sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, and Twitter are all up in the air.

As you’d expect, there are some brave organizations standing up to the bill.  You can find out more at Mozilla’s page here.

SOPA is, at its core, a censorship bill.  It’s set to put the decision of who-sees-what in the hands of regulators being funded by entertainment industry interests.  It’s not a good thing, but it’s likely to pass.

And that’s a good thing.  As of today, the site www.occupytogether.org is listing 219 cities participating:

You can find out more information at  that site or at www.occupywallst.org.  Check out http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ for personal accounts of why people want change.

UPDATE: This is the same page at 3:30 (4 hours later):