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Showing posts from 2016

The 15-Year Blogoversary

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15 years and 1,213 posts! My first experience with the World Wide Web came in 1995, and by 1997 I had my own web page. The first web authoring tool I remember using was Composer, an HTML editor built into the Netscape Communicator suite. That helped me learn some HTML, and later I used Microsoft Word 97 and then FrontPage 98 and later Macromedia Dreamweaver to design more elaborate pages. Some of my FrontPage-built sites are still on the web. As I learned more about HTML standards and validation I wrote more HTML by hand, but I still wanted a way to make publishing to the web easier. By 2001 I understood that (a) sites should be updated regularly and (b) FTP'ing sites and pages from my desktop to a server was a bit of a pain. I had heard about some early blogging platforms and chose one, Blogger , to try out. As you can see, I'm still here. My receipt from Pyra Labs for Blogger Pro My first post using Blogger came on December 8, 2001. A few months later I paid fo

Last.fm and Ten Years of Web 2.0

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Ten years ago yesterday I scrobbled my first tracks to last.fm . What's scrobbling? On last.fm, scrobbling refers to automatic music track logging to the internet. For me, uploading a record of my music listening habits was my first real experience with "Web 2.0." Remember Web 2.0? It referred to websites of user-generated content that enabled virtual communities and interoperability. Now such sites are too ubiquitous on the web to warrant a special designation — they're just the web . But that wasn't true in 2006, and even though I'd been putting content on the internet since 1996, at the time it was enough to make me a little nervous. What did these strangers want with my data, and what was in it for me? Ten years and 24,941 scrobbles later, I have my answer: I have a really cool record of all the music I've listened to the past 10 years! Well, not "all," technically: I've certainly listened to music in places and on devices that didn'

Muhammad Ali, 1942-2016

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Muhammad Ali died late last night. To say I saw this coming wouldn't tell the whole story. Several times, over the past few years, I found myself suddenly struck with the thought, "Ali will be gone soon." It was the kind of thought that hit me as I lie in bed, unable to sleep, but unable to focus my thoughts. I wasn't seeing the future, and I'm not particularly sentimental about the dead. But the fact that my subconscious would do this to me should give you an idea of what Muhammad Ali means to me. Early Memories As a young boy, I had a few pieces of sports equipment: a bicycle, an old baseball glove passed down from my dad, and a pair of boxing gloves, which I used to hit a heavy bag fashioned from my dad's old Air Force duffle bag. My interest in boxing was initially driven by the Rocky movies, but I remember the first Ali fight I ever saw: an ESPN replay of the first Ali-Norton fight, from March 31, 1973. I'm going to guess I was 11 or 12 years old w