Free Wifi is great, isn’t it? Except when it’s worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.
I often have difficulty with hotel wifi. It drops out, you can’t get an IP address, the bandwidth is next to nothing. Forget about streaming Netflix over it, you’re lucky if you can check your email.
Over the weekend we were at a pleasant small hotel whose wifi was utter crap. It barely worked for Mike on his 15″ MacBook Pro, and my smaller MacBook Air was only able to make use of it twice.
Instead of working on a site redesign that I have a tight deadline on, I am dealing with a long-standing peeve I’ve had: iTunes hygiene.
This isn’t really a problem with iTunes so much as it is a problem with normalizing band names. iTunes’ search is quite smart, and matches similar items even when there are minor differences between them. So “Sigur Ros” and “Sigur Rós” will show up when I search for “ros”.
Its sorting in displays of music is clever as well. If I’m sorting on artist iTunes will cleverly show me “The Doors” intermingled with “Doors”.
I had the most amazing news today: I’m a finalist in a fitness contest. That’s something I would never have expected to be writing.
From August 2010 through January 2011, I participated in Precision Nutrition’s online “Lean Eating” program. I’ve been meaning to write something about this but the time hadn’t felt right.
Yesterday there was a fuss about alarming news that Facebook and Twitter had both killed off their RSS feeds (“completely”).
This led to much hand-wringing, name-calling and gnashing-of-teeth.
I’m at An Event Apart and have just listened to a great presentation by Jeremy Keith on data permanency. He touched on many issues, from technical ones regarding physical recording media and logical file formats, to digital rights management, legal issues like copyright, and what happens when the service which holds your data (delicious, Geocities, Myspace…) goes away or even just reorganizes its URL structure.
I used to operate my own hosting out of my house – apocalypse.org. At the time, the services I used it for were difficult to find for free – web hosting, shell access, email. I used it for myself and my own projects. I also wanted to continue a tradition from MIT of sharing computer access with other people, so I allowed many friends to use it for email and hosting as well.
