Fastmail

I’ve been using Gmail as my primary email service provider for a decade now. Gmail is 10 years old today. While it was certainly groundbreaking at the time, Google’s email services have stagnated as of late, and I’ve started to get serious privacy concerns over their practices and unified product lines. Google, quite literally, controls […]

Overlord Ruby

Backstory Notwithstanding my foray into TI-BASIC programming on my TI-83+, I got started with coding in the glorious language known as Perl. There’s no real particular reason for this choice, other than that it seemed cooler than PHP at the time. With its esoteric mannerisms and increasing levels of disuse in a technological culture, I […]

Tragedy of Technology

Offered without comment. nikky: This user wants to do http authentication with PHP nikky: It’s like nikky: why lutters: he hates you lutters: is why lutters: despite lutters: your heroic struggle for the users lutters: they secretly despise you at worst lutters: or are simply incompetent at best lutters: in this way you grow bitter […]

Evil Tape Robots

Introduction The following is actually partially paraphrased (stolen) from the Urban Dictionary‘s definition of “Evil Tape Robot.” How I came across that definition is another story entirely. Once upon a time, not too long ago, the computing giant Sun Microsystems had a tape robot. This robot was really nothing more than a large silo of […]

Struggle to Ignore the Blinking LED: Internet Addiction and Smartphones

A problem I’ve always had with data phones is the amount of information they provide the user: and the reliance the user can become on the device for even the most trivial of information updates and tasks. When I first purchased an LG Voyager a few years ago, I found my girlfriend at the time […]

WebAlpine Easter Egg

This is probably of interest to those who a) are currently a student, staff, or faculty at the UW, b) use UW Deskmail for their e-mail, and c) check their e-mail using WebAlpine. Regardless, while at work today I found an easter egg in WebAlpine today. To view it, follow these easy steps: Navigate to […]

IMAP Creator vs. UW: The Hidden Tale?

From: [redacted] To: Alpine-info <Alpine-info@u.washington.edu> Subject: [Alpine-info] The saga of Sir Crispin vs the UW (maybe) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:14:58 -0600 (MDT) Sender: alpine-info-bounces@mailman2.u.washington.edu User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (OSX 1167 2008-08-23) I was reading a Slashdot RSS article entitled “Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages” which turns out to be about Googles contribution to […]

Mythological Battle for uw.edu

As seen on the tech-support mailing list: uw.edu? [redacted] Thu Jun 18 22:18:53 PDT 2009 Once upon a time, there was waged a great battle between Educause and (then) C&C, the result of which was the acquisition of uw.edu. There was much hemming & hawing and mad twinkles in mad eyes. Win this one victory, […]

Embarrassing Answering Message Greeting

Yes, it’s true. I’m on the wall of shame for this one. I’ve always had a rather bad relationship with my message tone for my phone. First it was one of those canned messages where I say my name and it repeats it. Generic, boring, and impersonal. But I didn’t have anything better, since I […]