Today was full of Google tech news - exciting stuff for technophiles, but the rest of you can just stop reading now.
First, Google announced and released a new web browser to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. It's been rumored for years but today's news was basically a surprise. I've already downloaded and installed Google's new browser, known as "Chrome". It's only in beta right now but I was still majorly disappointed. Thumbs down for now.
Next from Google today was the release of Picasa 3, the latest version of their great desktop photo organizing and editing software. As a professional graphic artist, I've been a longtime satisfied user of Picasa for my home photos. It's quick, it's easy, and it's powerful (but not PhotoShop powerful). This new version 3 adds so many more great new features, including retouching (really impressive), automatic red-eye reduction, video editing, text overlays, and auto-syncing to Picasa Web Albums. Big thumbs up!
And speaking of Picasa Web Albums, Google just today introduced people tagging, just like on Facebook. That's cool, but the coolest part is Google's new face recognition software. Picasa went through all of my online photos and identified over 300 faces. Then Google grouped similar faces together so I could identify who the person was and tag them. It wasn't always perfect but it did a good job with recognizing similar faces (especially since Patty is a twin). It took me less than 10 minutes to tag over 300 faces.
During spring training I tried to sign up for Major League Baseball's Gameday Audio so I can listen to Mets games on WFAN through the internet. I ran in to a brick wall when I refused to give them my telephone number. (MLB has a reputation for taking liberties with your privacy. They claim it's a desired benefit to me to have their advertising partners bother me with 'special' 3rd party offers. Besides, I'm paying for the service which doesn't need a telephone so what do they need my for?)
Anyhoo, back to the story... Last week I tried to sign up for Gameday Audio again and somehow was able to sign up without giving them my phone number. Sweet. So I've finally been able to listen to Mets games on WFAN over the internet, 1000 miles away in North Carolina. It's been great to listen to the games at night, but the best part is that the Mets haven't lost a single game since I started listening. They just won their 7th consecuve game and are right back in the playoff hunt again. Of course I'm not responsible for the Mets' winning streak, but then again, I am still convinced that I personally helped will that ball through Buckner's legs in 1986.
I'm still not a fan of social networking sites but I just can't ignore their popularity any more. Thanks to Facebook's "friend's suggestion" feature, I've been connecting to a lot more people lately. Perhaps more importantly, I've helped four times as many other people connect by using the same feature. I currently have 44 social connections ("friends") on Facebook. While that's still less than half of the 110 professional connections I have on LinkedIn, I haven't even been actively trying on Facebook. It almost happens on its own. Long story short, I finally give in. I still refuse to live my entire life on Facebook but I'm finally going to update my Facebook info, add some more apps, and add Facebook to my list of sites I check at least once daily. This website here is still my primary online home but I guess I'll now have a sort of online "summer home" since not everybody visits me over here as often.
Google's Street View launched in Charlotte a couple of weeks ago, one of 37 news cities added to Street View all at once. When the Street View feature first launched in select cities last year, every blogger in America was posting about the strangest and most interesting sights that could be found (and I was one of them.) Several websites sprung up to share all the interesting candid shots that people were finding.123 Now over a year later and with Street View available in dozens upon dozens of cities nationwide, the novelty has largely worn off. I was eager to see what other people had found in Charlotte's version of via Street View but other than a few passing message board mentions, nobody seemed to care, or even notice. So that's why I've taken it upon myself to present, A Tour of Charlotte via Google Street View.
A Tour of Charlotte (sightseeing)
Trade & Tryon This is the center of Uptown Charlotte. Pictured here is Bank of America Corporate Headquarters. Pan down to see the four statues on each corner of the intersection. (Wachovia's corporate headquarters are just a few blocks south.).
Queen Charlotte This statue of Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg is the first sight many visitors see when arriving at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She is the reason why the city is named Charlotte, its nickname is "the Queen City", and the county is named Mecklenburg.
Queens and Queens Charlotte has many confusing roads but this is definitely the city's most notorious. Queens Road loops around and meets itself again only to take a 90 degree turn. At the same intersection, Providence Road also takes an unexpected 90 degree turn.
Time Warner Cable Arena Home of the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats. Also home of minor league hockey's Charlotte Checkers.
Lowe's Motor Speedway The Charlotte area is NASCAR country, and LMS in nearby Concord is its mecca. Lowe's Motor Speedway holds over 200,000 spectators and is home to both the NASCAR All-Star Race and the Coca Cola 600 .
Baseball Water Tower Sticking with the sports theme, this is the baseball water tower next to the Charlotte Knights stadium in Fort Mill, South Carolina. This is a landmark along Interstate 77, just south of the state line.
Carowinds Amusement Park This a 112 acre Cedar Fair amusement park is half in North Carolina and half in South Carolina. This image is of the Thunder Road roller coaster.
Meck Deck This nondescript location marks the historic signing of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence - the first colonial government to declare independence from England in 1775. Nearly nobody in Charlotte even knows this historic event happened at this spot.
Buster Boyd Bridge Another spot that most locals don't even know about. Well they know the bridge is here, but most people don't realize that the Buster Boyd Bridge is the only place where you drive north to go to South Carolina and south to go to North Carolina. Take a close look at the states and directions in this image.
Caught On Camera (other interesting shots caught by Street View cameras)
Motorcycle on Sidewalk I'm no law expert, but I'm pretty sure it's illegal to ride your motorcycle on the sidewalk.
Do you know of other cool Street Views in Charlotte? Post it in the comments and if it's good enough I'll add it to the list above.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does (Google is stupid) Some commentary: Google is stupid to have paid whomever they got to take these photos, and Charlotte has been jipped. There are dozens of places around Charlotte that were photographed at night time. WTF? The very point of Street View is for users to see what cities look like - so what's the point of photographing the city at night time when all you see is blackness and headlights? Here's what should be a great shot of Uptown Charlotte from the John Belk. Here's I-77, College Street, Bank of America Stadium, Ballantyne, and Carowinds. All taken at night so they're all useless photos. Just plain stupid.
P.S. The answer to the question "When were these photos taken?" is as long ago as last year and as recently as last month. I happen to know that this road was newly paved only about 6 weeks ago, yet less than a mile away the you can clearly see that the Lynx light rail line near Clanton is still under construction (and missing those huge clay circles that they call art) despite the fact that it was opened to the public and already running in November 2007 (so the photos have to be even months earlier than that).
Firefox 3 is released today! Download Firefox 3 today and help set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. I'll be responsible for two downloads, one at home and one at work.
Note: Today is June 17th - Dowload Day - but Firefox 3 is not available to download at this very moment that I'm posting this. Stupidly, somebody decided that "Dowload Day" shouldn't start until 10:00am Pacific Time, so not until 1:00pm Eastern Time. Huh? Who thought 1:00pm was a good idea to start a 24 hour period? Last I checked, a day starts and ends at midnight.
In any case, download and install Firefox 3 later today when it's actually available.
Update 8:34pm Wow, what a huge disappointment. Aside from the 1pm start time, Firefox had major problems where nobody could download anything for hours. When the site came online again, if you clicked on the "Download Firefox 3" button it initiated a download of the older version 2.
So far it looks nice but since half of my add-ons and customizations don't yet work with version 3, I can't even surf the way I want to yet. Now I have to re-customize it again.
It's all about who you know. Or it's about who the people you know, know.
LinkedIn is a professional networking website. Unlike social networking websites like Facebook or MySpace, LinkedIn is geared primarily towards forming professional business connections. No games, no chat, no quizzes, no photo galleries. I joined LinkedIn in 2006 but I barely touched it until late 2007 when I finally started utilizing it more.
How It Works: You connect to people you already know personally - either co-workers, former co-workers, former classmates, or good friends. Since you already know your own contacts, there's not much benefit to LinkedIn yet. The beauty of LinkedIn is that it reveals professional connections that you didn't even know you had - people your contacts know but you didn't.
At this moment I'm just shy of 80 "1st-degree" LinkedIn connections - people I already know personally. But because my 80 connections are connected to many other people, that actually connects me to over 5,000 2nd-degree connections. Great! That's 5,000 professional contacts that my personal connections can put me in contact with. LinkedIn goes as far as 3rd-degree connections too, connecting me to over 350,000 new people I didn't know I had a connection to. I didn't think these 3rd degree connections (a friend of a friend of a friend) could be very helpful to me, but that's why I'm writing this post...
How It (May Have) Helped Me: First a quick story: Last year, somebody I did not previously know saw my professional credentials on LinkedIn because we had a mutual contact in common. Unsolicited, she contacted me and asked me to apply for a job with her company. How sweet is that when jobs come looking for you.
Now the main story: Last month I applied for a job I was interested in. After applying, I used LinkedIn to search for people on LinkedIn who may work for that employer. Luckily I found the actual manager for that department I was applying to. He was a 3rd-degree connection (a friend of a friend of a friend). I asked one of my connections, a college alumnus, to pass along a brief introduction message to the manager stating that I was interested in the position. He then passed it along with a recommendation to his contact (whom I didn't know at all), who then passed it along to the manager. Yes that's a long chain but the point is that it did work, and I start my new job this week! Since I actually applied for the job before using LinkedIn you could argue that it probably didn't actually help me get the job, but a personal recommendation through a contact certainly didn't hurt.
Final Thoughts Even though I'm starting a new job this week, it's always good to maintain connections with past colleagues and friends. If you know me, connect to me on LinkedIn.
P.S. As much as I recommend LinkedIn to anybody interested in professional networking, I can't see any good reason to pay for the premium service.
When I was a kid I loved playing with Legos. I probably played with them every single day. Perhaps that's why I wanted to be an architect when I was younger. I don't know how many sets I had but they kept adding up. I had a Lego bag exactly like this one I found in somebody else's blog, but picture it completely filled edge to edge (yes I know there's really only one edge in a circle) and piled several inches deep with plastic bricks. That's what I had. No wait, that's what I still have. Maegan used to enjoy playing with them when she was younger and one day Darah can too.
Today I found an article on c|net that Lego is currently developing a MMOG called "Lego Universe". (MMOG is an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Second Life and Club Penguin are examples of MMOGs.) I have the Lego Star Wars game for Xbox and I think it's great, so how cool would that be to build my own stuff in virtual 3D lego creations, and to interact with an entire virtual world where thousands of others have done the same? Sorry to say I wouldn't pay for it, but I would definitely check it out. Lego Universe is still two years away from any public release, but that will still be well before Darah's ready for it.
Last night I was reading an article on LifeHacker which was recommending a free webcam software called Yawcam. This is the exact same webcam software that I discovered earlier this year and which I used to run BoomerCam. A few months ago we moved some furniture around so Boomer no longer has a "perch" in front of the window anymore, but the camera has remained in operation, just pointing basically nothing. Since I've been using the Yawcam for a while, and I could recommend it to others, and provide an example of the software in action... I decided to post a comment to the article (the first comment) and I included a link to BoomerCam (along with a disclaimer that Boomer wouldn't actually be seen).
LifeHacker is among the most popular blogs on the entire internet, garnering over 500,000 visitors every day from all over the world. In less than a minute I heard a little beep sound that tells me when somebody is viewing the webcam. And then another. And another. Realizing that this was just the beginning of a massive wave of coming BoomerCam visitors, I decided to give the viewers what they really wanted. I quickly cleared off the table which the webcam was pointing to and threw Boomer's pillow on top. I then got Boomer and put him up on top. He was confused at first (and Hobo was jealous) but pretty soon he just laid down and went back to sleep.
Every time I heard another beep I would reach into the shot and wave, which was quite often. According to comments on the LifeHacker article and on my original BoomerCam blog post, people seem to like me waving to them. I later added a "Boomer is dreaming of LifeHacker" thought bubble to the shot. The beeps kept coming. At times it was as often as every few seconds. And it just kept continuing all night long, well past when I went to sleep.
My computer was still beeping constantly when I woke up this morning. Since we couldn't keep Boomer up there all day we eventually replaced him with a jack-o-lantern. And I'm now writing this blog post over 24 hours later and it's still going, and going, and going like the energizer bunny.
On a normal day my website gets about 100 visitors, viewing about 200 pages. In just the past 24 hours since I posted my comment on LifeHacker, over 800 visitors have visited my website and viewed over 1,400 pages... and still counting. Even though I get nothing out of this spike in traffic, it's pretty cool to see so many people visit.
I've previously blogged about my historic 1946 Town of Huntington Planning Map. Today I learned about Yahoo's new Map Mixer application, which overlays uploaded maps over the ones found on Yahoo. Naturally I tried it out with my 1946 map to share with others. Aside from progress in general, it's pretty cool to fiddle with the layer opacity and have line up (mostly) with the modern map and see how the paths of some roads have been changed over time.
Last year I began adding feeds to my Google personalized homepage (now called iGoogle). As time went on I kept adding more tabs to accommodate more and more feeds I was tracking, but now it was getting too annoying. Aside from having to constantly switch between multiple tabs, some blogs posted so often that I would miss good content if I didn't check my each tab of my Google homepage several times per day. (iGoogle limits feed items to a maximum of the last 10 posts per source.) This became more of an issue lately after I discovered the web-goodness that is Lifehacker.
So last week I decided to give Google Reader another try. I tried it when it was first introduced and quite frankly thought it was clunky and worthless. Apparently they've made lots of major UI improvements since then. In less than a week I'm finding it vastly superior to the improper way I was using iGoogle, especially once I learned the "J" keyboard shortcut to quickly scroll though new posts without using the mouse. It's definitely not a perfect product (I wish I could use keywords to filter out subjects that I just don't care about, like anything about Macs) but since feeds are so indespensible, I think I'm well on my way towards becoming a future victim of Google Reader addiction.
Today is a great day. Today, the Sussman household traded in their dial-up internet connection for broadband! Yea!
Last week I wrote about how my dial-up ISP was going out of business and I needed to find a new ISP quickly. I found a descent replacement dial-up service but then I found out that Time Warner Cable offers Road Runner Lite. This is a service they never promote because they'd rather you pay twice the price for the full Road Runner. It provides connection speeds of 1.5 Mbps (1,500 kbps). Then I did the math.
$13/month for dial-up ISP $30/month for the cost of having land-line telephone service Equals $43/month
$30/month for Road Runner Lite broadband cable modem $20/month for increased cost to double our family mobile minutes Equals $50/month
So for just $7 more each month we now have a broadband cable modem, well worth it for internet connection speeds 25-30 times faster than our old 56K dial-up!
Pity me. I've been stuck on dial-up since the '90s. I used to use Earthlink as my internet service provider (ISP) and was satisfied with the service, but I switched to lesser known Higstream several years ago to save money. All I wanted was a connection to the internet and Highstream did just as good a job as Earthlink for less than half the price. I recommended Highstream to many others, including my mother who also switched to Highstream.
On May 30th my mother received an email stating that Highstream will be ceasing operations in just a few weeks and that all customers will be transferred over to PeoplePC. I never received any such email and the Highstream website made no mention that they were going out of business so my initial thoughts were that this was a phishing scam. But I decided to actually call up Highstream and ask them what was going on. After 40 minutes on hold I reached an operator who told me that it is all true. The fact that I was about to lose my ISP sucked enough but I had to question why I was not notified of the impending service termination. I figured that they would chalk it up to a mistake or spam filters, but they freely admitted that Highstream was not notifying all of their customers at once. They decided to stagger their notification emails in groups over multiple weeks in order to avoid being overwhelmed by a mass of support requests. It's now June 6th, seven days after my mother received her email and only three business days before I need to cancel my service to avoid being transferred to PeoplePC - and they still haven't sent me any notice! Other customers who were sent emails last month are given weeks worth of notice to make alternate arrangements but I now have to scramble to find a new ISP and cancel my old service quickly. And I'm actually lucky because I wouldn't have known at all if my mother hadn't told me. I was totally satisfied with Highstream's dial-up ISP service for years but this transition process is BS.
So what am I going to do now? I'm not sure yet, but there's no way I'm going to PeoplePC. PeoplePC requires you to use their "smart dialer" which interferes with various desktop applications which sometimes need to open a connection to the internet. And even though you do pay them for service, they still require you keep their special advertising-filled homepage open in the background while surfing, choking up what little bandwidth you can actually squeeze through a phone line. In the 1990's I was happy with Earthlink, but who the heck would actually pay $21.95/mo. when you can get DSL Lite for about the same cost? So I've started looking for new dial-up ISP's. Since some people in similar situations may find this post, I'll share what I found.
My requirements:
Cheap (or else I may as well get DSL Lite)
No forced advertisements
No requirements to use special dialing software
No requirement to keep their website open in the background
Reasonable idle time limitations
Given my requirements, all of the big name companies were immediately crossed off the list. I found plenty of small ISP's that fit the bill so I began to judge them by their website (perhaps unfairly, but if they don't know how to create a professional website than what makes me think they know how to run an ISP). I was also weary of ISP's that charged too little because they're more likely to go out of business quickly. I narrowed my finds down to just two, ISP.com and SurfBest, neither of which I had ever heard of before. I decided to go with ISP.com because it appeared more professional (judging a book by it's cover), has been in business since 1993, and they were cheaper. I just had one question/concern about their disconnect policy after only 15 minutes of idle time, [see bottom for update] so I wrote an email to both their support and billing teams. That was 48 hours ago and I haven't gotten any response from ISP.com. A second email has also been ignored. So I decided to write an email to SurfBest to ask about their idle time disconnect, and to test their tech support. I was amazed that even though my email was sent late at night, I received a personal response to my questions in just 11 minutes! That's impressive. Plus they won't automatically disconnect you until you're idle for 8 hours.
I still have until the end of the week to look in to other options like DSL Lite but if I do go with dial-up again, SurfBest definitely won my vote with excellent customer service and a generous idle disconnect time. Conversely, ISP.com lost my vote with non-existent customer support. I hope my mini-review of cheap, no-frill ISP's helps somebody out there.
Update 1 on 6/7/07: ISP.com finally responded to my support questions, three days after the original email and 44 hours after the 2nd email which is the one they actually responded to. Still bad support. According to their response, ISP.com's idle disconnect time is actually an acceptable 5 hours, despite the fact that their own website says 15 minutes.
Not long after Google Maps and Google Earth were introduced, people began searching for interesting shots that were accidentally captured by the overhead imagery. These include everything from catching a mid-air military plane refueling in California to an in-progress Major League Baseball game in Philadelphia. So it was no surprise that after Google introduced their new "Street View" feature on Google Maps, people immediately went on a frantic virtual scavenger hunt to find the most interesting images captured by Google at street level. Since the service was introduced on Tuesday there have been hundreds of finds posted on the internet. Here's my list of the Top 10 Street View Images from the 1st 100 Hours. Hopefully cooler images are found with more time but these are the best found so far.
#10 Promoting the Competition Forget about the amazing new Street View feature that actually makes these images possible. Not the best image but ironically, here's a billboard for it's competitor, Microsoft's Live Maps. Note, Live Maps' "Bird's Eye View" feature is pretty damn cool too.
#9 When You Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go In broad daylight, on a busy public street in the heart of San Francisco. I guess he just couldn't wait.
#8 Adult Book Store Nobody's looking... except for that van taking digital photos of me which will soon be all over the internet.
#6 Censored Police Incident Somebody found this police incident in San Francisco. It's been called everything from a routine traffic stop, to a crime scene investigation, to a police stand off. Whatever it was, it was quickly yanked off Google's Street View. The image on the left shows you can still see the incident from farther down the street.
#5 Under Where? What else do I need to write about this photo?
#4 Forbidden NYC Tunnels Just a boring photo from inside the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. But since the September 11th attacks it's been illegal to take photos inside any tunnels in New York City. Oops. Read more here.
#3 E.T. Phone Home or Beam me up, Scotty Somebody spotted this mysterious alien figure on the side of a New Jersey highway. There are tons of other odd photographic glitches in Google's Street View, including odd colored blotches, glaring lens flares, riderless bicycles, and a man with no head.
#2 Google Maps Team Of course this was a planned shot of the Google Maps team responsible for this Street View project but who cares. It's still a nice easter egg.
#1 Home Invasion In Progress Man caught on camera (at point-blank range) breaking into a house in San Francisco. Now that's an unusual sight.
Of course many of these examples have raised privacy concerns. Views from a public street are perfectly legal, but that's not stopping many concerned citizens from speaking up. Some have serious concerns, and then there's this lady who complained because her cat was photographed.
I read in U.S. News & World Report about a social networking website geared specifically for kids called Club Penguin. It's a website where kids can register and become a cartoon penguin in a virtual world. You walk around and explore this snow covered land, while you play interactive games and communicate with other penguins. Penguins can dance at the night club, snow-tube down a mountain, go ice-fishing, and then go to their home igloo to care for their fur-ball pet known as a Puffle. It sounded like something Maegan would thoroughly enjoy but my first concern is Maegan's safety so I checked in to it in more detail.
While most kids can chat openly penguin-to-penguin by typing on their keyboard, parents are able to set their kid's penguin so that there is no open chatting allowed. A kid in "ultimate safe chat" can only communicate with other penguins by choosing a from a limited selection of a few dozen common words and phrases. More importantly, nobody else can communicate to a kid who's in "ultimate safe chat" except by using those same preselected safe phrases. This makes it impossible for anybody to give or to get personal info from Maegan. After testing it out with my own penguin first, I signed Maegan up with an account.
Maegan absolutely loves it! When she's not on Club Penguin, she's talking about it. When she's not talking about Club Penguin, she's drawing pictures about it. We need to limit her time on Club Penguin or else she'd spend her whole day there.
Club Penguin has been described in the media as MySpace for kids. It is not. While it does share the element of collecting "buddies", MySpace (which I can't stand) is all about sharing personal information and photos, which Club Penguin does not allow. Club Penguin has also been described as Second Life for kids. It is not. While it does share the element of freely navigating a virtual world and communicating with others doing the same, Club Penguin is totally family friendly and players can not freely reshape their world beyond simple structured customizations.
In addition to showcasing the 1946 Huntington Planing Map I blogged about yesterday, I'll also take this opportunity to point out some other historical writings I'm proud to have contributed to Wikipedia.
A few months ago I accidentally discovered an amazing online resource called Northern New York Historical Newspapers. This website has digitally scanned hundreds of old newspapers and made them available in searchable PDF format. Although the olden-day typography causes problems with the text recognition software, you are able to find "today's news" from 140 years in the past - like a time machine.
Before the Press Republican, Plattsburgh, New York was covered by a newspaper known as the Plattsburgh Sentinel (1866-1931). Since I went to school at SUNY Plattsburgh, I decided to check out the headlines from the day my alma mater was founded. (Yes, this is where I got much of my information for my previous blog post on SUNY Plattsburgh Trivia.) I was surprised to find that the date on SUNY Plattsburgh's official logo was actually a year earlier than the school really opened. After that it became a history treasure hunt and I eventually contributed my research to Wikipedia. Here's an excerpt from the History of SUNY Plattsburgh:
... On January 26, 1929, a great fire completely destroyed the Plattsburgh Normal School. The fire started in the boiler room on a cold Saturday morning. Aided by high winds, the entire structure was fully engulfed in flames within a half-hour. Six children were rescued from the school by faculty members.
Classes resumed the following Wednesday at City Hall in downtown. By June of 1930 plans were presented for a new structure to replace Normal Hall. The new building would be twice as long and boast three times the capacity of the original building. ...
So it began with the history of SUNY Plattsburgh but I soon realized that the quaint, picturesque, harbor side town of Northport, New York (next to where I grew up on Long Island) had a rich history that was also being ignored by Wikipedia. So I found reliable sources and composed the History of Northport, New York. Here's an excerpt:
... By 1837 the village finally became known as Northport, although the village was not formally incorporated until 1894. The reason for this name was never officially documented but coincides with the rapid growth of port-related industries. By 1840 the region had shifted away from its farming roots as shipbuilding became the community's primary industry. Northport's shipbuilding boon lasted a half-century, but waned in the late 1800's as steel-hulled ships began replacing the wooden vessels produced in the village. ...
Since my hometown of East Northport shared so much history with neighboring Northport, it was only natural for me also write the History of East Northport, New York. Although the history isn't nearly as rich, one interesting thing I discovered was the little known fact as to why the town was named East Northport even though it actually located south of Northport. Here's an excerpt:
... In 1868 the Long Island Railroad opened a station within the village of Northport. However, just a few years later the LIRR decided to move the Northport station to a new location in Larkfield to facilitate further railway extension to Port Jefferson. The new railway station located at Larkfield Road and Bellerose Avenue opened on January 13, 1873. Although the station retained the name of Northport, train conductors would refer to it as "East of Northport" because the station was located east of the railway junction which used to direct trains north to the old station located in the village of Northport. Despite the fact that East Northport is actually south of Northport, the area became known thereafter as East Northport. The Larkfield Post Office formerly changed its name to East Northport in 1910. ...
I'm a regular contributer to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. I have well over 700 edits to my credit. I own an old 1946 town planning map from Huntington, New York which I considered historically significant enough to warrant an article on Wikipedia. The map shows Long Island right before the post-World War II population explosion that transformed it from rural farmland into an endless sea of housing developments and shopping malls. In addition, it also shows a proposal for a highway that would have cut right through northern Long Island, but was never built. Other Wikipedians agreed that the map was significant enough so I uploaded a scanned copy of the map and created a new article about it.
The article remained on Wikipedia for nearly a year before somebody pointed out a nearly unknown rule that the subject of an article can't be its own citation source. (Although, how else can you demonstrate the significance of any document without referencing the document itself?) After some debate the article was removed from Wikipedia, but the uploaded digital file of the map was allowed to remain as a historical document.
Since my intention was always to share the map with others who may find it interesting, I've created a new page on my own website for the 1946 Huntington Planning Map. Enjoy.
Net Neutrality is in serious jeopardy. To summarize what this means I'll compare it to my industry. Imagine just as an example that you had Time Warner Cable. Time Warner owns many of the cable stations available, including CNN, TBS, TNT, and Cartoon Network. Now imagine that you're paying for over a hundred cable television channels but Time Warner decided to make all the stations that they don't own blurry, full of static, and muffled audio, in an effort to force you to watch their networks if you want quality reception. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well that's what's happening right now to the internet. Washington lobbyists are pushing congress to allow internet providers to unfairly slow-down websites which they don't have a business partnership with.
I visited The Internet Archive a few days ago. The Internet Archive is an amazing internet resource which "was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." In other words, it takes periodic "snapshots" of millions of websites and stores them online for historical preservation. It's pretty cool. Want to go back in time and see...
Yahoo! in 1996 - When the focus was a Directory approach rather than Search.
Google in 1998 - When it only indexed a minuscule 25 million pages on a Stanford server.
In any case, I can't even remember why I was visiting the Internet Archive in the first place but I plugged my own website into The Wayback Machine. Other than laughing at how horrible my site used to look, I discovered that IA had historically preserved most of my blog posts from 2001 and 2002. Of course this is only important to me, but that's exactly what it's here for. I gathered up more than 50 old blog posts, and I've now re-posted most of them again! (Some weren't worth recovering). Check out my recovered archives:
Reading my old posts seems to reveal something about the me I was six years ago. Style wise, I apparently never gave any of my original blog posts any titles (but I gave them all titles when I re-posted them), and for some reason I rarely wrote more than a sentence or two. Have I simply just become long-winded? Seems so. I blogged a lot about tv awards, baseball, and fantasy sports. I blogged a lot about playing softball (I managed my own team) and several times about purchasing our first new home. On my fourth anniversary we said we were planning a trip to Las Vegas or Mexico for our 5th. It's sad to see that after 10 years we still haven't done that. I find it interesting that I never blogged anything about the September 11th attacks but I don't think I was consciously avoiding the subject. Other interesting posts include Maegan breaking her collar bone, wild speculation about a mysterious revolutionary transportation device, me becoming an uncle for the first time, and best of all... the swarm of killer bees.
My long list of website updates, upgrades, and fixes contiues to grow. Between this website and several others I operate, I've been stuck in limbo waiting for:
phpBB3 - This message board upgrade (for another website) is huge, but it was expected to be released last summer. Come on already!
New Blogger - Google's Blogger.com already upgraded to a new and improved version but for unknown reasons my account was unable to migrate to the new system. I'm still waiting in limbo, unable to use the new features and not knowing if this eventual change will cause me any problems.
Website Redesign - I've settled on a long-overdue new design for this website, written the necessary code, and tested the template for browser compatibility. However it will take a few hours to properly implement the changes and I just haven't found the time to make the switch yet. Hopefully I'll get it done sometime in the next few weeks.
Gallery - I'm not waiting for any major upgrades but this morning I found out that two of my three websites that use this photo album software have suddenly stopped working, and I haven't got a clue as to why. This website is the only one which the photo album is still operational.
When Time Magazine named me "Person of the Year" (yes, I suppose they may have included you too), I ranted that Time had officially erased all doubt that they had long since Jumped the Shark. I did not disagree with their wise assessment that this Web 2.0 age is transforming the power of media and therefore the world itself. (I must now sidebar the fact that I despise the term "Web 2.0" simply because it is used incorrectly as a popularized generic buzzword far more often than it is used to properly describe certain technical aspects of todays AJAX based web applications.) It's 100% true. The ability for non-techies to easily create, disseminate, and consume media and information on the net is indeed monumental, but that still doesn't mean that everybody who's ever posted a comment on a blog should be named Person of the Year. Maybe next year they'll name "The spirit of peace on earth" as Person of the Year. Many good articles were written which shared my view that Time has totally wussified the once lofty distinction of Person of the Year. I mean, Time Magazine once had the cahuntas to name Adolph Hitler as Man of the Year, which I won't disagree with because their mission has always been to name the person who had the most influence on the world, whether positive or negative. But no such bold declarations any longer. Nice and safe all the way for Time.
Then came the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30th. Well actually it was the next day when some grainy, unauthorized cell phone video of the hanging spread around the world almost instantaneously via the internet. With almost Nostradamus-like foresight, Time Magazine predicted that some unknown hooligan in Iraq with a video enabled cell phone would very soon become Person of the Year. Consider the immense consequences that we've yet to realize from this video and you can easily argue that it meets Time's criteria of influencing the world. And since it took throngs of other net-users to disseminate the video around the world, you too have had a hand in changing the world, for better or for worse.
Today was full of Google tech news - exciting stuff for technophiles, but the rest of you can just stop reading now. 
