Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

Brimming

I have been awake since 6 a.m., Thursday, June 27. Forty-two hours of freelance work and manager training. Somehow, I’m still wide awakkkkkkkkkmlkjjjm ,,, mmmmmmmmmmmmm

I Still Need Validation

It’s not just my OCD. I want my site orderly. One version to serve all. I want handcrafted code from organic XHTML and CSS, 100% validated, compliant to web standards and ADA Section 508, and ready to run in any browser on any device, as Spazowham claims. But I don’t know how. Yet.

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Replies: one comment so far

Ah, you are still alive. Excellent. Still pining for web nirvana. Good. So why don't you write? :)

posted by Vincent at 01:08 p.m. on thursday, june 27, 2002

Beware Adware

How can you kill “adware”? Don’t click on pop-ups. Ever. Instead, click on banners served locally or text links sponsored in places such as Google. Google claims, with justification, that “Keyword targeting that eliminates waste and increases relevance” and “[ads] on Google’s image-free pages have yielded clickthrough rates 5 times higher than industry standard.” What gets measured gets done.

Abort

EarthLink giveth, and EarthLink taketh away. My “rocket-fast” DSL was shut down less than 24 glorious hours. Of course, EarthLink doesn’t know why. Polite as ever, tech support has been, but no answers. So, once again, I am relegated to dial-up Internet access. Feels like I got kicked out of first class and have to sit in the john for the duration of the flight.

Liftoff

Thanks to a Mac Genius, I now have EarthLink DSL. Why couldn’t I set it up myself? After much pain and suffering, it turns out Earthlink hadn’t activated it. Of course, right there on the first page of the welcome letter, was the note that it may take up to seven days before the service is active. Who needs to follow instructions, anyway? We’ll have to see if download times are “up to 50 times faster.”

The Dark Side of Bridget Jones’ Diary.

I feel this woman’s pain: “i’m disappointed in myself, but so what else is new. i haven’t kept to my plan, i haven’t motivated, etc. the world’s tiniest violin plays for me.” I really want a page to track all that I want to accomplish, knowing full-well that designing the page would usurp the time and energy otherwise dedicate to the actual goals I would be trying to track. Oh, what a tangled Web I weave. At least I ran today.

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I emailed the author of this posting’s link. Promised her a secret if she walked for a mile tomorrow. We’ll see what happens. Time for bed.

posted by kawika at 12:53 a.m. on thursday, june 20, 2002

Fight the Power

Know your digital rights. Free your mouse. Open your mouthpiece. And don’t let the machine break you.

NPR (Nimrod Public Relations)

Some organizations just don’t get the Internet. Runner’s World tried to sue LetsRun.com for linking to “printer-friendly” pages. Now NPR is attempting to prohibit any linking or framing without the prior written consent. Thankfully, the Internet can simultaneously point out and route around stupidity.

Free-reign Spending

Morgan Stanley estimates that U.S. companies threw away $130 billion in two years on unneeded software and other technology. Why? They stampede into the wrong technology. They buy too much and don’t implement new tech properly. They also underestimate the time needed to make it work. And CEOs, especially during the go-go years, often spent too quickly without clear goals. “People kind of viewed it as black magic, so why understand it?” says Charles Phillips, a tech analyst at Morgan Stanley.

Free-reign Computing

The research head of a New Delhi software and education company finds getto kids can learn computers—even though they have little knowledge of English, no instruction and minimal intervention. Within days, the kids taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Imagine what they could do with more access, a few problems to solve, and rewards for doing so.