This often misquoted statement from George Santayana’s book, Reason in Common Sense (not to be confused with Thomas Paine’s, Common Sense), actually follows what I think are two even more brilliant and, dare I say, now timely statements.

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.”

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So with no WP7 option, I got an HTC Droid Incredible instead. I have been very very happy with it and, in hindsight, it appears I dodged a bullet. Seems the Metro UI was a good idea but it needed to mature a bit more. Every phone store staff I asked said they much preferred the Android OS over the Windows Phone 7 OS. Primarily because the Metro UI just seemed too dumbed-down, not conveying half the information the Android OS could at a glance on a single screen. I don’t want to spend a lot of time using my phone. If I can glance at it and see everything I need and get back to what I’m doing with out having to open and close a bunch of apps, that’s just peachy.

Now I’m at the point of “upgrading” again. My phone is still keeping me very happy. I have few complaints. I picked up the Samsung Galaxy S yesterday (the one phone that is now outselling the iPhone) and at first glance it seemed to be a slightly bigger version of my Droid Incredible. But what about the new Windows Phone 8 OS that’s due to be on some phones in a month or so?

Windows Phone 8 is the latested interation of what I was waiting for last time. The Metro UI (now known as Modern UI or simply Windows 8) is reportedly more flexible and more intelligent. The desktop version of Windows 8 reportedly will change the way we approach our computer work, device interconnectivity and file storage. For a geek like me, that’s the equivalent of the cutest girl at school inviting me to a dance.

So after dodging disappointment last time around, am I just setting myself up to walk into it this time? Hopefully I will give myself the opportunity to kick the tires so to speak (I’m not continuing the cute girl dance metaphor here) this time.

No coffee to go for me, thanks.

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Those with all their eggs in the GoDaddy basket (both web hosting and domain registration) were stuck. They couldn’t access their domain records to point visitors to an alternate web host. This would have been a quick and relatively painless way to get around the issue had the problem been with web hosting (no one really knew at the time).

But others with their domains registered elsewhere, jumped to their domain consoles and changed (redelegated) the DNS (domain name servers) away from GoDaddy’s but with the domain records still pointing at their web site’s IP on GoDaddy. Voila! After waiting for this change to be reflected across the interwebs (about 30 – 60 minutes), their sites became accessible again. Had this been a web hosting problem instead of the more common DNS failure, they could have still set up on other web hosting services using their site backup (you have a site backup, right?).

What this experience teaches us

1. It’s inadvisable to have your hosting and domain registration (DNS assignment) from the same service.
2. Back up your web site so that you can quickly set up on an alternate hosting service quickly if needed. (WordPress does this easily with its own “Tools – Export” plugin).

For those of you selling or providing customer support online, these two points are critical. Imagine if your services were down for days. How would you react? It’s not unreasonable to have a plan at the ready for just such events.

The post What We Learned From the GoDaddy Service Interruption appeared first on Joe Beaulaurier's blog.

Solve 6 – 1 x 0 + 2 / 2= ???

I looked at the hundreds of answers being submitted and considered what my own would be.  Of course, anything times zero is going to be zero so I negated anything left of the zero as inconsequential. That left me with two divided by itself, which, of course, is one.

Assuming nothing short of brilliance in my conclusion and wondering how the hell others were coming up with five or even seven as their answers, I Googled the problem expecting to see my answer confirmed. Not.

What I failed to consider was what my fourth grade teacher would have referred to as “order of operators.” No, this isn’t some strange element of the “new math” (new math is a different way of teaching the same old math, it doesn’t change any of the rules). In short it means, in the absence of parentheses, you must do multiplication and division before you do addition and subtraction.

So when I applied this fundamental principle of fourth grade mathematics, the solution comes from:

Step 1.   1 x 0 = 0

Step 2.   2 / 2 = 1

Step 3.   6 – 0 = 6

Step 4.   6 + 1 = 7

And that is why the answer is seven, not one nor five.

Learning … erm … Relearning all the time.

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Recently, I started seeing the “Loading” message stuck at the top of my Gmail page for way too long. It would be there when I’d switch between my work and personal accounts. It would be there when I switched between folders, view contacts and view my calendar. Sometimes I’d just give up and refresh the page. Many times that wouldn’t make a difference.

It finally drove me to look at my options. And there were really only two.

Yahoo Mail – My mom has been on Yahoo Mail and I’ve been logging into her account periodically to help her with it. It was my first web-mail service and I used it for a long time. But I’m not liking the direction this service has been going. The functionality is presented in detached convoluted pieces. I’ll pass.

Hotmail – I was had been using Hotmail (aka Windows Live) just before I went to Gmail. When Microsoft started rolling out its upgraded web services and the Windows Phone 7 got rave reviews, I got excited at the prospect of having a digital ecosystem entwined with the Windows operating system on my computers. But I was really disappointed when SkyDrive and Mesh fell far short of something useful. I’d been teased by MS before and this was no different.

But a lot has changed over the past two years. SkyDrive has been combined with Office Web Apps and Mesh functionality has been merged into SkyDrive. Unfortunately, the User-interface is cartoonish.

I remembered how happy I was to discover Gmail’s Priority Inbox because it meant my phone wasn’t going to annoy me for every little thing that was emailed to me. Instead only emails that I designated as worthy were making it into my Priority Inbox. The rest were simply in the Inbox, still top-of-mind but not getting urgent treatment. But that wasn’t enough to make me tolerate the perpetual “Loading” situation.

So imagine my surprise when I figured out (not easy with the lack of useful guidance from Microsoft) that a great set of functionality is hidden in Hotmail’s “Sweep” menu. When faced with features offered under a “Sweep” label, you would assume they provide unilateral “sweeping,” changing or moving of entire folder contents. Not so! The most wonderful  tool is available under “Sweep- Move all from …”

From the Hotmail inbox (or any folder) select a group of emails (e.g. unimportant emails) and then select “Sweep – Move all from …” from the pull-down menu.

You will be presented with the above. I have created a folder labeled, “Not urgent,” that is a sub-folder of my Inbox. I now use “Sweep – Move all from …” to identify all mail I get that I don’t need to deal with right away and move it and (see the check box above?) all future email from the sender into this folder before it gets into my Inbox. This accomplishes the same benefit of Gmail’s Priority Inbox quite simply.

The folks at Microsoft have recently introduced the “Outlook” implementation of the Hotmail web-mail service. It’s pretty much all the same functionality in a different, simpler and less cartoony wrapper. That’s a bonus.

I was using Google Apps for my work email, having redirected that email to my Google Apps account. With Hotmail, I was able to much more easily go to http://domains.live.com and set everything up to enable redirecting email to my Hotmail account.

But what about all the contacts and emails I’m leaving behind on Gmail?

I set up all my email accounts, the new Hotmail ones and my previous Gmail ones, in the Windows Live Mail program (WLM). This program runs on my computer and is part of the free Windows Essentials package. Once I added all my accounts and they had completed downloading to WLM, I selected all emails in the Gmail inbox and dragged them to the corresponding Hotmail inbox in WLM.

There were thousands of emails so that process took a lot of time. I did the same for my Sent boxes. When it was all done, every email I had received or sent via Gmail was accessible to me in my Hotmail accounts.

Contacts were much simpler to move. Actually, they were simply being linked to from their location in Gmail. Hotmail allows you to connect to several services (e.g. Gmail and LinkedIn) so that your contacts in these other services will appear in your Hotmail Contacts lists. In many cases this means your information for someone is automatically updated when they change it on these other services. That’s pretty sweet.

So, Hotmail is where I am now and that is how I got here. SkyDrive just got a significant upgrade and I’m finally coming to realize the incredible freedom it provides. That will probably be my next post here.

The post Moving from Gmail (back) to Hotmail appeared first on Joe Beaulaurier's blog.

So, my apologies for neglecting things here and no more excuses.

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recognized it. She asked if he had gone to her school and he said yes. When she gave her maiden name he instantly recognized it. Turns out his wife also went to school with them as well. That was another reunion. They had all gone to the same elementary, middle and high schools.

What’s even more interesting is they all went to school together hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the state.

Pretty neat.

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Click to view

Alternate titles welcome. Such as “Meet mah lil friend!”

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From 1969, Episode 1, Season 8 of the Beverly Hillbillies

Scene:
Jethro enters the Clampett house with three male friends, all wearing nearly identical yet outlandish outfits, hairstyles and sunglasses. He had offered to introduce them to his single cousin, Elly, as a favor to the family.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Uncle Jed:  These is, uh, college students?

Jethro:  Yes, sir, fetched ‘em right off the campus.  Oh, this here’s my uncle jed.

Uncle Jed:  Howdy.

Mitch: Hey, man. how are you?

Uncle Jed:  Oh.

Jethro:  This here is Mitch. He’s been to 12 colleges.

Uncle Jed:  what all’d you study?

Jethro:  Study?  They don’t study. they protest.

Uncle Jed:  Well, what do they protest?

Jethro:  Everything.  You name it, they protest it.  They march up and down in front of the college holding signs.

Uncle Jed:  Well, how about you? ain’t you learning nothing?

Jethro:  Oh, yeah, I’m carrying three subjects.

Uncle Jed:  Oh, good, good. what are they?

Jethro:  Down with the dean, down with the faculty, and down with the regent.

Uncle Jed:  You walk around carrying signs too, huh?

Jethro:  Heck, yeah.  That’s what college is all about.

Uncle Jed:  Well, don’t you go inside at all?

Jethro:  Starting tomorrow I do.  They’s gonna let me bust down the dean’s door and tie him up.

Uncle Jed:  And why you gonna do that?

Jethro:  ’Cause I’m part of the academic revolution.  I’m fightin’ for intellectual freedom.  I’m throwing off the shackles of the economic power structure and putting down you corporate entities and conglomerates.  I have done solved my identity problem.  I know where I’m going and who I am.  I’m free to make up my own mind and do my own thing.

Uncle Jed:  And what is that?

Jethro:  They ain’t told me yet.

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There’s been some interesting articles pouncing on this revelation. This Slate article makes a very detailed look at this and there’s even a UK outlet taking advantage of this, like used US jeans in Japan.

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