Glass Panes That Separate

transparent barriers to communication

Tag: tech

  • dream

    If you have no interest whatsoever in web design and hosting, you can just move right along. If you’re looking for a web host, I recommend dreamhost. I’ve been using them for about 5 months now, and I am continually impressed by the amazing things they do for their customers. I signed up when the base account was already pretty good. And then they quadrupled their storage limits, and octupled the bandwidth restrictions. I hadn’t really paid any attention to it before, but their referral system is incredible. They give you $97 for every person that signs up under you. If you are generous, you can pass some of this money on to the people that you refer. So here comes the gratuitous discount code: shane90. If you enter that in, you get $90 off of a 1-year or 2-year plan. If you just want to go monthly, you can enter in ‘shanemonthly’ to get a pretty significant discount.

    If you are looking for hosting for a church, I would recommend checking out dream3. They offer free design and hosting if your church qualifies. Otherwise, you have to email them for pricing plans. If you don’t know much about websites and such, that’s the way to go. That’s all I have to say about that.

  • tm

    Trademarks can be some of the stupid things ever. In most cases, it makes sense. You don’t want someone stupid defaming your good name when you’ve worked so hard to build it up. A trademark makes it so that they can’t use your name without paying you. Which ensures that you at least know who is using your name. Some other trademarks are just dumb, and shouldn’t be valid at all. SCO just announced some silly service which appears to be just an advertising mechanism, and a method for spamming people. But that’s all beside the point. The service has ‘Me’ in the title, and so they have trademarked ‘Me.’ Will the insanity ever stop with these people. Let me answer that: NO.

  • pics, passion, progress, and fish

    I finally sorted all the photos we’ve taken since last November. My computer had died in mid-December, and thus I was unable to do anything with it until January. Now it’s February, and I realized that I had quite a few photos to take care of (around 200 or so). So I uploaded a couple new pics of the guinea pigs, and a bunch of our pics from Christmas.

    I still don’t care much for the institution of Valentine’s Day, but I do like to celebrate my love for my wife, and since it had been one full year since we were engaged, I took her out for dinner. Then we went to Menards, and looked at all sorts of stuff for a new house (still don’t know which one we’re buying, but soon). We had a good night out on the town, and it was good to get out of Ellendale for a bit.

    I got a call yesterday morning from Cherrie. She said, “They’re putting the rafters up, someone needs to take some pictures.” Work on the LLHSLC is in full swing, even though it ought to be too cold and snowy for any sort of construction. God is definitely favoring TBC right now, and the progress they are making on the new building is astounding. I’ll put up a few pics, just so you can see how it’s shaping up. For more pics, you can go here.

    My present from Mandy yesterday was a new fish. I picked out a big, fat, very pregnant molly. She’s white with some orange coloring. Should be having babies any time now. There will be more pictures when she does.

  • doom doom doom

    Just so no one gets surprised in a couple years, I have one thing to say:
    Microsoft is doomed. Their gig is up. Instead of innovating, they are just trying to take what everyone else is doing and make it better. But, in typical MS fashion, they are messing it up bad. There are several examples, which I will discuss in brief. (more…)

  • s-words

    The s-word in queston here is ‘software patents’. Most people don’t care about them, but they should. Many have taken a black or white approach to the issue. I think there’s a middle ground. Currently, the US patent system allows for patenting anything from a scrollbar, to a mechanism for delivering habit-based shopping referrals. On one hand, you have a lot of good, concrete solutions, and the people who invent them should reap the benefits. On the other hand, you have someone who thinks up something that might happen in the future, and then applies for the patent to their whimsical idea. When someone else has the same idea and actually implements it, the patent-holder hits up the one who did all the work for a bunch of money.
    My stance is this. You should be able to patent an actual tool for getting something done. A piece of software, a search algorithm, or even a million-dollar homepage. You shouldn’t be able to patent an idea, especially one that is not likely to be unique: a method for viewing off-screen content (scrollbar), a layout for placing data in boxes (a spreadsheet), or a method for distributing ads to consumers. When patents are allowed to be so broad and vague, anyone can make money simply by having an active imagination without any actual skills. I’m done.