During the month of October, my 17 year old son has been accepted to college, awarded a significant scholarship, and been invited to interview for a full ride. He also improved his rating in fencing to C, which puts him into Division I. His 15 year old sister won a national level horse judging competition, […]
Breck and I spent the day at Arlington National Cemetery. I’ve lived in VA for 13 years, yet somehow never made it there. The views from Arlington House are amazing. It’s easy to understand why they built that house where they did. The cemetery is huge. I’m guessing we walked about 4 miles today. Of […]
I linked to the Punk Rockers Make Great Parents article on Facebook and G+ a few days ago. However, I was thinking about it again. I don’t subscribe to the idea that the point of parenthood is get the kids into college. However, I have to admit that I’ve been feeling pretty damn good about […]
It’s been a month. I’m sold on Duck Duck Go a a viable replacement for Google search. I’m still using Horde on my server as my primary email interface, but I’m not quite sold. There are just a few too many quirks. Overall, it works, but after a month I still find myself thinking about […]
If you aren’t a geek that pays attention to this sort of stuff, you might be only vaguely aware that Facebook has been all over the news recently as the roll out “enhancements” to the service. And by enhancement, they mean, “Stuff that will help Facebook’s customers sell even more stuff to you.” In no […]
So I’ve been using Horde as my webmail interface for 10 days now, and I must say, I really don’t have many complaints. It may not be as elegant or snazzy as Gmail, but it works just fine, and I know that the Googlebots are not reading my mail and instantly deciding what to sell […]
As part of the ongoing De-Googlization of my life, I’ve been investigating various options to share photos on the web. There are plenty of purpose built apps that will do that, some of them rivaling Flickr or Picasa in features. I was looking for something very simple, and finally settled on the web album export […]
Since I actually got a fair number of comments (by this blog’s standards anyway) on my Google is the next AOL post, I thought I’d update what I’ve actually been doing. The easiest thing to change was my default search engine. I’m using Duck Duck Go, and I have to say, I don’t miss Google […]
My daughter needed to be in Lexington VA from 10 AM Saturday through noon Sunday. It’s 5 hours round trip. Breck and I dropped her off and made a hiking / camping trip out of it. I chose the Cold Mountain summit hike specifically because the summit is very unusual for VA, open meadow that […]
I was initially a big fan of Google+, and I still think it is a more privacy friendly social networking platform than Facebook. However, Google’s insistence on real names in the service is concerning. I’ve always used my real name online, but I certainly understand that for many people, there are very good reasons to […]
