As 2004 closes, I spend this evening alone, pondering how the year went from my perspective. And as I think about it, I'd have to say that overall I'm pleased with it. There are a number of things that I might change if I had the power to do so, but overall, I choose not to be depressed about the year. My part in it wasn't all that bad.
The picture at the right is my 1980 Volvo GT that I bought new in December of 1980 for about $10,500.00. It has been disabled since May of 2003, so I finally decided that I would donate it to the East Tennessee Kidney Foundation so they could get some value out of it and I could get a tax deduction for doing so.
Yesterday my friends Patrick Ahern and Paul Moor both tested out my installation of SAM, the Skype Answering Machine. What I learned from that experiment is that at the moment SAM does not permit me to specify the length of time a caller can talk when he or she is leaving a message. Right now, a caller is cut off at the about the one minute mark. So I wrote the author, Alex Rosenbaum, and asked if he were planning to add that functionality in the future.
Yesterday I received a comment on my post about Skype. This comment was from Janet Tokerud, someone I do not know, and in it she asked an interesting question about using Skype. However, that comment raised a point that I need to make about comments in general. (By the way, it is always a kick to get a comment from a «stranger» because it means that people other than my immediate family and friends are reading my blog, and that usually surprises me. Thanks, Janet.)
The drive from Knoxville to Lula, GA., where my older son, Jeff, and his family and my ex-wife, Carole, live, carries me along highway 64 between Cleveland, TN, and Murphy, NC, along a stretch of the Ocoee river that served as the venue for the Kayaking competition in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The picture at the right is one of the calmer stretches of that river.
The road that winds around sharp curves in the mountains beside that river is quite scenic, though it is a very tiring drive because of the constant twisting back and forth. The entire trip usually takes about three and a half hours from Knoxville to Lula or vice versa, and I usually make it once or twice a year for special events, such as Christmas, which as I said the other day, is Jeff's birthday.
My son, Jeff whose 40th birthday is today, and his family sent me this animated Christmas greeting card last night. I thought I'd share it with you as a way of wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Lawrence Lessig says that it's time for an update to his book «Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,» which was written and first published five years ago. His publisher has agreed to the following plan:
I have just completed the first Skype call with Hans-Christian Steinhoff, Paul Moor's local computer guru in Berlin, as he was testing out Paul's installation of Skype. All went well for a first effort.
Increasingly, when I am answering customer calls about why they can't surf the Internet as they could before or why their computer is running so slowly, I end up trying to educate them about Spyware. This morning I found a worthwhile site, called «The Spyware Warrior Guide to Anti-Spyware Programs: Feature Comparison,» that should prove useful to anyone beset by these problems. There are links at that site to the two major Spyware removal programs that we recommend at work, Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy. In combination, these two programs do an excellent job of identifying, removing, and, in the case of Spybot S&D, immunizing your computer from becoming infected again by the nuisances.
If you read enough blogs, you'll run across links to articles that are influencing the blogosphere and hence the culture of the online world significantly. Although it was published before blogs took off in 2004, The Cluetrain Manifesto is one such work. Also «The Cathedral and the Bazaar» by Eric S. Raymond has had a profound influence on people's thinking.
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