It's News to Me

The title of this post is from the lyrics of a hymn, but it describes how I spent almost all of yesterday and most of the evening before.

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I had a priceless opportunity when I was growing up to become a greasemonkey. My dad, Willie Nelson (yes, boys and girls, I am Willie Nelson's son), owned a used car lot, the Decatur Auto Exchange, during my pre-teen and early teenage years. There were always plenty of cars in need of all kinds of minor, and sometimes major, work to put them in working order and get them ready for resale that I could have learned on. My dad even had people who worked for him who would have gladly taken me under their wing, allowed me to be their apprentice and learn the ins and outs of rebuilding a carburetor or setting the timing of a motor. A lot of kids of that era, the early and mid 1950s, would have given almost anything to change places with me and take advantage of the unique opportunity I had. But me? As has all too often been the case with me, when opportunity was there pounding on my front door, I wasn't interested in letting it in. I had no curiosity at all about cars, the mechanics of what makes them work, nor any interest in getting my hands dirty or greasy. Though he never expressed any unhappiness to me about that choice, I can't help thinking my dad must have felt at least some disappointment that I didn't show any interest in something he seemed to care so much about. And I can't help but wonder how different my life and, probably not coincidentally, our relationship might have been if I had.

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Adam Pash, the person who writes Lifehacker's excellent tips section, has just posted «Seven New Year's Resolutions for your PC» that I think contains some terrific advice. It is written with both the Mac and the Windows PC in mind, and he adds that «most of the required software is freeware, so all you need to follow any of these tips is a little bit of time and resolve.» Although I've just finished reading this article, I plan to explore each of the programs he recommends and, where I don't already have a system in place to do what he recommends, experiment with his suggested resources.

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When you want to show someone something on the Internet, you must tell them where it is located, just as you might refer them to the street address of a particularly attractive house that you noticed for sale in your home town. On the Internet the address you'd give them is referred to as the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, which is technically a sub-set of the URI, or Uniform Resource Identifier, but for the purposes of this discussion I'll simply refer to the URL when talking about an address on the Internet to which you might want to direct your hypothetical friend.

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As audio, video, and digital picture files have grown in size, the problem of how to share them with others has become more of an issue.  ISPs and Email systems like Gmail impose a limitation on the size of file attachments, which is usually in the neighborhood of 10 MB.  It is quite easy to exceed that limit with the files most of us are now creating.

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I see that Mike has already added the description of the agenda for the November Knoxbloggers meeting. Good for you, Mike. It looks like it might be an interesting meeting, because it deals with almost everyone's favorite subject -- making money. Check it out, and come and join us if you can. It could prove to be 2 hours well spent.

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In the interest of having this page load more quickly, I have removed the embedded video from this page and am choosing to point to it through this link instead. It is a video that explains about what Creative Commons is and how choosing to grant a Creative Commons license «refines» your rights rather than relinquishes them. I should add that, at least for me, viewing the video at this link works better than it did when the video was embedded here on my site, as there are no pauses in the streaming.

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I know many people are fond of waxing nostalgic about the joys of curling up with a good book and how much better that is than trying to read something on a computer monitor.  And to a degree I can appreciate that perspective.  Because you can take the book to bed and read it there or on a train or plane while traveling and because there is a certain joy in the feel of just turning the pages, staring at a CRT or an LCD screen isn't nearly as convenient and that represents something of a hurdle that one must overcome to see any benefits to reading something online.  But as I've done it more, I've now actually come to prefer curling up with a good CRT to read many things.  Why?  Well, that's what I want to talk about in this post for a moment.

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I am almost embarrassed to admit that I have only today discovered this technique, but I must swallow my pride and state what to everyone else may be obvious.

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The social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, turned three years old yesterday.

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