Category: My Life

Heading to WWW2007

Tomorrow, I leave for the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007) in Banff, Alberta, Canada. I’m excited.

As I mentioned before, I’m presenting a paper at the “MobEA V – Mobile Web in the Developing World” workshop. After that, I’ll be at the WWW2007 conference, going to sessions for 2 days.

I’m going to take a lot of pictures and probably do a lot of live blogging. Stay tuned…

Any of you all going to Banff? Wanna meet up?

I hear Banff is gorgeous. Any good micro-breweries? It’d be cool to get a bunch of people together and go get beers. Drop me a comment.

Corecomm Web Hosting Is Dreadfully Slow On Server Updates

I’ve been using Corecomm Web Hosting, for a long long time. (since it was Voyager Web Hosting) Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much longer my patronage of their service is going to last.

I’m trying to install a new instance of the latest version of WordPress and it won’t work. Corecomm still has MySQL version 3.X loaded on their servers. The latest version of WordPress requires MySQL 4.0 or later.

So today, I called Corecomm asking if they could update the server that I’m on. They said it could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months before I got my update.

Some of the functionality and presentation I want to implement requires the latest version of WordPress.

The question I have is do I want to wait for the dreadfully slow Corecomm Web Hosting to update their servers or should I start the migration to someone else?

MySQL 4.0 has been out for a while hasn’t it? Isn’t it crazy that they’re just starting to update and roll out new servers now?

I think we deserve better service.

My WWW2007 Workshop Paper Posted

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here yet but I’m going to presenting a paper, “Library of Congress Outreach to the Developing World: The World Digital Library Initiative (PDF),” at the workshop “MobEA V – Mobile Web in the Developing World,” on May 8th, 2007, which is being held in conjunction with the WWW2007 conference.

Check out the paper and let me know what you think.

Are you going to WWW2007? I’d love to meet up with some cool Web folks.

At Computers in Libraries Conference This Morning

Friends, I’m going to be at the Computers in Libraries Conference, in Arlington, VA, this morning. I’m not speaking or anything but just coming to check out the action. A friend of mine was able to score me a ticket. If you’re at the conference too, drop me a line. Maybe I’ll live blog a session or two… we shall see.

RIT Highly Ranked (for media piracy)

I just read Bob Finnerty‘s latest blog post, “Movie lovers beware: Hollywood is watching RIT.” Apparently, students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) are some of the biggest pirates of movies, according to the MPAA. I wasn’t surprised.

I got my undergraduate degree at RIT. I have to say there is a culture of media piracy. Its just what was done. If you’re with a bunch of your friends and nothing is good on TV, someone will say, “wanna download a movie?”

When I was a freshmen, media piracy had just become to the cool thing to do. We had an internal network that would have around 20 terabytes of data on it at any given time. You could get any song you could imagine. Movies and video games would come out on our network months before they were released to the public.

By my sophomore and junior years of college, my friends at RIT started getting sued by the MPAA and the RIAA. If you heard a knock on your door and there were two guys there in suits, it probably wasn’t the Mormons. It was Campus Safety there to serve you with the lawsuit papers. I quickly gave up downloading for good and opted to use the Apple iTunes Store.

At RIT, there is and always has been a plethora of free pirated media at anyone’s finger tips. How can you engineer an incentive so that the piracy doesn’t take place?

RIT tried to offer a discount to a paid music service but no one really used it. I kind of wondered what they were thinking when they instituted this service.

The RIAA and MPAA could sue more students. RIT could pursue all the pirates. I still don’t think it would matter. There would still be media piracy.

I don’t pirate media because, well its wrong. Also… the convenience that iTunes provides (versus downloading illegally) is worth the money that I pay for music on iTunes.

What can RIT due to cut down the piracy? They’d have to make it easier and more convenient to get legal legitimate media then to get the pirated media but when you have students with little to no budget for fun (except for beer) that’d be hard to do.

A New Day and A New Blog

Over the last few months I have been growing into a new chapter of my life, in a new part of the USA, and in a new job. To commemorate this new chapter in my life, I figured it’s time to start a new blog.

For those of you who are regular readers of my blog Confessions of an Undercover Geek, you may have noticed that I haven’t written for a while. I have been contemplating the idea of doing something new. Undercover Geek has served me well but I have decided to retire it.

I really love blogging as a medium for communication and collaboration. It has helped me get to amazing places. As I work to make my “ding in the universe,” this is where I will express my thoughts and flex my brain.

I will be writing about topics like various emerging technologies (mobile, Second Life, online video), the World Wide Web, community, collaboration, communication, and a bit about my life. I may do some interviews with other thought leaders. I may even dabble in audio or video podcasting.

As always, my blogging is a project of the communications consultancy MyCapitalWeb.com LLC.

What’s with the name “Oatmeal Stout”? It has no rhyme or reason. I was just looking for a random name that would stick in people’s heads. I would have to say that Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout is one of my favorite beers.