I think it was something like seven years ago or so now that Google Reader was axed by its parent company and those of us who use RSS feeds to follow blogs and news sites were sent out in search of a new aggregator.

A coworker, who is a fellow parent and part-time teacher like me, shared this video. I am, in turn, sharing it with you. It's powerful. And heartbreaking. 

Remember when MySpace was the shit? Everyone wanted a piece of it and so many were on it and did everything within their power to make their personal homepage look like the worst possible piece of HTML garbage?

How many times have you been seduced by a bot? Anybody who currently is or has ever been part of a social media network knows what I’m talking about here.

So you remember that issue I mentioned I've been having with comments disappearing from my site as reported to me by one of you? I reported it to Typepad like I said I would and they got back to me pretty quickly.

Back in January, Kevin Spencer reported to me that the comment form for my blog wouldn't render on his mobile device. He couldn't even leave a comment.

I need your opinion.

Take a look at the links under my headshot in the right column (bottom of the page if you're looking at this on mobile)...

Nathan is a YouTube junkie. How he discovered it, I'm not sure. But he's there and he's really good at navigating around and finding something to watch.

Given the plethora of free entertainment that's been made available during this pandemic, it's shocking how little of it I've taken part in. Even the live music that everyone and their mother is streaming. 

I know most of you have, at the very least, heard of the band Rage Against the Machine. They were a heavy metal/rap-rock band that started in the early 1990s and are very well known for their highly politicized songwriting. They are, IMHO, the guitar-driven equivalent of my beloved Public Enemy, although Megadeth is up there as well.

Currently, Nathan’s iPad and all his apps are registered in my name. At first, the reason for this was simplicity. It was just so much easier to get everything signed up and initialized by not creating new accounts from scratch.

Has Twitter really existed so long that I could possibly be celebrating my 13th anniversary on the platform? 

I’m one step closer to actually learning that TikTok dance and crossing another square off my social distancing bingo card. Yup, I actually signed up for a TikTok account.

5,000 what exactly?

For a couple years now, a buddy has been telling me about Humble Bundle, a group that bundles together video games and sells them at tiered pricing that is a huge discount over buying them new. Each tier has a minimum spend and includes additional games the more you pay.

For a couple years now, I’ve been touting this web service called IFTTT (IF This, Then This) and how I use it to run my Yondu On Terra blog.

Yes! Synths! As in “short for synthesizers.” Very expensive electronic music-making equipment but in iOS app format. 

I got an email from AT&T asking me to take a customer satisfaction survey on the AT&T TV Now streaming service. 

Okay, so as a general rule, this week sucked. But we did get at least a little good news...

This is the subject line of an email I got from Nest today...

Remember the good ol’ days of Vine, the six-second looping video service? Those were fun times. I enjoyed the heck out of that app.

Much like the previous Draft post, this is one where I apparently wrote the Totally Unrelated Aside (TUA) before the main post without the benefit of knowing whether or not they're truly (un)related. But this is a topic that does bother me to this day. And I still feel the same way as posted below. Oh, and this dates back to 2009. I don't have the original date as I kinda screwed up the posting of this. Oh well.

Before I get into this post, I need to introduce you all to Dr. David Gunkel. He is an author and professor at Northern Illinois University, my alma mater. He was also the man who taught me coding and was part of my graduate thesis committee. He's also very heavy into artificial intelligence and robotics.

Apparently, for this draft post I re-discovered, I had written the Totally Unrelated Aside (TUA) before I wrote the actual post. How would I have had any idea how (un)related they were going to be if I never wrote the main post? I'm weird.

Having access to multiple unlimited libraries of movies and TV shows and music and whatever else streaming down to whatever device you prefer is really nice, indeed.

If you looked at the blue thing on the Walkman in the picture below, what would be your first thought as to its use?

I started sifting through my posts in Typepad and found that I had more than a dozen unpublished posts from the last 11 years. I'm not sure why I never used them, but I didn't. So I'm going to, on occasion, grab one and publish it unedited just to see how it goes over. That cool? I may add a photo or image of some sort because I try to make sure all posts have an image for the sake of making RSS aggregation prettier, but otherwise. I'm starting with one that I drafted back on September 8, 2008, at 6:55:50 p.m., at least according to the timestamp. 

In an attempt to fend off buying a new iPhone for a while longer as I'm not at all impressed by any of the new features enough to go all spendy spendy, I'm going to take my iPhone 7+ in for some work tomorrow on the one thing about it that's been bugging me... that I cannot reliably charge it because the charging port is FUBAR. 

Usually if I want to post a video on my blog, I wait until I have several and can set up a Snippet sort of post highlighting them all in one fell swoop. 

Remember the days of ye olde Blogroll? That master list of fellow bloggers' sites that we maintained on our sites so we not only had a one-stop recommendation shop for things we think make for great reads, but it also served as a type of bookmark list? They were great. 

In 1996 or 97, I was introduced to Adobe Photoshop for the first time and it was life changing. Since that time, I've had a copy of some version of Photoshop on nearly every work or personal computer I've possessed. 

How many of you have registered domains on the World Wide Web? If yes, how many registered domains do you have? Have you had others in the past and gotten rid of them? Do you use all the domains you have registered? Do you register domains for ideas you have whether you are even close to ready to actually launch any content?

It kinda blew my mind to realize that I’m approaching the one year anniversary of me being an official book reviewer for Geeks of Doom. Well, one year since my first review posted on August 8, which means that I started reading for them a couple weeks before that. 

I get a lot of people asking why I choose Spotify over other services like Pandora or Apple Music. I'm not going to focus on the negatives of the other services and will, instead, focus on one of the biggest positives of my chosen streaming music service... It gets me!

Katie and I desperately want to extend the wifi signal in our house. It just doesn't reach as well, say, upstairs in our bedroom as we'd like. It was fine before. But now that we're relying 100% on streaming for our TV habits, we need a better one to avoid buffering and display artifacting and the like.