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Google Wave Review

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Oct 13 2009

I’ll keep this short. These past couple days I’ve been experimenting with Google Wave, Google’s solution to e-mail “chat”, the back-and-forth asymmetrical use of e-mail as a means of realtime communication and collaboration between multiple recipients.

It’s a good idea, and it essentially mirrors the functionality of a forum, albeit a high tech forum with lots more capabilities.

Although Google Wave maintains the typical Google simplicity of its application here, I feel as though the people this might benefit most will be the least likely to use it.

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Why Yahoo Mail is Still an Epic Catastrophe

31 Comments | This entry was posted on Jan 03 2009

Someone in my family, with good intentions I’m sure, decided to give my dear grandmother a free Yahoo Mail account to replace her digit-ridden CompuServe e-mail address. I felt compelled to write this because as I was over at her house, she informed me that she hadn’t touched the computer in two weeks and for me to “clean out the junk.” I went ahead and logged into her e-mail and was shocked to see that her inbox had well over 2,000 messages! I knew that my grandmother likely didn’t have more than 10 or 20 real messages in there, but thanks to Yahoo’s brilliant SPAM detecting algorithm, I’d never know. I began sifting through the messages, deleting 25 at a time. After the tenth or eleventh page, I grew weary of looking at all of the SPAM that Yahoo failed to capture and decided enough was enough. Grandma was gettin’ Gmail (spam chart).

Below is a screenshot of my Grandmother’s old computer, a Windows98 system running Internet Explorer 5. Click to see the full sized screenshot. Evidently, Yahoo thinks that only 75 out of the 2,000+ messages are SPAM.

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Removing Internet Advertising

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Sep 28 2008

This article is from 2008 and is pretty much obsolete. Google Chrome now has AdBlock; the Filterset.G Updater is no longer necessary, and IE9 may have some support for ad blocking. So, there is no longer a need to do the awkward workaround that I have outlined below for Chrome and AdBlock Plus for Firefox works fine just by itself.

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There are a few things about Windows and the Internet that I cannot do without. Writing about them, however, is something I rarely do. People and businesses rely tremendously on Internet advertising, without it the Internet likely wouldn’t be as diverse and free in many ways as it is today. Advertising revenue enables even the smallest of site owners to generate revenue for otherwise very expensive websites. Moreover, there are plenty of things online that wouldn’t be feasible at all without Internet advertising.

In the 90’s, when animated flashy banners were more common, I became very accustomed to advertising and was generally able to ignore it. Over the years, ads started appearing in different forms. Pop-ups, pop-unders, square ads, flash ads, interstitial…and a whole, whole lot more. For me, however, this wasn’t a problem until the ads started appearing close to the text which I was reading.

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