As explained previously, I have Verizon FiOS for my Internet service, and I’m quite happy with it compared to Comcast, which I still have for cable TV. But now I can get FiOS TV. The announcement for my town came out last week, following approval by the board selectmen (no mayor, have we). Is it time to cut the Comcast coax?
I’ve decided to stop using embedded video and audio. Everybody moans. Awwwww….
Sorry, but the problem with it is the setup phase, which can be seen in the status bar message, “Connecting to media.” When there are several of these on the same page, the load time takes too long, especially if the hosting service is busy. The server is in Phoenix, by the way.
From now on what I’ll do for video is take a screen shot and make it a link to the file. The videos will appear in their original size, 320×240 pixels, and you’ll have to use your media player to make them bigger. For audio I’ll try to find a picture to use for the link, but failing that there will instead be a text link.
Here’s another boring screen shot of a technical-related thing. Sorry! Will get back to fun stuff in the next post.
If you don’t know what the “Feeds” on the right do, this is how they appear in my Yahoo! home page. I’m extremely sensitive to how daunting all of this new technology is to the vast majority of people, but to me it is neat, although frequently as frustrating as it is to anybody else.
Yay. The $20 rebate for my 2GB flash drive is finally here, so the final cost is $50. This takes just a teeny, tiny bit of the sting out of the $1100 it cost to put a catalytic converter and oxygen sensor in my ’98 Accord.
The new SanDisk drives include a system called U3, which is one of several competing systems for loading applications off of flash memory. At first I was wary of it, but I’ve decided my concerns were unfounded and now I’m excited about its potential.
Here’s a screen shot of the U3 Launchpad, with my selection of applications. The Filezilla file transfer program is very good, and I use it to push big files up to this blog. And I really like the design of the Essential Personal Information Manager. It has a great little graphical HTML editor.
I first read about The Net in December, 1972, as I’ll explain later. I never had any interest in CompuServe or AOL, or any online service that wasn’t The Internet. The original graphical Web browser was Mosaic 0.9, released in October, 1993. I read about it in the December ’93 issue of PC Magazine. I’d been looking for an Internet service with a local phone number, intending to open a UNIX Shell account. The possibilities of going graphical made me feel I had to get moving, so in January, 1994 I went online with The Internet Access Company, using a 40 MHz 386 PC and an Intel modem running at 14.4 Kbps. TIAC was a very good service, and it was later bought by Earthlink.
It was no easy task getting Mosaic going! For starters, Trumpet Winsock was the only reasonably priced Internet Protocol software that was available for home use, and downloading it with Xmodem and getting it working on Windows 3.11 took some effort, as well as $25 US sent to its author, Peter Tattam, in Australia. There was no PayPal in those days, so some ISP’s, including TIAC, took care of forwarding the money. Then Mosaic itself had to be downloaded, etc.
The first Web page I ever saw was Paramount Studio’s Star Trek homepage. After doing some text-based browsing in UNIX Shell with a program called Lynx, I immediately “got” the graphical Web experience. It was one of those memorable, “ah ha, of course” moments, that made me laugh out loud. Sort of like the first time I saw a cassette deck with auto search and reverse. 😉
I promised myself to get off of dialup as soon as I could, and that turned out to be August, 1998, after we sold our first house and bought this place. While my physical broadband connection never changed, the service providers sure did! I started with Road Runner → then MediaOne → moved to ATT Broadband → and ended with Comcast.
At work I was known to mutter about the need to rewire America with fiber optic cable, and I vowed to get it as soon as it was available. Last March, three weeks after seeing the Verizon truck on the street with spools of fiber optic cable, I ordered FiOS. Our phone service is also on FiOS. With the old copper wires the telephone crackled when it rained, even after Verizon swapped wire pairs in the buried pipe, so we were glad to be rid of it.
The title of this post is a reference to a past item. Here is an example of what I use to embed the videos that I make. I started out with a much longer command, with lots of tags and options specified, but it did nothing more than this does, so I trimmed out all of the fat!
