Alex's Journal

I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but it appears to me that Hillary Clinton is ruining any chance the Democratic party has against the Republicans. The Democrats really should have this election in the bag due to Bush’s sharp decline in popularity, however, with all of this internal fighting between Hillary and Obama, that may not happen — or at very least, it’s not going to be as easy as it really should be.

When it comes to the final election in November, I hope the Democrats win because I really dislike McCain and would be quite scared if he were to be elected, but I refuse to vote for Hillary.

[digg=http://digg.com/tech_news/ISPs_Injecting_Websites_with_Ads]This kind of infuriates me:

“Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site.” (Source: Slashdot)

ISPs should not have any right to alter webpage content whatsoever, much less inject ads into websites that normally don’t contain any ads. That’s especially if you’re paying for their service in the first place.

It seems to me that that should be considered spamming or even vandalizing. As a web developer, the kinds of websites I work on generally don’t have any sort of ads on theem. I don’t want my visitors to have to see ads if I haven’t originally intended the website to have ads.

You can read the full and longer article at PC World.

I know everyone is going to call me crazy, but I’ve started yet another blog. This one is called “History Rhymes” and focuses on 19th century postbellum American history. I chose to start this blog because I am currently studying American history at my university as an undergraduate and will hopefully soon start at a graduate level. My studies are going to really focus on the post-Civil War settlement of the American west, the Indian Wars, etc.

Anyway, I will be using History Rhymes as a place to vent some of my findings and share them with everyone.

You can find the new blog here: http://historyrhymes.wordpress.com.

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in my computer habits as of the past few months. Slowly but surely I seem to find myself more and more in the “cloud” – that is using more and more online applications as opposed to offline applications.

I think the first thing to go was the RSS reader. I used to use NetWireNews for Mac OS X, but I eventually gave that up for Google Reader. The next application I gave up was my e-mail application. I used to use Mail that comes with Mac OS X, but eventually I stopped using it all together when Gmail (also called Google Mail) added support to check POP3 accounts on top of its own mail service. Gmail had already long had the ability to send mail disguised as other e-mail addresses, but now I could also check other mail accounts.

I’m not sure I’m ready to give up Word or Pages just quite yet. Online replacements such as Google Docs are just not quite there yet; not to mention whether or not I trust Google or which host company with my private documents. We’ll see in time though.

A couple of days ago I got an notification that there was an update to the software I normally use for keeping track of all of my various blogs and my journals. The software is called Journler. I have to admit that I really like the software, but with the update came a new license saying that it was becoming shareware. It used to be something they called donationware which is where a user can choose to donate if they like the software.
I donated some money because I really liked the software, but according to the new license, I will have to buy the program if I want to continue using it despite having already donated the same amount the program will cost me ($40). I don’t know about you, but for me that was enough for me to uninstall the program and start using Word and a system of folders in my Documents folder as my new journal/blog organizing system.
As such, I have removed Journler from my Mac Software list. I’m quite disappointed because I really liked the program, but I will no longer be using it.