Colin Charles Agenda

“Its like a magazine. (Evan Williams) is getting you guys to do all the work. Philip Kaplan once told me that the best kind of Internet company is one where everyone else does the content, you just sit there and collect the money.” – Leo Laporte on Medium.

Makes you think a lot about Twitter. Facebook. Medium. Instagram. You’re creating the content. Someone else is making money out of it. No one seems to care. It’s time to diet.

Quote from This Week in Google #180.

As someone that spends a lot of time in front of a keyboard, many get a kick out of the fact that I always have a notebook with me (usually a moleskine or field notes of some sort) and a battered up montblanc pen.

I did learn to write cursive back when I was in junior school, but it never lasted and my scrawl basically took over and this is what I write with till today. Yet I write a whole smattering of things from TODO lists to meeting notes. Yes, I am one of those people who go into a meeting room not to tap on a keyboard or touch a tablet’s virtual keyboard – I usually write long form notes recording all sorts of information, which I then review later. I’m no Richard Branson, but you can be assured I always have a notebook & pen handy. (additional reading: Pocket Notebook of 20 Famous Men, What’s in Richard Branson’s notebook?)

Today’s FT Weekend had a column by Gillian Tett: Handwriting: a joined-up case (read it!). The takeaway quote from that: “It is keyboards that really matter now in the global economy, not penmanship”. It seems teachers are suggesting that its better to learn keyboard-skills over writing. 

There’s much wrong with this. For one, default keyboards are QWERTY which exist to slow you down (compared to DVORAK layouts) during the times of typewriters. Yes, that’s how old keyboards are – they’ve not changed since the days of the typewriter.

Writing is a life skill. You don’t always have a keyboard/touch keyboard all the time.

I however do feel that we’re in yet another midst of a digital native vs digital immigrant. I myself might be a digital immigrant compared to kids of today. Generations are made every 10 years (at minimum in this fast paced tech world), in my opinion (though Wikipedia suggests its a minimum of 20 years). Will we see the future forget to write? How much will be lost to digital rot (remember 5 1/4 disks? 3 1/2 floppies? Older hard disks, etc.)?

I aim to create in 2013. Many people do #365, a photo of the day, etc. I’m going to attach it to a daily blog post and not talk too much about the photo, unless I want to :-)

I tend to upload photos to Instagram on a daily basis. It naturally gets synced to my Flickr photo page too.

Can I post photos daily? Sometimes, I am stuck in a tin can (aka a plane) and its tough. Can I blog daily? I doubt I will have something to say or muse about, but I plan to write more and more. I may play catch up (like I did over the weekend).

All in, let’s see how long this journey lasts!

Photo: Taken after reaching back home to Malaysia after a two-week vacation in Europe. That’s some prawn mee & a Tiger beer. It felt good.

i’ve made numerous complaints, and i’ve finally decided to give up on phpwebhosting where i’ve been hosting the www components of bytebot.net for many years. why? very high load averages which lead to there being errors establishing connection to the databases. heck, httpd can’t push content either (static). it can occur when i post a new blog post. it can occur when someone else does so. its woefully annoying, and this is a goodbye to shared hosting with them.

machines with 1gb of ram, 2gb of swap, 4 cores Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz.

[byte@chop byte]$ uptime
12:32:52 up 46 days, 14:23, 1 user, load average: 41.76, 15.03, 5.88

when all is said and done, this was just $10/month. 

so where am i going? dreamhost. it is still shared hosting, but back in 2010 i signed up for a free account that gave me unlimited space. load averages seem to be a lot more sensible and there’s terabytes of storage space for users. pingdom suggests less than 4 minutes downtime in the last month which i consider acceptable.

this is also a great month to do it – i’ve been blogging with wordpress since january 2004 and its been at phpwebhosting ever since. farewell old host.

Having a few long journeys, I got to catch up with the latest Hollywood had to offer.

1. Papadopoulos & Sons – show about an entrepreneur who goes thru trials & tribulations, then learns whats important in life
2. How I Spent My Summer Vacation (aka Get the Gringo) – you won’t think much from the title, but this Mel Gibson show isn’t half bad. I don’t recommend going out of your way to watch it, but it’s a good way to pass time surely. Action, murder, revenge, love, and crime are all covered here 
3. Arbitrage– Richard Gere stars, also about an intensely wealthy entrepreneur, about to sell his company, cover up his problems, while having an affair. There are several themes & plots here, so you’ll enjoy it overall 
4. The Words – about a writer who placed his name on his best work, only to find out that he has to live with such a secret. Turns out its a lot harder than expected.

I notice that the plotlines in the last two movies seem to end with a bit of a cliffhanger. Leaves the watcher to understand or continue thinking about what might have been. Unlikely that you’ll see a part two, but maybe that’s how modern movies tend to end. 

Upon arriving home, I did turn on cable and caught Senna. If you like the Formula One (F1), you surely know whom Ayrton Senna was. You probably also know that Senna was the last F1 driver to die while racing. It is an awesome show and I highly recommend all to watch it. 

I’ve been writing this blog here since 2004 and since then its been having a default copyright stance – i.e. I own it. I’ve been supporting the use of Creative Commons licensing on many of my works since 2004 (probably earlier, but with 2004 I am firm with the bytebot.net training materials).

Today I made sure that this blog, is also licensed under the Creative Commons. I’ve always liked the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license which is what is applied here. Its worth noting that my other body of work, photographs on Flickr have always been licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

Why something different for photos? I’d rather you use it as a whole instead of a mashup and if you were mashing it up, ask me for it. For text, if you want to build on top of my research/writings/works, feel free to, but just share it alike.

As always, contact me if you want it in something other than a share-alike/no-derivative license.

Surprised it took me so long to make sure this body of work is licensed under the Creative Commons!