Rob Knight » Links

Keith Olbermann nails it.

Rob — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:26:35 +0000

For the past 4 and a half years, I have dreamed of the perfect blog post. I have started it and stopped it in my head over and over and over again. It is the post in which I eloquently, emotionally and concisely convey my feelings about the way George W. Bush has led this country to its darkest hour. In that blog post, I express just how distraught I have been at times, wondering why our president professes to love America so much while he tears it to pieces. The well-worded blog post would expose Mr. Bush as the lying cheater he is; and why America — indeed the world — no longer considers him worth the effort of common respect. He is, without any doubt, the worst president this country has ever seen, and the most embarrassing leader a country of our greatness has ever had to endure. I hoped to capture that in written word here.

Last night, Keith Olbermann delivered the monologue I had hoped to write. I can finally point people to something that truly expresses how I feel about this president.

Thank you, sir.

Mashing Things Together

Rob — Fri, 04 May 2007 09:09:59 +0000

One thing I love about the internet is how much we, the users, own it. We own the internet. Case in point:

Last Friday I was thinking about how I haven’t been out surfing in quite awhile. I went to my go-to site for local surf conditions and found it in a state of disarray. Frankly, it feels stale now. It used to be a wealth of great info and it felt fresh. It was well taken care of at one point. Now it just sits there…getting old and looking older.

What is a web developer to do when a formerly informative site is no longer fun to visit? I realized that a lot of their information was coming from outside sources. Their tide chart was coming from the Scripps Institute. And several other informative parts of the site were publicly available elsewhere on the web. So I took the URLs of that info and made my own surf conditions page:

http://robknight.net/tides

It has everything I want to know about local surf conditions and I don’t have to go elsewhere and see an old, stale site. I don’t own this information, but now I’ve taken ownership of how I get it and I present it in a way that suits my needs. Nice!

Second case in point: would you like to watch me work today? Sound like fun? No, I know it doesn’t. But you can. ustream.tv lets you set up and stream a live video feed on the internet. Before ustream, delivering streaming video was the kind of difficult voodoo that you needed a PhD in quantum mechanics to pull off. And my PhD is in collecting tech gadgets, so I was out of luck. Now I can just do it. And…I can put my streaming video feed wherever the hell I want:

http://robknight.net/live (Watch 10am – 2pm, 04 May 2007)

The webcam world, formerly only for women of questionable judgement and cat’s litterboxes, is now available for anyone with a camera. And you know what? It’s as free as a slice of turkey sausage in a Dixie cup at Trader Joe’s.

We own the internet. Go forth and create!

Cowardice on display

Rob — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 06:29:24 +0000

Here it is folks, the only political news you need to read all week:

We now know that Gonzales, McNulty and Moschella each lied to Congress. We know that the purge was a plan that began at the White House — and it was overseen by two of President Bush’s closest lieutenants in Washington — Miers and Gonzales. Sampson is the second resignation. There will certainly be more.

Despicable human beings. Cowardly protecting their own interests at the expense of our Democracy.