Aaron Ewer

Back in the early days of the internet, it was an adventure finding email providers and deciding which email to use. Sometimes you would have two or three emails from different providers. I lost a couple of good ones, for various reasons, but usually because if you changed your internet service provider you would lose the associated email address.

Now every seems to be getting blogs and personal web sites. Although the kids or interested in the social networking sites, the adults seem more interested in something a little more sophisticated and don’t seem to mind paying a small reasonable fee for hosting services. There are a lot of affordable hosting services, and each one has different features or advantages.

To find your way through the maze of web hosting services, I found a site that reviews and rates the different sites. They have a list of the top hosting sites, in a chart format that shows different rates and features. A nice added touch is that site reviews and that users can add their own ratings. I like the way the users themselves can write the web hosting rating, not a paid promotional item. This gives you a little better insight into the good and the bad.

Some of the players take advantage of lobby chat to goof around and use keyboard characters to create little pictures, such as Kilroy faces and secret messages.

The easy one I used to make was about coffee. If at a table with good friends, late at night of first thing in the morning, I would “offer” to bring everyone a cup of coffee and deliver/illustrate it by typing this into the chat line:

(_D

I’ve always liked maps and I love Google Maps. I even learned how to use Google Earth and love the way you can tilt and rotate the satellite version to get a different perspective on the locations.

There have been a lot of interactive maps developed that are based on Google Earth, which must be very gratifying to the people at Google who have been developing and working on this really cool feature. Some of the west coast newspapers have created maps of the California fires and making clickable information balloons to give details of each fire, such as acreage affected, percent contained, and links to photos. There are also earthquake maps and user generated multi-location maps of a variety of topics, such as all the NASCAR tracks, the most popular theme parks, and other cools things.

Finished the web site for the lawyers radio show, called “Legally Speaking,” and it’s up!

That was quite the process. I met with each attorney in his own office to write the biography and copy. Then I had a photo shoot of them during a live show. I just took my pocket digital camera, no extra lights, and shot about 100 photos - some posed and some candids.

I think it turned out great. And now I listen to the show as much as I can on Saturday nights, and I’ve even called in a few times to pose questions for my microphone shy friends.

I was reading about the new Netflix Player by Roku that will stream movies on demand to your TV. This is a little black box that sells for $100 and then you pay a subscription fee to Netflix instead of having to get DVDs delivered by mail. Great idea! This is perfect for the generation who has come to expect everything delivered on demand.

A little trivia note: the guy who invented this little black box and is the founder of Roku, Anthony Wood, is the same guy who invented the personal video recorder. So it’s pretty cool to see that someone who embraces technology and can find a way to make a practical device as an inventor has a real shot at  the American dream and  making a good living from his inventions. Way to go, Wood!