Strawberries in New Jersey

Today was a nice day: warm, bright blue skies and calm winds. What better thing to do than to spend the day out in a field picking berries?

We took the train out to New Brunswick, then rode with our friend out to Snyder's Farm. Today was the last day to pick strawberries, so the first field was pretty picked over. We looked and looked for some good berries, but most of them looked a bit like this:

Sad strawberry

Eventually, someone in our group noticed there was a second strawberry field. This field had some strawberries which looked a bit more …

A Few Weeks with ProtonMail

Back on Memorial Day, I finally took the plunge and moved my email hosting to ProtonMail. I signed up for the professional tier for 75€ per year. I also moved DNS hosting for MGZI.NET over to AWS Route 53.

I have been slowly weaning myself off of various Google service. Ever since Google killed off Google Reader, the writing has been on the wall for most of the fun Google projects. Of all the services that Google provides, Maps and GMail have been the hardest to get rid of.

GMail is a genuinely useful service. Prior to this, I …

A Brief History of Email

As a digital native, I have spent most of my life connected to the internet in one way or another. One of the consequences of this is the fact that I have been using email for several decades.

I got my first Internet-accessible address from an Excalibur BBS called Cursors. It long since offline, but the basic procedure was to connect via one Excalibur BBS, then open a WinSock connection to another BBS (with a second instance of the Excalibur client software). Then you could read your email. This wasn't very convenient, and I didn't end up using it very …

New Host

The Home of AlexDW now has a new web host: Amazon S3. I had a number of problems with my old host, including the dreaded Database Error. Because of said Database Error, I'm stuck recovering data using the friendly Internet Archive. Remember to backup your data, kiddos!

I've also switched my email over to ProtonMail at the same time. This should hopefully reduce the number of mail delivery errors my GMail forwarding setup created.

Legacy of Your-Site

Error establishing a database connection

(That's pretty much all this site would output while it was hosted at Your-Site for the last few years.)

For the Children

As we head into the Winter, here are a few thoughts for the future. The road for us has been long, and the winters have been unforgiving. Our elders have passed before us again and again, but we have endured. Do not forget, however, that we will see the spring once again.

Think of our ancestors, and be proud. Think of our children, and be strong.

If the book has been written for us, do not worry. Look into the eyes of the children, the newborns, and remember that the world belongs to them now. Remember that even if everything …

New MP3 Player

I got a new MP3 player yesterday, a Creative Zen V+. it was less than $100, so all is well. ";-)" I had to hike up to the Alewife Staples to get it, as the store I went to in Harvard Square was completely out. It can supposedly play videos, but so far the results have been less than inspiring. It played none of my videos, and its "pack-in" videos do not play on my computer. (What kind of codecs does it use?) Oh well… at least now I don't have any excuses not to continue listening to my language learning …

LiveJournal Account Back Online

My here-to-fore mostly unused LiveJournal account is has now been re-activated. I had previously created this account so that I could take part in the forum for the Vampires game. (Boy, that brings back memories!) With any luck, everything I post here will get mirrored there… but I somehow doubt it. The LJ plug-in for Serendipity is a little flaky. (Won't this look stupid when it is read at LJ? Oh well.)

Mood? Who cares!?!

Party Down, Mate

I'm currently attending a party in downtown Boston, held by my company to honor a member of our team who is moving on. The food here is very different, but quite good. The view, however, has to be seen to be believed. I'm up on the 42nd floor (by all accounts,) and can see most of the west side of Boston and part of south east Cambridge. It is quite a beautiful view; recommended for all who can do it.

Settling In

I'm finally getting settled in to my new place here in Medford. We've been doing some gardening, some grilling, and many other fun activities. Our cable internet service is working here, but it took quite a bit of pain. Apparently, Comcast only wants you to connect a single computer running Windows to their service. Thankfully, I had a computer lying around that happened to have Windows 2000 on it. I got the service set up, and then cloned that computer's MAC address with the wireless router. (Of course, the wireless router in question was ###'s from-the-trash router. It has since …

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