With the exception of grocery ads, I usually don’t get store flyers in the mail – except during the week of Black Friday. Leafing through this year’s ads, I’m struck by the sheer number – and visual prominence – of “smart” TVs, smart phones, tablets, Orwellian listening stations from Google and Amazon, and other electronic […]
My old buddy Mark Miller passed away unexpectedly a year ago today. I’d known Mark since around 1989. Apart from being in the same small group for several years, we didn’t hang out a whole lot socially, but he was one of my longest-running friends from my years living in Lincoln. A fairly hard-core introvert […]
An old scanned photo of the billboard atop the LT&T warehouse building at 21st & Capital Parkway, probably late 1950s…
My gut tells me that cyber-warfare, and hacking into major Internet service platforms, is going to increase in the coming years. Facebook, Yahoo, Dropbox, and Evernote – among others – have already been hacked and had user information stolen at least once. I doubt that any platform is immune. I already use unique passwords on […]
Several years ago I completed a masters degree in Communication Studies, with the focus on communication & culture, and how technology was affecting the ways we communicate. The effects of technology on the culture are never neutral, and one can usually find both positive and negative consequences from pretty much any technology. Computer-mediated communications technologies […]
In 1957, journalist Edward R. Murrow referred to television as the “opiate of the people”. It’s safe to say that in the last 5 years, social media has decisively replaced television on the opiate throne. Given the sheer amount of attention we give to it, the number of times we check our devices throughout the […]
Why are people now so intent on denigrating the idea of interracial families? Insistence on some sort of racial purity, or on the inherent inability for parents of one race to race children of another is, by definition, racism. David French and his wife have been pilloried by both the left and the right for […]
I’m not sure what the official product life is of this guitar polish, but I bought it at the (long gone) downtown Lincoln location of Dietze Music probably 20 years ago, and it’s still going strong. (One can extrapolate from this that I haven’t cleaned my guitar nearly as often as I should have over […]
As most who have been following me on Facebook know, I made the decision to ditch my smartphone for a dumb phone, primarily because of unhealthy behaviors I was noticing in myself. I initially made this switch in the spring of 2017, moving to an old-school flip phone. Though I don’t do a ton of […]