Waileia

It’s been busy for me the past few weeks, and it’s only going to get worse. Therefore, the frequency of posting is going to be severely curtailed. You’ve been warned.

Sorry, and thanks for reading.

The North American power outage affected many people, including some of our own. Many people don’t think through the full implications of such a large power outage - elevators, subway trains, telephones, cell phones, many types of police radios, water pumps, and much more, all suddenly stop working. Society is so dependent on electricity that the lack of it can be life-threatening in certain situations.

I’m very, very glad that nobody got hurt, and that this wasn’t a terrorist act. I hope that the government sees the large potential vulnerability, however, and gets to work fixing the problem.

Please pray for palmer. Yesterday, his wife of five years passed away from cancer.

To read the way they continued to worship God, as a couple, until the last day is something miraculous. Just skimming this blog reminds me of 1 Peter 3:3-4.

Sleep well, palmer. Never forget that your wife is in a better place, and some day soon you will be with her and Ke Akua forever.

(Link via Bene Diction Blogs On.)

Here’s a little trivia for you:

Q. What well-known technology company invented RSS?
A. Netscape.

If you got that answer correct, kudos to you. RSS, or Rich Site Summary, was created by Netscape as the foundation of their then-new portal, My Netscape, back in 1999.

The idea was ingenious - by allowing web sites to make one of those nifty boxes that are the foundation of portal pages, Netscape created a win-win situation for everybody. Web sites got to display content on a high-profile service. Users got to pick from the largest selection of content available at any portal. And Netscape got to sell banner ads alongside content they were getting for free.

Unfortunately, it seems that everything didn’t go as well as Netscape planned. Around the time the company was acquired by AOL, My Netscape began to fail. Today, it’s just another generic portal, and with AOL firing many Netscape staffers, nobody has any idea how long netscape.com will continue to exist.

RSS is like the golden goose, in my opinion. The first portal to open their content up to the masses will grab significant market share from the other portals, meaning more ad exposures. Many university portals have done this already, but I’m still waiting for a commercial portal to realize the advantages of doing this.

I was going to write about something today, but I’m having serious issues with network connectivity. (My ISP’s DNS server is saying www.google.com doesn’t exist. Yeah, right.)

So, with apologies, I’ll see you all on Monday, August 11^th.