Category Archives: Uncategorized

I will blog what I like

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This experiment with blogging on the same site as my web design business is no longer working out. I blog on too varied a field of topics than just tech or business-related topics. As a result, I will no longer maintain a blog on BigMinds Media.

Instead, I will blog at World of Values, which will be a widely-varied site. I will also move most of my posts (and comments) over to World of Values. I will maintain the BigMinds Media site for my media portfolio and business contact.

With the posts that I’ve posted, and how they have ranged across so many topics, I’m not going to limit myself to just technology-related or business-related topics.

I will blog what I like (with reasonable limits, of course).

Following up on African-American children’s TV

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Following up on my past post, I just sent this email to the contact emails of five African-American-oriented TV channels: TV One, BET, Bounce TV, Soul of the South and Aspire. 

To whom it may concern,

I am an African-American who is concerned that there is little programming on African-American TV channels that is dedicated to children and youth.

There are several channels on television which offer children/youth blocks of shows, both animated and live-action, and the lack of such content on African-American television channels is disappointing due to the alienation of that audience in their daily lives.

Would it be possible for your channel to feature a children/youth’s television block featuring Black lead characters? I think oncoming generations of Black TV-viewing youth will benefit and be positively impacted by such an action.

Sincerely,
Harry Underwood
Fort Benning, GA

The Myth of Just Deserts

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I’m of the opinion that good government is not about blaming the indebted or the poor or the “lazy”, but about assuming corporate responsibility, restituting the wronged, repairing the cracks and moving on.

The blaming of the poor or indebted is stupid and doesn’t get us anywhere.

Rick Cooley's avatarRcooley123's Blog

Attacks on the social safety net, workers’ rights, raising the minimum wage and basically anything aimed at eradicating or ameliorating the enormous economic, political and social inequality in this country tend to rest largely on one tenet – blame the victim. It is possible for anyone to get ahead in this society. If you fail to do so, it is your own fault for either not trying or not working hard enough to succeed. Those who have accumulated wealth deserve to keep it because they have earned it and should not be taxed to make up for the shortcomings of others. People get what they work for and deserve their fate.

Nobody deserves to be rich or poor. No one should starve, or be homeless or without care when they are ill or injured. The above attitude does not take into account many factors which affect the ability of people…

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This is the Face of 6th Street

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Something as simple as taking someone’s picture can find beauty and realness in the ashes of poverty. No one thought about taking her picture until now. How could they miss her visual complexity, her face’s ability to tell a thousand life stories about the city in which she lives?

Serpent Box's avatarNumina

When I told her that she was beautiful she smiled like the Cheshire cat. She knew that I meant it too. I don’t think she’d heard that in awhile. You want to take my picture? She said. My picture? I told her that it would make my day. There was so much going on around her that wasn’t beautiful. The heroin touts were busy running back and forth from Natoma out to the cars idling on 6th Street, looking at me with Hyena smiles. I could feel a certain malice in the air, like a current in a wire. I said, All right, are you ready? I knew I didn’t have much time. A white man with a camera on 6th Street. She put her hands on her hips and looked up into my eyes. She couldn’t have been much over five feet tall. She had a story for sure…

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I found this article via Global Voices, and I was very much interested in the reaction by other Jamaicans and Jamaican-Americans to the article. The article states that Afro-Caribbean people who move to the United States worry less about racism than African-American descendants of antebellum slavery, and ultimately recommends that we should “take it easy” rather than worry much about perceived racial issues. The reactions largely respond with citing the racially-charged histories of even the Black-majority states in the Caribbean (where, apparently, it’s not always the case that being raised in a comfortable Black demographic majority inoculates against skin-color biases). #Jamaica #Caribbean #race

On the #IndieWeb

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I have recently discovered the #IndieWeb.

The #IndieWeb is a decentralized means of bloggers replying to other bloggers without having to be logged into a corporately-owned, centralized social network (or “silo”, like Facebook or Twitter). It doesn’t make use of single log-ins, it doesn’t make use of having to put your “real name” on your profile.

It departs a bit from other existing initiatives of decentralized social networking services, such as Diaspora and Friendica, which try to retain a Facebook/Twitter-like user experience without the lock-in (by allowing you to install the software to host a social network site on your own server and allowing users to connect as friends and talking to each other across servers).

Instead, IndieWeb is even more decentralized than that. Technically, it relies even less on a common user interface, and it doesn’t necessarily provide for a means of “friending” or “following” another blogger on another server. Instead, the focus is on receiving notifications of replies or likes/faves from other blogs, especially those which are self-hosted.

The more that I read about it, the more I find the idea of the IndieWeb to be fascinating. It can keep much of the sort of connectivity that is sought by bloggers (say, on WordPress.com or on self-hosted WordPress sites) through social media site users without the sort of reliance upon logged-in comments or shares through first-parties such as Facebook or third parties such as Disqus and Livefyre.

But it’s pretty next level. I don’t think I can use it on WordPress.com, but if I ever move the posts from here onto a self-hosted WordPress site, I would install it just to see how many IndieWeb users would be interested.

I also wish I could import my public Facebook and Twitter posts over to a public personal blog, at least to have a backup of much of that data.

Questions from Inexperience

Can the emphasis of IndieWeb on “personal blogs” conflict with those blogs which expand into full-on “news sites” or “community blogs” (i.e., Huffington Post, TPM, Gawker, etc.)?

The latter type of blog often features the registration of users who submit post comments or lower-tier post content, while the bloggers remain separately credentialed in their ability to post first-tier content. Most news blogs may have a large community of users who are registered simply for the purpose of keeping their own comment histories lined up, or faving each others comments.

I wonder if the traffic and authorship growth of a blog from “personal” to “community” affect the functionality of an IndieWeb-capable blog.

It was either yesterday or today last year when Connie sat us all down and told us that the doctors found an anomaly in the lining of her spinal cord and brain, and that she would have to go to surgery the next day. I don’t think we celebrated the holiday, or her birthday, that year. I remember the last time she grilled in the backyard, but it was probably a sweltering Memorial Day. I drove Brandon and RJ to go see the fireworks that night. We were late. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end.

Got a Client!

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I sold my work, made it personal, and listened to members. I demonstrated the website in action on my Macbook, answered all the questions, and I named a *reasonable price* upfront. By the time I finished, shook their hands and left the meeting, I knew that I had a captive audience.

As of 9:03, I can confirm that a small local progressive congregation’s board has approved my proposal to do their website, with a contract to be signed the middle of next month. I am so glad for this moment, and I thank those who lent their support to my proposal before the board meeting, as well as all those who urged me not to sell myself short.

Despite every past impulse compelling me to lower my price, this proposal was at my true, intended price. I will never doubt my skills or my talents, nor will I ever stop asking questions, nor will I ever stop believing that there is always a better way to communicate your ideals. And I now know a better minimum of what my work is worth. #wordpress