Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by dmcityview.com Last week I survived something I will forever deem the most treacherous act of technological perpetration in my life, full stop. After almost eight years of uninterrupted service, Google shuttered its longstanding RSS reading service, Google Reader. RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds are the paper delivery boy of the Internet. Millions of websites use RSS feeds to syndicate content automatically to website subscribers. Nearly every major website and news distributor on the planet uses this technology to deliver content; CNN, ESPN, Google News, Twitter, Facebook and many, many more. RSS Readers, such as Google Reader, allow users to aggregate and subscribe to these feeds and bypass the need to visit dozens of sites each day for news and entertainment. While Google gave plenty of warning that it was terminating its RSS reader site, for diehard content curators such as myself, it was a devastating gut punch. While Reader wasn’t the most ...

It's over cable industry, I'm taking my money and going home. It may sound weird to read this considering the source , but I've had it. For the past 11 months I've been routinely forking over $120 to DirecTv for a product that goes out in a light rain, has far more channels than I would ever watch, and is completely overpriced. Yes it's a great product but my cable bill should not be greater than my cellphone bill. ESPECIALLY considering 65% of the cable industries content can be watched online. I don't care about on-demand movies. I don't care about the Golf Channel, the Game Show network, E!, Bravo, Reel, HSN, HLN, Spike, TRUtv, Lifetime, Oxygen... I don't care . Plus, their best content I can get over the air. CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS? You don't need a dish or a coax cable to get those, and Thanks to the digital conversion broadcast TV is finally bearable. And what I can't get over the air, I can find on Hulu, in the Redbox, or on TeamCo...

Whenever I tell people my family started using the internet in 1994 they think I'm a lying. The truth is my best friends Kevin and Jason McEwen moved from Iowa to Baltimore the summer after fourth grade and I figured that was the end. I didn't have the patience to write a letter and my family at that point had not vacationed once on the east coast. So I figured I'd never hear from them or see them again. Then my dad hooked our PC into a 1200 bps modem and fired up Prodigy and Compuserve. The only thing I remember about Compuserve is it looked like a giant chat room, and for all I know that is what it was. I think I logged into it once and left it alone. Prodigy was where the real action was. My Dad told me I could write my friends digital letters, send it off, and hear back from them in minutes, the only catch was I could only send 30 emails a month. I guess 31 emails would melt their servers or something. It was awesome. The McEwens and I emailed back and forth a coupl...