Personal News

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Barack Obama listens when Jess Coburns speaks er um tweets..

I started this post at the beginning of September and today saw something pretty amazing…

I was adding people to follow on Twitter today (I have yet to figure out what to twit about) and after a few adds and tweets I got this email today:

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Finally, a Presidential Candidate that recognizes my brilliance!!  Ahh, it’s nice to have followers :)   Now I just need to find out his gamertag on xbox live so we can play some COD4 :) .

In all seriousness though I am truly amazed with the way the Presidential candidates have embraced the Internet and are using it to spread their message and the fact that they are using social networking as one of these tools is even more amazing.

Back from the back burner.

As I mentioned earlier I had shelved this post because it wasn’t that interesting.. It’s cool but not really interesting. Anyway, I did start following Barack Obama on twitter because I was curious what the campaign would post. Before I continue, no I don’t really believe Barack is reading my tweets.. He should but he’s probably not.. but he’s probably is subscribed to my blog ;) . Anyway, Today they tweeted about an official “iPhone App.”!!. 

The Barack Obama Phone App

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Now this is clever and really shows how technology and the Internet is changing the world.  Back in 1988 we had a student project to volunteer for the campaign of a candidate running for election. At that time I opted for Dukakis in his Presidential run. I had 3 jobs:

1. Hang door hangers on all the houses in my neighborhood (after sitting for days in my bedroom my younger sister went out and hung them all out for me).

2. Hold a sign at a rally for Dukakis at a local union office and wave as the Bus carrying Dukakis comes in. Turns out I got to shake his hand be on TV, so for a high school kid this was impressive.

3. I was handed about 20 pages of computer printouts (the crappy old green and white paper used in 9 pin dot matrix printers), a script to read and shown to a phone where I was to sit for hours and make phone calls. 

From this experience I learned a few things:

1. Dukakis was a short man but had a solid handshake and made a point to make eye contact, even with some punk high school kid wearing his cool high school mascot jacket. I was impressed.

2. I’m not one for hanging door hangers but my sister will gladly do it for free!

3. People don’t like to be called during dinner time. If you call a stranger’s house about a candidate they don’t care for they will probably rip you a new one and scream vulgarities at you and finally many people will just say “Yeah, we’re voting for him” just to get you off the phone.

4. Politics was not for me.

The reason I mention this is that the Barack Obama campaign continues to impress me with their grasp of the Internet and how they are using it to reach voters.  The Iphone app is just pure genius. Instead of setting up a phone pool and trying to get people to come in and make these calls to strangers (that are going to curse them or just say yes for the sake of getting someone off the phone) they are providing a phone app that will allow you to make these calls to your contacts AND provide information upfront on key topics that you’re most likely to get hit with when talking to your friends and contacts about Obama.

This is truly clever. You know I often think back to that first batman movie website. I believe it was the first movie to launch a website to promote their movie. I was amazed with the graphics, the layout, the animation but more importantly excited about what it meant to the entertainment industry and was cool new websites we’d see. So I’m equally excited to see not only what else Obama’s campaign will do with the Internet but how other candidates will continue to raise the bar.

If you wish to pick up the Barack Obama IPhone app you can get it here.

NOTE: I’m not Political. I don’t care who you’re voting for and whether I vote or who I vote for is none of your business. So don’t bother me with political crap.

And a WARNING: Never give the NRCC money as a joke to tease your buddy who thought it was cool he got an award for being such a good republican because you got the award too and you’re a democrat! They’ll never leave you alone and will send you tons of crap awards, pictures, statues, letters, invites, etc. You’d think they’d look at your voter’s registration but I guess not.

Introducing William Henry Coburn

Here’s William Henry Coburn, 8lbs 2oz, 19.5 inches (I’ll leave out the silly joke this time). Unfortunately my attempt to blog post from my cell phone via email failed miserably. But here’s a couple pictures from the first 24 hours.

First Williams Nursery (because I spent a god awful amount of time painting that darn thing)

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Williams Very First Baby Picture (being held up by his mommy’s OB Dr. Newman)

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Daddy Snips the cord (not nearly as easy as it looks on TV but 10X more gross as you can see from the blood squirts)

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Here’s the grandparents and Auntie Louise getting their first look at him (they still have those smiles on).

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Strike A Pose …

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Finally, Daddy doing for the first time what daddy is going to do the most for the next few years… changing the nappy…and dodging the stream of pee (he almost got me)

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3D Sonograph of the baby

I was attending The Parallels Summit this week and while up there the wife sent me a MMS picture on my phone.  The doctor had a 3D sonograph made so I give you the first 3D picture of our baby due sometime in June of 2008:

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Today we say good bye to Netscape

It was announced back in December that Netscape would be officially no longer supported as of February 1st 2008, for many they see it as just another forgotten software program but for many others it was much more than that. For me, Netscape is part of the events that got me hooked on the Internet and that eventually led to the start of Applied Innovations (it seems fitting that in the same month Netscape retires, AppliedI turns 9).

In 1994, I was just starting a career in Electrical Engineering at Motorola and had been using the Internet via gopher, FTP and USENET for a while already. I had been using NCSA’s Mosaic browser and HTTP Daemon running on SunOS and already building webpages and applications around it.  NCSA’s tools were nice but simply unpolished.  Then I read this USENET posting:

Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP.  Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

    ftp.mcom.com in /netscape
    gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm
    lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape
    ftp.meer.net in /Netscape
    doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape
    archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape
    ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only)
    mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time
by sending email to rele@mcom.com.

Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet.  It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.

A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle.  Contact us at i@mcom.com for more information.

Have fun!

Marc and the gang
i@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/

That post was dated October 13th 1994, 8:51am and the archived message pulled from google groups.

I quickly downloaded, installed and was AMAZED by this new web  browser and I wasn’t alone.  Here’s a few of the follow up posts from USENET that give you an idea of just how the Internet community accepted the Netscape Beta back then:

As blown away as you may have been by seeing the original Mosaic
for the first time, Netscape is even more impressive.

Besides being faster, easier to use and more rubust than Mosaic,
it elegantly handles news and mail.

It’s terribly, terrible impressive.

Looks great so far!  (Windows version.)

- Transparent GIFs are nice!
- Delayed inline-image loading a-la MacMosaic.
- Scrollbars on TextAreas
- Copy to clipboard from text.
- Multiple windows a-la XMosaic.
- THREADED news!

- AND…I’m POSTING this from Netscape!

Cool!

Let’s think of some of the things Netscape did that helped change the Internet:

  1. 1. They created a web server application with a easy to use management interface (no need to edit nasty .conf files)
  2. 2. They said F-U to the man time and time again and set their own standards for HTML and extended the Hypertext Markup Language.
  3. 3. They created the first commercial web browser (then free, then commercial, then free … )
  4. 4. IPO! Here’s a company that when it IPO’d it signaled the start of the DOT COM bubble!
  5. 5. It simply made the Internet more accessible to all, it went from a tool used only by scientists and geeks to a key component of everyone’s daily life. You no longer needed to know secret geek-speak like GOPHER, FTP, USENET or TCPIP you could just point and click your way around the web.

For many the passing of Netscape is just another antiquated  piece of software taking it’s place in history but it’s much more than that and because of all it’s done and changed for myself, my company, and society as a whole, I say raise your cup of coffee this morning and give thanks to Andreessen and the guys that started Mosaic Communications Corporation and released that very first beta version of Netscape, they truly changed our world!

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(image from Peter Coffee’s 24 Killer Apps of All Time).