Joe Beaulaurier’s Blog

Recently thousands of Apple ‘Mac’ users converged on San Francisco for their annual commiseration fest. This is much like the annual migration to Sturgis by motorcyclists (another down-trodden consumer minority). This year Mindset Media, an online ad network company, compiled a study of attendees and released the results to the public in the form of a [...]

This blog is hosted using Yahoo!’s Geocities and Small Business Hosting services. So it was frustrating when the Yahoo! Shortcuts WordPress plugin was announced and I discovered it wouldn’t work with my version of Wordpress. Of course, I thought maybe upgrading their WordPress users wasn’t a biting priority for Yahoo! Hosting. And I assumed there [...]

Most evenings when I finally shut my email and close the last spreadsheet, I fire up my ‘therapy.’ It involves running around with a rocket launcher on my shoulder while climbing rock outcroppings, swimming through underwater caverns and sneaking down fortress hallways. It’s a first-person shooter (FPS) game built as a ‘mod’ to the Half-Life [...]

When I go to user-contributed content sites to see what’s happening in the city I am in (e.g. upcoming.org), or social bookmarking sites for interesting web pages, or even on Facebook I see a lot of noise mixed with the few tidbits I might be interested in. The noise is mostly provided by teens, twenty-somethings, and meme-of-the-day echoers. [...]

46 of these banners have been installed along the downtown streets in Yakima, a community in central Washington State. Yakima is a sun-drenched (in the summer at least, with freezing cold and snow in the winter) community with many nearby recreational and sporting opportunities with many rivers, lakes and hills surrounding the city.
People seeing the [...]