Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Tag: technology

  • How to Engage with the Community

    I don’t consider myself a “blogger” or a “social media guru,” but I do enjoy sharing things with my friends and meeting new people online. I also don’t like when companies try to force buzz, such “retweet this message ten times to enter to win a prize.” Instead, I share things with people because I…

  • A Connected Life

    I remember the first time I got online, typing commands into Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3 to establish a dialup connection over our single phone line. From that moment onward our house answering machine message was effectively modem sounds—I kept a computer online as much as possible. Even when I was nowhere near the computer,…

  • How to Mess Up “Unsubscribe”

    Here’s what I got when I tried to unsubscribe from Baltimore County Public Library’s email newsletter. The password, of course, is not the one associated with my library account, so if I want to unsubscribe, I’ll have to first request a password. This is how email gets filtered directly to trash.

  • Boarding Pains

    Everybody who’s flown before is likely familiar with the boarding sequence. First class, elderly and parents with children, military personnel, and everybody else beginning with the back of the plane. For the most part, it makes sense. But thanks to airlines charging fees to check baggage, most if not all of the passengers are bringing…

  • Holiday Hiatus

    Over Christmas I underwent a kind of internet fast. It wasn’t exactly self-imposed or rigidly enforced, it just kind of happened because I was away from my computer, Rachel commandeers the laptop to be her e-reader, and my phone is from before phones really figured out how to access the internet in a useful manner.…

  • On the Consumption of Content

    Now that we have internet access and are pretty much unpacked, I’ve been slowly trying to catch up on the internet. I’ve collected RSS feeds in Google Reader to the point that I can’t get through them all on a regular day, so several weeks of backlog probably means I’m going to give up and…

  • Three-D, Leave Me Be

    I made it through the first half of the year without seeing a single movie in the theater. It wasn’t a goal or anything, I just didn’t find anything compelling enough to make me spend the time and money. In the past two weeks I’ve seen as many in-theater movies, and nearly every trailer concluded…

  • Ad Blocking Is Here to Stay

    This has been discussed at some length before, but with yet another one of my favorite websites featuring a columnist adding their voice to the fracas, I thought it was worth revisiting. Like Ars Technica before him, Louis Lazaris of Smashing Magazine chastises folks who aren’t keen on including ads in their web browsing experience,…