As of 12:10pm today, I officially became a Zend Certified Engineer at the Pearson Vue testing center in Greenville!
Free Rice: An Amazing Approach to a Classic Problem
When I started reading Bill Clinton’s book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, I began to learn about and think about some of the more ingenious ways to help those in need not only in the US, but around the world.
To me, there is nothing more unique than the approach taken at Free Rice. Users get to test their vocabulary (and, hopefully, learn some new words as well), but at the same time each page view generates revenue from their sponsors. This revenue is then used to purchase rice for the starving and distributed through the United Nations World Food Program.
Can you think of a better way to help starving people around the world? Not only are you paying for those people to survive another day without taking a penny from your own pocket, but you’re also improving your own vocabulary skills – something Americans in particular need to spend more time doing.
Help feed some starving people from around the world – go test your vocabulary for a few minutes at Free Rice.
Take.TV
I saw an ad for Take.TV on LifeHacker this evening and was intrigued. I clicked through and watched their Flash demo, and I have to say… I’m underwhelmed.
What exactly is the point of having to take the USB thumbdrive from TV to computer and back again? Even the Apple TV lets me watch media on my TV without the hassle of physically moving anything from one to the other.
Provided they have a better method for enabling media (preferably hi-def and convertible from many different sources), do we really have to take a step backwards here? Why don’t I just plug my computer directly into the TV with a standard video-out cable?
The whole point (to me, at least) is that there need be no physical effort involved in the process. With a matter of clicks from my computer, bingo, media is now available on my TV elsewhere in my house.
Best of luck to the Take.TV folks, but if I were their venture capitalists, I’d kiss my money goodbye…
Missing an Email? It may be Media Temple’s Fault
It started last week when I was trying to sign up for Ron Paul Christmas. For some peculiar reason, I didn’t receive the welcome email. After talking with the site owner, it turned out (mt) was rejecting the email because the email address wordpress@ronpaulchristmas.com didn’t exist on the sending server.
Now, this isn’t particularly unusual. There is no requirement1 that an email address actually exist for a server to send email as if it were from that address. This is especially true from Wordpress blogs, which often send email from
wordpress@domain.comaccounts on behalf of their owners. Now, since this is only used for outgoing email, in most cases users would never bother setting the email account up. Why would you? You’re never going to be receiving email there2, so what’s the point?Well, (mt) apparently knows better than you do… For “security reasons”3, their grid service does a “callback” check on every incoming email address. If the server handling mail for
domain.comdoesn’t recognize that account (such as ourwordpress@domain.comexample), (mt)’s server will reject the message.I’ve tried to point out that this kind of behavior can be detrimental, particularly in the age of blogging and web services we now exist in, but the best answer I’ve been able to get out of (mt) is that I should add the sending address to their Mail Protect whitelist. Well great, unless I can add
*@*to the whitelist, or at the very leastwordpress@*, that’s hardly a viable solution – how do I know the address that’s sending to me if I never get the email?If you use Media Temple’s grid service4, please contact (mt) immediately and tell them this is an unacceptable situation. I love a lot of aspects of their grid service, but this is clearly not one of them…
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