Jegsworks, Edgecast, and Flux

What do these have in common? Very little except they belong to the world of tech. Of the three, Jegsworks is about my speed. The others, I just visited out of curiosity. Don't get me wrong, I was highly impressed. But they're wa-a-a-y out of the realm of anything-I-might-conceivably-ever-need. Highly corporate, I guess. Edgecast.com is interesting enough to make me want to know more. Don't ask me how I found it. Well, okay, here's how. I had just let LastPass log me into Tumblr. As I connected to Tumblr, I noticed the URL of an Edgecast page flash by in Firefox's status bar (where I usually see ads and re-directs). Curious, I popped over to Edgecast to have a look. The page is slick, commercial, and professional. They offer a patented technology that lets you feed your pages up fast without changing a line of code. It looks expensive, and there are no prices given (you know, if you have to ask...) There's very little info on the site ~ just links to PDF downloads. You'd have to fill out a contact form, so I passed on that. Interesting, though. They say they 'integrate Google Pagespeed at the edge' using Google's front-end optimization (FEO). I have no idea what that means. Perhaps the company uses server-side includes or something like. Edgeworks offers hosting, among other things. Is the speed-up service only available for hosted clients? Dunno. Anyway, I suspect this site was meant for someone else's eyes ~ maybe Donald Trump's. Speeding up your site without changing a word of code! Man, the idea sure makes me salivate! My guess is that Tumblr is hosted there. Quirk: Visiting that page must have made me look like a pro and a corporate wallah. The next ad I saw on my blog was for 'Flux.ly.' [Ah, 'This is what makes time travel possible: the flux capacitor!' Beam me up, Scotty.] I went there ~ Flux site ~ not by clicking, just by noting the URL. It was a site for streamlining and automating tasks for corporations. Once again, way beyond my means or needs. The upside of all this is that while I was trying to remember how to describe that URL that flashed by at the bottom of my browser, I searched enough dumb-butt terms that I found 'Jegsworks.' Finally, a site that understands what I need: really, really basic technical info. Jegsworks: Jan's Illustrated Computer Literacy 101. Yeah, I like it!

Rel.: Build your own Flux Capacitor: http://www.instructables.com/id/Flux-Capacitor/

And a nod... thanks for the quote! Source: http://backtothefuture.wikia.com/wiki/Quote:Back_to_the_Future

Backups and Power Outages

How come every time I sink my teeth into a computer project, the power goes out? Sigh. Twice tonight. Our power has been rather unstable since a big, freak windstorm that knocked the power out over much of the county a few weeks ago. They got the power back on pretty quickly, then, but it must have done some peripheral damage. Now every time there's a little thunderstorm, out goes the power. It takes me back to the olden days, between 1970 and 2000 or so. There was only a single transformer that served our road, then, apparently, and the power blinked off at least once a day, I'd say; and way more during a storm. (Three blinks and it was out for the duration). Some years back, they put in a second transformer, I presume. After that, the power was pretty darn stable for a few years, only going out during wrath-of-God style thunderstorms. Sometimes, not even then. I guess we're back to the way it was, at least for awhile. This is thrice in as many days that we've lost power, albeit briefly. I was transferring files to a flash drive and to SkyDrive, and planned on blogging any interesting genealogy tidbit that I ran across during the project. This, as a clearing of my hard drive in advance of another much-needed website overhaul. Life as we know it, since the Internet came along...