Tag: Ask Roger Anything

The Internet domain of Colombia

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow.

Chris asked in the previous round of Ask Roger Anything, albeit not until December:

Have you ever wondered why Assange is in the Ecuadorian embassy or all those fake news places are registered to Columbia? Don’t those seem like weirdly arbitrary choices?

Why Ecuador’s embassy?

Let’s take the Colombian connection first. The two-letter Internet domain for Colombia is .co, which looks a whole lot like .com or some new generic top-level domain. Go Daddy has put on the big push advertising these new domains, at least in the past.

Some countries restrict the use of their domain to registrants who are in, or are from, their country. Colombia does not. Thus, one gets sites such as wsj.com.co or nbcnews.com.co out there to try to fool the user, and often succeeding.

There are some interesting country code top-level domains that are more open:

.fm for the Federated States of Micronesia, an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean. “Except for reserved names like .com.fm, .net.fm, .org.fm and others, any person in the world can register a .fm domain for a fee, much of the income from which goes to the government and people of the islands. The domain name is popular (and thus economically valuable) for FM radio stations and streaming audio websites

.io for British Indian Ocean Territory, treated as “a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because ‘users and webmasters frequently see [the domain] more generic than country-targeted.'”

.nu for the island state of Niue. “It was one of the first ccTLDs to be marketed to the Internet at large as an alternative to the gTLDs .com, .net, and .org… Commonly used by Danish, Dutch, and Swedish websites, because in those languages ‘nu’ means ‘now’.”

.tv for Tuvalu. “Except for reserved names like com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and others, any person may register second-level domains in TV. The domain name is popular, and thus economically valuable because it is an abbreviation of the word television.

.ws for Samoa. “The .ws domain is an abbreviation for ‘Western Samoa’, which was the nation’s official name in the 1970s when two-letter country codes were standardized. While there are no geographic restrictions on registration of most second-level .ws domains, .org.ws, .gov.ws, and .edu.ws registration is restricted.

“The .ws country code has been marketed as a domain hack, with the .ws purportedly standing for ‘World Site’, Web Site or Web Service, providing a ‘global’ Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names

In other words, Colombia is the country for the faux sites because of the stroke of fortune that the Internet domain for Colombia is .co, and because there is money to be made.

As for Assange, this Washington Post article from October 2016 explains it well:

Ecuador treated Julian Assange like a trophy in 2012 when it opened the doors of its London embassy to the WikiLeaks founder, sheltering him from extradition to Sweden over rape allegations and, possibly, to the United States.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s leftist president, seemed to bask in Assange’s bad-boy glow, which gave the small South American nation a big role in a global drama. Protecting the WikiLeaks editor also gave Correa a way to poke Washington in the eye and look like a champion for press freedom even as he cracked down on journalists back home.

Correa embraced Assange’s mother at the presidential palace in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, and championed the Australian “hacktivist” as an anti-imperialist comrade-in-arms.

Now he’s treating Assange like a bad tenant who won’t leave.

There may be other factors in play here that I’m not aware of, but I don’t think it’s some odd South American conspiracy.

My parents, and my career choices

Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors?

les-trudyMy good friend Carol, who I’ve only known since kindergarten, has some follow-up questions about the Lydster’s career choices, which were really about My career choices.

Two questions based on this… why did you not go into law?

Because I did very poorly in a pre-law course at New Paltz. I loved the subject, but Bill Dunn didn’t love my answers. Or maybe it was because it was an 8 a.m. course and I was late sometimes. This failure threw me into a tizzy, because that was my intended life path, and then I had NO idea what I wanted to pursue.

Do you wish your parents had made more suggestions, not along the lines of pushing as much as of possibilities?

Not really, because it just wasn’t in their skill sets. My mother was not one to push us, because that was not her nature in much of anything. She was a “go along to get along” type.

She was very good with numbers and was a bookkeeper or teller for most of her adult life. But she didn’t really think of it as a skill much as, say, her husband arranging flowers or playing guitar or painting or doing all sorts of things. I dare say that he could be a bit intimidating.

For his part, my father, according to his military record, had only three years of high school. I think that part of the friction that I had with him was that I was not very good at working with my hands, the things he excelled in. But I was book smart – would you accept that analysis, Carol? – and he was not as adept, but figured things out as he went along. He was outwardly gregarious, and that wasn’t me.

We did have some areas in common: watching sports together, especially the minor league baseball Triplets and the NY football Giants; playing cards, particularly pinochle and bid whist; and most especially, thank goodness, music.

So he was not likely to offer me career advice because, and I say this without a lot of remorse, he wasn’t always understanding me very much at that time. He certainly didn’t grok what motivated me, and this became even more acutely true in my early twenties when we didn’t talk, at all, for nearly six months, before I relented. This is odd in some ways because my antiwar, and other, activism was molded in no small part by his civil rights activism.

I said two but here’s a third – do you think as I do that our HS counselors were useless?

I actually have no recollection of ANY HS guidance counseling whatsoever, except one passing conversation with Allan Cave, who was the assistant principal at the time, and that only because I knew him from church. Did we HAVE scheduled meetings with guidance counselors, because if we did, I never received the memo?

Just as an aside you wrote about a few math/science awards Lydia received but there’s no mention of any options related to those. Is she just not interested?

Actually, it has determined what level courses she has in 7th grade, and that could lead to courses she could take in 8th grade that could get her high school credit. So it puts her on a more rigorous academic track in several subjects than she might be otherwise.

 

A Yuletide tradition: Ask Roger Anything

I’ve been surprised that seldom does anyone ask me anything particularly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is OK.

I have written in my blog EVERY DAY for – what is it now? – 11 and two-thirds years, roughly. I always say I write for myself, and that IS true. But it IS nice that someone actually reads what I write.

I was at breakfast with my pastors and a bunch of the Bible guys. I was talking about something to one of my pastors, the one with the light Virginia accent, and she said, “Oh, I read that in your blog!” And I said to myself that this pleased me.

So I guess I’m NOT so pure of heart as to be happy writing a daily blog that no one reads. One of the best things I figured out was how to post my blogs automatically to Twitter and Facebook, and that one act has made my blog accessible to a lot more people.

Do you know what else makes me happy? When someone like Arthur appropriates something from my blog in his. Earlier this month, the AmeriNZ guy did it ’s ‘Ask Arthur’ time again thing. This engaged me at a level beyond what I would have expected. It’s some sort of validation. And I thinkKNOW that sometimes I need that more than others. Right now, I seem to need it a lot.

And speaking of need, I NEED you to Ask Roger Anything. I’ve been surprised that seldom does anyone ask me anything particularly uncomfortable. Uncomfortable is OK. I mean that you may ask me ANYTHING at all and I promise to respond, generally within a month.

I will answer your queries to the best of my ability, though know that memory is an imperfect beast. I practically GUARANTEE a bit of obfuscation, because you know you want me to.

You can leave your comments below. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that’s fine; you should e-mail me at rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, or end me an IM on Facebook (make sure it’s THIS Roger Green, the one with the duck) and note that you want to remain unmentioned; otherwise, I’ll assume you want to be cited.

Ten things I’ve done that I’m still proud of

It’s not that I’m averse to changing the blog layout. I’m just not particularly adept at it.

10thingsFor this iteration of Ask Roger Anything, Eunai gets right to the point:

Ten things you’ve done that you’re still proud of.

OK. I found this challenging. In no particular order:

1. Getting arrested at an antiwar demonstration in the town of Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, NY. The trial was very interesting.

2. Editing the Spider-Man Chronicles for FantaCo in 1982. I was learning how to do this by trial and error.

3. Going to grad school to get my Masters in Library Science when I was 37 to 39 years old.

4. Trying out for and appearing on JEOPARDY! in 1998.

5. My very good grasp of mass transit systems in fairly short order. That’s true in Albany, of course, but I’ve gotten comfortable in Atlanta, Boston, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, and Toronto, and possibly others.

6. Keeping very good friends for a long time, even staying civil with ex-girlfriends.

7. Getting Black History Month at First Presbyterian to be less about the perceived needs of the black members and more focused on the whole community.

8. When I ride my bike, I generally follow the rules, even when no one is looking, or I don’t think anyone is looking. What I’ve noticed is that, sometimes, accurately used hand signals by a bicyclist has a calming effect on a driver. Of course, when I get passed by a guy riding on the wrong side, through the red light, my work is undercut, but so be it.

9. Helping to raise our daughter without totally wrecking her. Of course, she still has her teen years, so I still have my chance.

10. Doing this here blog, every day, for 11 years and about five months.
###
And speaking of the blog, the fabulous Scott F wrote:

I’ve been reading your blog again and found I’ve missed it. How do you think you’ve changed as a blogger over the time you’ve been doing this? One thing that hasn’t changed is the layout of the page. Ever think of changing it? (By the way, that’s not me saying it needs a change.)

Welcome back.

Well, I sort of know what I’m doing about 90% of the time. I write ahead so that I don’t stress out if I get sick/too tired/too busy/a bad Internet connection.

I write about enough different things that you can say, “Well, that doesn’t particularly interest me,” but the next day might be more to your liking. The variety is more to MY liking; I can’t write the same category of post back to back.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I found a list of celebrities who will turn 70 in 2017 that I will write about. Knowing what the topics will be – and this also includes family birthdays, major holidays, and significant anniversaries – helps the brain to think about it casually so that when I actually DO write about it, it is not a tabula rasa. I may have even come across an article or two, which I’ll throw in the draft file until I get closer to the date.

I find that it is MUCH better to write about ANYTHING, so if that piece on Trump isn’t writing itself – it seldom does – then I’ll look for an ABC Wednesday post for three or four weeks from now, or a piece about a musician’s birthday, or a Music Throwback Saturday. As I’ve noted, some days, I have NO idea what is posting that particular day until it goes live, at which point I almost always see the damned typo.

As for the layout, it did change in May 2010 from my Blogger blog to this WordPress iteration. It’s not that I’m averse to changing it. I’m just not particularly adept at doing techie things or visual things, or especially techie visual things. Recently, some simple bit for my blog took a half-hour, which was aggravating, and I don’t have a half-hour to waste on something that wasn’t all that important in the grander scheme anyway.

Now if YOU want to take a shot at redesigning my blog, go ahead. Seriously. I also lack what George HW Bush called “the vision thing.” Change it to what? I have literally no idea.

Are YOU still blogging, BTW?

The existential quest: Ask Roger Anything

YOU are my change agent.

Our intern this summer asked me, pretty much out of the blue, whether I believed in existentialism.

I know the textbook definition is: “a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.” But I wanted to know what HE meant.

“How can you have worked in the same job for over 23 years?”

“Because it always changes. The technology changes, the data changes, the clients and counselors change, the world changes.”

“So you count on things changing.”

“I don’t COUNT on the world changing, it just DOES. It’s like those occupational tests I used to take. They always asked what I imagined I’d be doing five years hence. What I imagined never meshed with the reality.”

I’m now going to try to will you all to Ask Roger Anything. That’s because YOU are my change agent. I may/do have some posts already planned. What YOU do is change the trajectory of my mind, thinking about THAT, when THAT might never crossed my mind. I find this to be a good thing, BTW.

As usual, you may ask me ANYTHING – advice or opinions or philosophical musings, even (GULP) politics. I will answer, generally within a month.

I will answer your queries to the best of my ability/memory/flashback/drugged state honestly, though the mind plays tricks on one, doesn’t it? A little obfuscation on my part IS not only allowed, but required.

You can leave your comments below. If you prefer to remain anonymous, that’s fine; you should e-mail me at rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com, or end me an IM on Facebook (make sure it’s THIS Roger Green, the one with the duck) and note that you want to remain unmentioned; otherwise, I’ll assume you want to be cited.

Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial