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 My father, Gregory Meredith Posnick, died last month, on Oct. 17, 2020. As I'm writing this, it's a few days short of what would have been his 77th birthday. He didn't have much of an internet presence; this picture from Getty is about all you'll get if you search for photos of him online: Embed from Getty Images Anti-war protester Greg Posnick (L) argues with war supporter Pamela Hall on March 19, 2008 in Times Square in New York. Demonstrators are staging a series of protests across the US to mark the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT That's a good encapsulation of what my father stood for. His involvement in the anti-war movement goes back to the 1960s. To avoid the Vietnam War draft, he obtained a PhD in experimental psychology  from Duke University after graduating from Queens College. While his career in academia was short-lived, his love of the Duke Blue Devils continued for the rest of his life. He spent most of his life workin

Let's say you have a website associated with a Google Apps for Your Domain (though okay, it's Google Apps for Work now) registration, and served off of App Engine . Great! Now let's say you want to enable that website for HTTPS. Great...ish. There's an article that walks you through the some of the steps, though it actually points you to another article halfway through. But following the steps in those article presupposes that you already have a certificate that you want to use, and that's hardly ever going to be the case for folks who just want to set things up for the first time. I just went through the process for Sheryl's business , and used gandi.net to obtain the certificate. (I actually tried using StartSSL first, but ended up requesting a certificate with a 4096 bit key that I couldn't use  with App Engine. And their UI is just awful.) Using gandi.net was mostly painless, and a great deal at $16/year, but there are a few things that aren'

The spring of 1942 was a perilous time for Americans, caught, as they were, in a new war. — David Denby , apparently just writing down the first thing that pops in his head.

We just finished rewatching The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret . The first series (there are two series, of six episodes each) aired in America on IFC before Portlandia really caught on, and I don’t remember there being much marketing or Internet buzz about it. (Folks from Britain—was it any bigger over there?) The show’s a textbook example of pure farce, and watching it got me thinking about the work of David O. Russell. While he’s risen to prominence with his last three films—The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook [really? that’s what you named your move?], and American Hustle—Russell has four other full-length movies under his belt: Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, and I ♥ Huckabees. I’ve written (10 years ago?!) plenty about my affection for Huckabees, and I love Three Kings as well, but watching Todd Margaret brought to mind Flirting with Disaster, since that movie is another example of how entertaining a farce can be. Then I hit on what

I'm incredibly proud to announce that my wife, +Sheryl Posnick , has started her own company, Red Letter Content . If you ever find yourself in need of editorial services , keep RLC in mind!

(Most of this is courtesy of @byoogle 's comment on a Facebook update I wrote looking for help. So thanks, Brian—I know that nowadays you're all about ensuring that as much information as possible flows into Facebook...) So let's say you have a Twitter account, and you have a Facebook account. And maybe you have a slightly different set of followers on each, and you want to push out the same status updates to both sets of people (because all your status updates are of the utmost interest to all). And also maybe Facebook has a history of deleting accounts due to bugs in their codebase, and you like the idea of having your online history in more that one place. So ideally, you'd set things up so that all your tweets automatically became Facebook status updates. Good news, if it's 2009: you can do that pretty easily. Unfortunately, a year or so ago, Facebook stopped third party applications (or at least the official Twitter Facebook application ) from updating

I'm definitely not tearing up over the announcement that Microsoft is killing the Kin after four months on the market (and I've got to assume that the rumors that only 500 devices sold during that span of time can't be true). But the word that the Sidekick line is being officially discontinued compels me to pause for reflection. Yes, Danger's been owned by Microsoft for a few years now and has pretty much done nothing worth mentioning (in that I'm not going to mention the Kin again), but the old-school Sidekicks were great phones. Not particularly well made phones—in my 5 years as a Sidekick user, I probably went through 4 warranty replacements on the SK1 and 3 on the SK2—but great for their time. The keyboard was a masterpiece, and I could easily touch type on it while walking down the street. Many of the early 34  entries were compose on it. I guess many folks feel the same way about their Blackberry keyboards, but they never did it for me (plus I had a weird