Mr. Heaton,

Today, your company dumped a good customer without warning or just cause.  Out of the blue today, you made the decision to unplug all of Scott Johnson’s Frogpants network of podcasts, blogs and social media.  It is difficult to estimate how many potential customers you have given error to today, but in iTunes alone, you have refused service to possibly 100,000+ people.  Those people need to know who is suddenly preventing them from accessing what they’re looking for.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you – since it’s your job to know such things – but you have just dumped:

• An entire network of podcasts and blogs, comprising a dozen very successful podcasters who have disparate audiences of thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of listeners.
• A massive web of highly effective social media mavens, most of whom have thousands of followers in Twitter.
• Media that has an unusually high international reach, with well above-average numbers of listeners outside of the United States.
• One of the top 100 podcasts in the world, according to listeners in iTunes, The Instance.

A cursory glance at your own Twitter feed makes it clear that you don’t understand or value the power and utility of social media.  Today’s bit of bad business by you was clearly the result of cold, hard calculation: you made an agreement with Scott Johnson that appears to be less profitable than breaking the agreement.  So much for almost every claim on your website “guaranteeing” “unlimited” “reliable” hosting that is “better” and “professional”.  The statement on your site, “we specialize in customer service” can now be considered laughable.

Of course, everyone involved with the Frogpants network will be henceforth opposed to patronizing your apparently fly-by-night operation.  The Internet meme you might become aware of is this: Get out of the blue.

I encourage any and all customers of Bluehost.com to get out of the blue, before Bluehost.com suddenly leaves all of your content un-hosted.  Get out of the blue as soon as it is feasible for you to stop paying a company that cannot be trusted with your blogs, forums, videos, podcasts and pictures.  I am not suggesting that any customer stop payment if you owe Bluehost.com money.  Don’t be like them, and break an established agreement.  Just take the first, honest opportunity to get out of the blue and take your content to another host.

Mr. Heaton, I sincerely hope that this letter finds you well, and that you take the opportunity to comment below if you have anything to say here.  Internet 2.0 is not a bum’s rush. Rather, it is an open and ever-expanding platform upon which those who speak have every opportunity to guide discourse, and those who remain silent increase the value of nothing.

Those who attempt to do any silencing will find such an attempt to be utterly impotent.

Thank you.

So we went to the hospital and were taken into the nursery where there was only one baby in an incubator, and he had his name tag prominently displaying that his parents had decided to name him Levi.

The nurse in charge left us alone in the nursery for a few minutes, and suggested Samantha feed Will in there, since there was another woman in the breastfeeding room next door.  The other woman wasn’t breastfeeding, mind you, she was just relaxing on a sofa.  We left her to her privacy, and Samantha fed Will while I examined Levi in his little baby bubble.

According to his chart, Levi’s situation had improved quite a bit since the day before.  They had stopped supplementing him with oxygen, and his heart rate had improved consistently.  He wasn’t jaundiced any more. His bowel movements were regular. Samantha had no idea what I was doing, so she asked me from across the room to tell her what his name was, and I said,

“It looks like his parents are naming him after a genocidal maniac who took revenge on a prince for sleeping with his sister by tricking every man in the prince’s city to mutilate their own genitals before he killed all of them and then stole their women, children and livestock.”

I really had no idea why his parents were naming him Levi.  I described the Genesis account quite accurately, but the parents of this baby could have had no idea whatsoever, and heard the first name of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby-daddy and just generally liked it.  It might have been a family name, and they might have been oblivious to the origin of the name.  This is the reason we didn’t tell anyone in the world what we were going to name our child until he was born.  We didn’t want to hear what other people thought of the name, and people tend to stop telling you their opinion of the name you chose after your baby is born.

The nurse came in and let us know that the breastfeeding room next door had been vacated, so we moved to it.  Over the next half-hour, we slowly realized that when you’re sitting in there, as Levi’s mother had been, you can perfectly hear everything said in the nursery.

Indeed, that is no oxymoron!  The web is simply teeming with really excellent freeware, if only you put a little time and effort into discovering it.  What follows are my favorite examples of top notch freeware, categorized:

May as well start with Image viewing and editing -

• IrfanView
• Paint.net

Sure it’s not a very good name for an application.  The name gives you a feeling that you’ll be editing photos in your browser or something, but Paint.net is a standalone application just like any other, and it has the power and ease to be a complete Photoshop replacement for anyone who can’t afford Photoshop.

Music –

• Winamp
• iTunes

The before and after applications for your pre- and post-iPod music life.  If you’re not yet attached to an iPod, Winamp is a simply killer app that manages to be incredibly good looking in addition to free.

Audio recording and editing -

• Audacity
• Wavepad
  

Browsers superior to Internet Explorer -

• Firefox
• Chrome

Don’t really need any explanation here.  It’s a question of slightly differing tastes.

Document authoring -

• OpenOffice
• Notepad++

There is really no need to ever pay for MS Office for personal use when OpenOffice does it all.  Of course, if you do any text editing whatsoever you know that Notepad++ is the only way to fly.

File management via FTP -

• Filezilla

I can’t name an FTP client app that is superior to Filezilla, and that includes those that cost a lot of money.

I could go on.  I might go on, actually.

More coming soon.  Yee-haw!