Blake Helms | Birmingham, Alabama

A few days ago Google re-released their highly antic­i­pated Gmail iOS app. After open­ing it you’ll quickly real­ize that its not the highly pol­ished app that peo­ple were wait­ing for. Infact it’s noth­ing more than a wrap­per around the stan­dard web inter­face. Granted Google is a web com­pany but they should make a com­mit­ment to […]

Ever­note, you are so close to per­fect yet so far away. I am still search­ing for the per­fect all in one note app and I keep falling short. Every time I think I can make this my go to app I find another flaw that moves it out of the realm of my work­flow. I’ve […]

This has both­ered me for a long time and I finally decided to blog about it. I run mul­ti­ple sites with dozens of plu­g­ins so it seems I am installing plu­gin updates. The first thing I do before I install an update is ver­ify that my hourly data­base backup ran then click on the plu­gin “ver­sion details.” […]

Ear­lier today gad­get blog Giz­modo posted a story link­ing to a site pur­port­ing to be a Google Chrome OS down­load site. Thirty sec­onds of look­ing around you could tell some­thing wasn’t right. The site was a hosted site on “Google Sites” not a Google prod­uct site (ex. google.com/chromeos), sec­ond and most damming was the line of text […]

The Jef­fer­son county com­mis­sion is at it again. With a $105 mil­lion debt pay­ment loom­ing, the county com­mis­sion is in nego­ti­a­tions with Regions Bank to take out a $25 mil­lion bridge loan to begin bring­ing back the more than 1000 work­ers who have been on upaid leave since the begin­ning of August. Last month the Alabama leg­is­la­ture voted to allow […]

On August 5, my home phone and Inter­net died and as of today it is still out. I have been hav­ing prob­lems for nearly two months where every time it rained the Inter­net would go out. After a month long wait a tele­phone repair tech­ni­cian called and said it was “fixed.” This was the day before […]