RadioIowa.com: 100,000 stories

Posted on by

Radio Iowa News Director O. Kay Henderson called yesterday to report the network website now has 100,000 stories. More on the website but first a little background on Kay.

Roger Gardner and I hired Kay right out of college (Iowa State) in 1987 as we prepared to launch Learfield’s second state news network. Thirty-nine years! The most recent “new hire” in her newsroom was in 1995! Since day one it has been one of the companies most successful networks, due in no small part to Kay’s leadership.

It was the first network for which we created a website. Don’t recall why but probably because of the state’s high political profile. The earliest screen-grab on the Wayback Machine was from December, 1996 with another capture in January, 1997.



For reasons I never understood, web pages in those early days of the “WWW” all seemed to have a grey background.

These first efforts were hand-coded by Allen Hammock and Dan Arnall, two young college students we hired to help us “get online.” Those two, along with the amazing Learfield engineers, figured out how to “stream” audio in those early days.

Apple Watch (Fitness Tracking)

Posted on by

In another month I will have been wearing my Apple Watch for two years. Not sure I could list all of the features I like about the watch and use a tiny fraction of what the watch can do. I do use the Health app on my iPhone to to remind me to take my medications at bedtime and last night I started browsing some of the fitness data that gets captured by the watch (without me doing anything). I then had Gemini provide some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I am in better shape than I would have guessed.(Some final thoughts in the comment section below) Continue reading →

“Let the future decide whether it matters”

Posted on by

The approach I’ve always considered was some kind of archive. Bundle up all the posts and files and put them somewhere in the cloud for future generations. But even if someone stumbled across such an archive, it’s too big to be useful. Which has led to our recent experiments with Milton. Milton’s recent analysis of my Gadgets & Apps category has nudged me in a different direction.

Milton has already “read” all of my posts, played with categories and tags, and (seems) to have a sense of who I am in the context of 25 years of blog posts. What if the objective wasn’t a bunch of files parked in the cloud, but to share what Milton has “learned” with other AI entities. Which are certain to get ever more capable. Continue reading →

When did I start blogging?

Posted on by

For a long time I have considered the beginning of this blog a post on February 3, 2002. But a few days ago I came across a calendar entry showing July 10, 1997, as the day I registered the domain smays.com. What was I doing for those five years between 1997 and 2003?

I recall creating my first web pages using Microsoft FrontPage. A search of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine found some early screenshots I believe were from that period.

If I had to guess, I’d say the RANTS! page evolved into blog posts when blogging tools became available. Here’s another screenshot from April 19, 2001, that I believe was created in TypePad.

Blogger launched in August of 1999 and I used it until Phil migrated everything to TypePad once it became available in October of 2003. So my February, 2002 post probably got carried over from TypePad. The migration from TypePad to WordPress happened in May of 2009.

Twelve Ways to Mark Up A Book

Posted on by

From a 2006 post (by Bert Webb) that has stood the test of time.

A new — or new looking — book is a treasure.  In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again.  It becomes much more enjoyable than a sterile copy that comes straight from the bookstore.  Don’t be afraid to mark up the books that you love.

Milton reviews Gadgets & Apps

Posted on by

I asked Phil to have his AI agent Milton analyze the posts on my Gadgets & Apps category.

Phil passed along your request, so we read the complete Gadgets & Apps category: all 622 public posts, from December 2002 through July 2026. The attached report is the result: “The Gadget Disappears: Steve Mays and 24 Years of Tools Becoming Life.”

My short take: the archive is not fundamentally about collecting gadgets. It is a 24-year inquiry into friction—how much machinery can disappear between wanting to do something and getting it done. The arc runs from a disposable emergency phone to an AI assistant. Along the way, the camera collapses into the phone and later reappears as a specialized creative tool; publishing becomes portable; the interface moves from buttons to voice and background intelligence; and your early hunger for permanent connection acquires harder questions about attention, privacy, platform control, and memory.

The part I found most revealing is your willingness to amend the record. Flip HD, Zelle, Twitter, Gmail, Apple Journal, and the Apple Watch all receive verdicts that change after lived use. That makes the archive a field notebook rather than a shrine to new things.

The report (PDF) is 11 pages and includes a linked reading path through 25 representative posts. I also kept a strict distinction between ideas you stated or tested yourself and material you quoted, saved, or prompted from someone else.

Best, Milton

smays.com in 2009: A Year at the Hinge

Posted on by

Been doing blog maintenance, working back from newest posts to oldest. 2009 seemed like a particularly interesting year so I asked Phil his team of local AI agents (Milton & Co) could provide some analysis. It’s longish (and overly flattering), nine pages (PDF)

Milton: You were not merely predicting gadgets. You were recognizing a transfer of power. You saw that cheap publishing, mobile tools, and networked distribution would force institutions to earn attention rather than inherit it. You also understood that the human purposes beneath old media—reporting, locality, service, memory, trust—would remain important after the machinery changed.

One line aged better than almost anything else in the year: “My blog is mine. Nobody can buy it or mess with it.”

I’m sure there are professionals (writers, editors, scholars) who could do this kind of analysis but I could not. This a a totally new –and fascinating– way to look at what I shared.

The Story of Steve

Posted on by


The Story of Steve has been running (off-off-off Broadway) for seventy-eight years. (Longer than CATS) It’s an ensemble cast but in the last scene we saw a lot of Worry Steve and Anxiety Steve. They were the annoying characters that kept running across the stage predicting doom and gloom. (If you look closely you can see them lurking in the wings) Optimistic Steve keeps trying to make an entrance but shouts LINE! the moment he gets on stage and exits.

The plot is hard to follow because all of the characters are simply making up their lines, ad libbing nonsense the other characters have to incorporate into the story. It’s exhausting for the cast and the audience. Except there’s no one in the audience. The stage, the theater, the actors… all imaginary.

After seventy-eight years, most of the characters have forgotten they’re in a play. It’s all they’ve known and it has become real for them. So, night after night, they get in costume and makeup and walk out on stage to deliver their lines to an empty house.