Friday, May 26, 2006
Cheap gas
I remember this, thanks to this, thanks to Adam Fields.
Blogging out loud
David Wallace: You see a blog is primarily something you HAVE not something you USE.
Scott Schrantz: I had never really given any thought to being anonymous.
The Bullshit Observer: Marketers, for some reason, never push back on the lawyers.
We were overheard to have said...
Quakeup has a nine part interview with yours truly, plus a pile of other videos from the Syndicate conference in New York last week.
Room for implogment
Denise Howell: ...the reporter missed the opportunity to tell the more accurate, important, and complicated story.
The item in question is Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply, from last Sunday's NYTimes.
Citizens vs. Verizon, round N
Here's a Verizon press release hawking the misleadingly named "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006". It begins,
Predicting it will lead to "direct, tangible benefits to consumers," including greater "video choice" and significant reductions in monthly cable television bills, a top Verizon executive today urged the U.S. Senate commerce committee to approve telecommunications reform legislation sponsored by the panel's chairman and the ranking minority party member.
Later it continues,
Saying that last year's Federal Communications Commission policy statement recognized that it would be premature to impose Internet regulations in the absence of a real problem, Tauke said the telecommunications reform legislation takes a "sensible approach" to the polarized net neutrality debate. It instructs the commission to monitor the marketplace and provide information to Congress and consumers regarding the need, if any, for Internet regulations. This would "allow policymakers to address any market failures, if they were to occur, without the adoption of broad, anticipatory regulations that curb innovation and broadband deployment," Tauke said.
Likening it to a highway "with 10 decks, each with 100 lanes," Tauke said Verizon's fiber-optic, FiOS network offers the "fastest Internet access" in the marketplace "capable of delivering speeds of 100 megabits and beyond." He said such plentitude will be required to enable "the widespread availability of such innovations as home health care monitoring and diagnosis, online education, telecommuting, and communications services for the disabled."
He’s got some balls to float that balloon in front of Congress. Let’s not disguise what Verizon really wants Mr. Tauke. How about some frank communications about Verizon’s future plans for the internet, stop playing games?
The game for Verizon is talking pro-business anti-regulation trash while seeking regulatory advantage over accountability to citizens at the local level.
New Darwin Award candidate submission form
Eric Raymond: I've just received a terroristic death threat. From an idiot who failed to obscure his return path.
Cute Ness Monsters
k, so i was out for a walk with my roommate and her friend and we heard this crazy screaming sound. so we turn around to see what it was. and oh my god. a raccoon was violating a cat. it was the weirdest/grossest thing i have seen in days.
Except for that last part
When I was a young and harbored aspirations of being a Radio Guy, the announcer whose voice I found most worthy of emulation was Franklyn MacCormack, whose Meisterbrau Showcase ran during the wee hours of the night on WGN/720 out of Chicago (and which I could pick up at our suburban home in New Jersey, as long as I twisted the transistor radio to null out the adjacent signal of WOR/710).
Well, yesterday I was talking with Steve Gillmor about MacCormack, when I looked the old guy up to see if he had any Google presence at all. What I found was that MacCormack actually died on the air. (Or started to, anyway. He finished in a hospital). Which led to some shefunnigans that Steve may air himself, since he recorded the conversation.
Overseen
Two fresh posts over in Linux Journal: Picasa on Linux, so far, and The choice between bad and worse just got bigger.
The former concerns Google's release of a Linux version of its Picasa photo management software, long before a Mac version. (If they ever have one. Apple's iPhoto probably discourages that.)
The latter digs behind the buzz around M2Z, a new company that wants to deliver free wireless nationwide broadband, but at a cost in top-down lopsidedness that (to me at least) differs little if any from what we're already getting from existing carriers. Bottom line:
M2Z appears to be a private, low-speed, non-standard, asymmetrical filtered subset of the Internet for "consumers". In other words, TV 2.0.
Shots
I just put up a bunch of pix of Dean Landsman and his girlfriend Susan at Dean's office on the lower east side.
And Amylou augments my aerial shots of Monument Valley with a ground-based tour of the same.
Also, Scott Johnson explains why I won't be the first to try out Ookles.