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| Saturday, June 15, 2002 |
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Than you Lord — and Kynance Community Wireless (and Consume.net) 
| |  I'm sitting outside Petite Delice on charming little Kynance Mews, deep in the heart of South Kensington, enjoying a pastry and a cup of fine French coffee, and on the freaking Net! London has always had its attractions, but this puts it over the top. Feel free to come, folks, because free is what it is. Now: off to the musems. |
| | No! Get this:::: Ben Hammersley just strolled up, walking his dog Lucy (that's her pic). He started talking to his friend Edgar, who just sat down at the cafe with his TiBook, when overheard their conversation about "access." He looked familiar too. So I called over and said, "Excuse me, is this your node I'm on?" "Yes," he said, then came over. "You're Doc Searls!" I said, "Yes!" And he said "Fuck me!" and held out his hand. Damn! It's his fucking node! |
| | Now the three of us are sitting here, talking RSS trash. I love it! The Revolution is on, People! I haven't felt this jazzed and with-it since the Sixties. (Even if you can't relate to that, it's still Deep Fun, which recently taught me to get exercize this way.) |
| | [Later...] Alan Reiter's on the case already. And Ben just told me that Danger's new "hiptop" will be out soon, and that Jabber has been ported to it (among other cool things). Also that his father-in-law is none other than Olaf Soderblom, father of Token Ring. And now he's telling me about Telecom sans Frontiers, a brave organization that goes into a trouble spot, builds a big wi-fi cloud, and commences to do Good Work with it (posting picturs of children separated from parents, for example). That (like Ben's hot spot) runs on Linux, too. I understand Telecom sans Frontiers is related to Doctors Without Borders. Nice. |
| | [Still later...] Petit Delice just closed. Ben is off having dinner, but Edgar and I just moved up Kynance Place (the Mews is on the other side of a low wall, I just found out) to Scandies, a pretty little restaurant and bar, also with outdoor tables. Edgar, by the way, is an architect with Zaha Hadid, about which more is said here. |
| | And now I'm getting turned on to ecademy. |
O Lord, stuck in No-Fi again (or... maybe not)
| | Got to my hotel around 9pm last night and taking an hour to change rooms (the first was a 9 x 8 cell with bad AC and a view into — no kidding — a plumbing shaft), I promptly failed to get on the Net over dial-up. |
| | One of the iPass accounts I tried to open before I left sent an email apologizing for not getting back earlier and offered to set up an account over the phone (please call 9-5 weekdays, CDST). The other remains incomprehensible (something about downloading a Windows dialer, plus a bunch of config shit that makes no sense). |
| | A friend offered his local access account, but I neglected to follow the link he sent me before I left, so I didn't get a local number from it. |
| | In Germany one of the guys who also had an Earthlink (as do I) gave me a German number for Mindspring that had worked for him there, but now I was in England and had lost the German number anyway. |
| | The hotel had an "Internet Desk" in their Business Center, so I used that to do a bit of research (at £9 per half hour, first 10 minutes free). |
| | I found this real cool wii-fi site, which mentions a good public access point in London, but it's on the East Side and I'm in South Kensington. |
| | Then I found Consume The News, provided an obviously cool local community here, but their local wi-fi maps are a bit hard to decipher. Hyde Park is beautiful (especially on a sunny and breezy day like today), but is it possible that the Hyde Park node covers the whole place? |
| | Then I found the Mindspring U.K. access numbers and went up to my room to try some out. They worked, but the system wouldn't accept my earthlink userid and password, so I was SOL. (Aside: if Earthlink owns Mindspring, and Mindspring actually has numbers on Earth outside the U.S., why not add them to the Earthlink list of access numbers? I'm very close to killing my EL account after this.) |
| | So I gave up, went to bed, got my first full night's sleep in weeks, woke up too late for the hotel's breakfast, walked around the corner to the Cullen's Patiserie across from the Glouchester station, sat outside writing the above while enjoying a terrible English breakfast (next time, French, which is the establishment's ouevre) with fresh squeezed orange juice and a cup of outstanding coffee. Then I walked to a couple of local modern & big hotels, hoping one of them might have some kind of access. Neither did, but both sent me to the Internet café on Cromwell, where I'm working right now, for £3 per hour, plus £1 for each additional :30 minutes. Not too bad, considering the fact that I'm gonna get out of here, ASAP. |
| | And another, closer still. Kynance Mews. ("Description: Up and running - covering Kynance Mews and Kynance Place. This includes two cafes with good coffee and outside seating. Hurrah!" it says.) That may be the closest, since this one appears to be the next-closest. |
| | Okay, just for kicks I'm going to go hunt these down. Let's see how I do. Next you'll hear from me will be from one of them, I hope. |
Gall-Mart
| | Talk about a geek's gift for Mom... |
| | This is the first mainstream Linux-on-the-desktop story I've seen. Should be interesting to see how it develops. |
| | (And here is what a good test it is: I want one.) |
Environmental Alert
| | I love Steve Gillmor, but this scares me. The Net has been benefiting enormously from Microsoft's paranoid cluelessness over the last year or so. (And I say that with great respect for Microsoft's cluefullness over the years preceeding. It wasn't cluefull across the board, but the company understood a lot more than we give them credit for, as Steve points out very nicely.) |
| | I wish Microsoft well. I really do. (And hating them has done nothing but prevent a lot of otherwise userul conversations.) But the Net is an environment we don't want anybody to dominate. Not the government, not Hollywood and not Micorosoft — or any other BigCo. |
| | If Bill takes Steve's advice, Microsoft probably wouldn't end up dominating the Net (and I doubt anybody will, given the nature of the beast); but it would turn Microsoft back into the conversational black hole it has lately (and mercifully) ceased to be, and slow progress down significantly. |
Bloodrolling
2 indent or not 2 indent?
| | Just a quick formatting question. Some readers have noticed that I quit indenting the text below headlines. I did today, but yesterday (and down the lest of the scroll) I did not. |
| | I got rid of the indents partly to simplify the outlining rules that format the blog, and partly for other reasons that are purely technical (and we're still working on, so I don't want to complicate things by bringing them up). |
| | Anyway, I'm just wondering. And to help me wonder, I just put up a survey: |
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