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| Monday, September 13, 2004 |
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Shalom, everybody 
Watch that space
| | I just volunteered for SpaceShipOne's launch crowd on Sept 29th, 2004. It is also (and, I hope, not coincidentally in the minds of many) the day my favorite asteroid, Toutatis, make the closest approach to earth of nearly any major asteroid, roughly 1.6m km - or only 4 times the distance from here to the moon - that's a short hop to some of the most desirable real estate in the solar system - billions of tons of useful materials and radiation shielding, and an elliptical orbit that leads to Venus, Mars, the Belt, and the moons of Jupiter.... |
| | I'm interested in going to the SpaceShipOne launch too. Who else? |
Lame-ass cable operator news du jour
| | One grace of the utility marketplace is the ability of local and regional governments to provide what monopoly utilities can't, or won't. Such is sometimes the case with high speed Internet service. |
| | Across the United States, towns and cities dissatisfied with data services provided by the private sector are now delivering high-speed connectivity to the doorstep, often at lower prices. |
| | In the process, however, municipalities are facing increasingly fierce opposition from cable operators and telecommunications companies unhappy with the competition. In some cases, cable companies and telcos are fighting to bar utilities entirely from providing broadband in the future. |
| | It isn't just competition, dudes. It's service. |
| | Here's what we want from that service, in addition to speed: Symmetry, and lack of restrictions. No port 80 and port 25 blockages, for example. We want anybody to be able to set up a business, or do whatever business they already have. |
| | Nobody expects to pay nothing to operate in a free marketplace. But they don't want that marketplace conceived and run as a one-way piping system for pumping "content" from entertainment and publishing producers to the same consumers who have been soaking up "media" in the same manner for the past 50 years. |
| | What smart cities and counties want is to create the conditions where enterprise can flourish. Fat fiber to doorsteps, provided at a fair and reasonable price, without usage restrictions intended to to favor a single industry, is the way to do that. |
| | Bravo to the places that are finding the way. Also to the cable and telco companies that support the effort and provide real leadership, instead of knee-jerk institutional resistance. |
| | Read the piece. It's scary. |
Oven timer alarm
| | 4:00am... "This is your wake-up call," the recorded voice on the phone said. "The weather today will be sunny, with a temperature in the mid-hundreds. If there is any way we can help you, dial zero." |
| | So, I'm thinking, 400 degrees? 500? How about just opening the oven and turning it off? I think we're done here. |
| | Some people love it. The bell kid who took my bags to my room, for example. Lived here all his life, except for a little sojourn to Concord, in the Bay Area, which isn't quite Alaska, even comparitively. He loves the heat. Same with Ted Cook of LPI, who has lived here for 25 years. "Went for a nice bike ride this morning," he told me last night. Ted's from Minnesota, which is Alaska, comparitively. So is Buzz Bruggeman, who lives in Orlando and grew up in International Falls, that famous "Icebox of the Nation". Now, more than ever, it makes sense to have International Falls and surrounding Koochiching County as your location for all of your cold weather and snow testing programs. Whether conducting development, correlation, or total vehicle durability testing, we have all of the elements to ensure a successful program. |
| | At the moment this has a certain appeal to me. |
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