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Monday, February 4, 2002
Cool (literally)! 
| | We are fielding 1,000 volunteers, 600 of them trained in emergency first responding (they can even restart your heart). I'm pretty darn proud of these people. |
Wider-Fi
| | But let's open our horizons a bit here. Wi-fi is to The Wireless Internet what walkie-talkies are to the cell phone system. I mean, it's real cool that I can get on the net by paying $9.95 or whatever for a session at Starbucks, but let's face it: we need wireless broadvand with a bit more range than a cordless phone. Maybe the better analogy in that case would be cordless pay phones. (Makes me think maybe we should call wi-fi "cordless" rathern than "wireless." Kinda puts the range in perspective.) |
| | Why is it so exhilarating? Partly because the pace of innovation is so hectic, and partly because the technology isn't dominated by cable or telephone monopolies. But most of all, it's because wireless expands the possibilities of the Internet. Amid all the anxiety over the future of broadband, these are all good reasons to encourage wireless whenever possible. |
| | He goes on to tout Sky Dayton and Boingo: |
| | Sky Dayton, the founder of Internet-service provider EarthLink, hopes to be one of those people. His new company, called Boingo Wireless, offers broadband wireless service in hundreds of locations -- airports, hotel lobbies, coffee shops and other public spaces. Mr. Dayton thinks he knows where MobileStar went wrong. Trying to build a wireless network, market to users and cater to customers is too complicated, he says. |
| | Boingo (www.boingo.com) will focus on the customer part of the equation and leave the construction and operation of networks to partner companies. It gives members access to a variety of wireless providers with a single account. Users install a piece of software that "sniffs" for a Wi-Fi connection, then logs them on. |
| | I like Sky, and I like the basic idea behind Boingo (though not its Windows-only client lock-in system, which I griped about here and here, with some pushback from Glenn along the way.) |
| | But I invite you to reconceive things a bit. Look at it this way: |
| | - Right now we have the Internet everywhere we have the phone system (and in some places, cable). That's Condition A.
- What we want next is to have the Internet everywhere we have cell phone service. That's Condition B.
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| | Yes, Wi-Fi is cool. I have two tranceivers right here in my house and I love having them. I even invite the neighbors to hop on (not that they can, since both my Wi-Fi signals barely get past the back deck into the yard, which is why I need two transcievers in a 1700 square foot house). |
| | But I want to get on the Net everywhere my cell phone shows a signal upwards of one little bar. |
What are friends' blogs for?
| | Skywave is getting some action. When I checked here a couple days ago there was nothing. Nada. A blank white space. |
| | I plan to add blogrolling lists and stuff like that. Soon. |
Answers
| | People ask me how I find time to blog. I think about that question the same way as Cory thinks about the "too much time on his hands" remark. |
| | Still, here's one answer: I don't find the time. I use rather little of it. Too little, if you like the kind of stuff that does show up here. There's some real good shit I'm not blogging about right now. Stuff about cellular wireless, Superbowl badvertsing, journalism, markets, voice and the 4,650,000,000 year old meteor fragment I met the other day. Bummer. |
| | Imagine if all your talk were work-related. You know: functional and important. Goal-directed. Disciplined. Life would suck, no? I heard Laura Bush explain the First Husband as "extremely disciplined." See what I mean? |
| | Here's another answer: I type fast. This post took less than three minutes. Making coffee takes more, and makes for lousy reading. |
Does not compute
| | I downloaded the latest Eudora Beta for OS X, but when I go to import, it can't find my current OS 9 Eudora files when it searches for them, and seems to offer no alternative to searching. How about a directory navigation dialog of some kind? |
Google oggling
The tide right now is, um, wide
| | Somebody just called asking me whether the tide was going in or out in Santa Barbara. I went to Google and found this, which is a real cool page. Looks like it's relevant on lots of grounds. Or beaches. Or buoys and shit like that. |
| | This tide graphic shows something most of us don't tend to realize, which is that the tides are more of a tune than a rhythm. Plotted on a graph over time, they look like a close-up of sound waves. While a tide chart might show two low tides and two high tides, today there are four of each. What we see if we watch the surf is barely discernable, even if we spend all day watching. But waves come in all sizes. What we call tides are just the longest, slowest ones. |
Grr.
| | I'm in OS X. I just saved a file called 'tides.jpg' on the desktop, which is actually a folder in my user directory. Then I went to place the picture in the blog using Radio. I browsed for the file. It didn't show up. I lookws for it with Sherlock. Again, no show. Annoying. |
| | [Later... finally got it to work by saving it to a different directory. Not sure what's up with that.] |
Later
| | Travel day. Maybe. Stay tuned. |
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