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Sunday, March 5, 2006
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 Sunday, March 5, 2006
started 3/5/2006; 2:00:59 PM - last post 3/7/2006; 12:14:13 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, March 5, 2006 
3/5/2006; 6:00:59 PM (reads: 7907, responses: 3)
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Another button for your limitless radio 
| | After visiting Kent Newsome's blog more than a few times, I finally decided to do what I should have done a long time ago: listen in to Rancho Radio, his Internet radio station. Says this in the margin: |
| | We play a rotating selection from our 26,000 plus song library of Americana, Alternative Country, Classic Rock & Blues. It's an eclectic mix of songs selected by musicians, songwriters and music lovers. Our playlists change every week, and we occasionally feature live cuts and unreleased tracks from Err Bear Music and other independent publishing companies. |
| | Oh, there's a podcast too (which I'm listening to now... it's terrific... and good to hear the voice behind the words... also perfect mood prep for my soujourn to Texas at the end of this week... still listening: man, does this guy know his music, and how to share it... wow). Best line: "It's a harder climb up Podcasters Hill than it is up Blogger's Hill." Amen on that brother. Tell me about it. |
'Fi in the sky
| | Well, there wasn't any wi-fi in the train, but my laptop tells me I passed several hundred access points on the way down. |
| | I'm part of a broadband coalition that's been working on a plan to increase broadband availability in Santa Barbara County, and one of the things that's becoming clear to us is that we need to come up with something — or several things — that work for the incumbent carriers as well as customers. I've spilled a lot of pixels writing about What's Wrong With Carriers, but I also think we need to approach carriers with business plans and ideas that work for them, so they'll see opportunities beyond leveraging current models, or expanding only by offering fast-lane service for the likes of Google and Yahoo. |
| | I bring this up because it seems to me that the muni wi-fi story is too often cast as a fight between public and private sectors: municipalities and citizens on one side, and cable/phone utilities on the other. |
| | I'm looking for ways to avoid that, if it's possible, with our project. Which isn't a muni wi-fi one, but involves the same potential antagonists. |
Training
| | Heading to the first of two non-unconferences: eTech and SXSW. Gonna be on the road for way too long. (Ever since I started reading Dear Elena, I can hardly bear to be gone a day.) |
| | The first leg will be Amtrak from Santa Barbara to San Diego. I've heard there's some wi-fi on some Amtrak trains. If this is one of those (a long shot, I figure), you may see more soon. If not, see ya tonight or tomorrow. |
Distinctions
| | Dave gives Nick Carr an award for the highest snark-to-information ratio, renames Memeorandum Snarksforall (Hey Gabe, the domain is still available), and ices the cake with today's Quote du Jour: The latest controversy is whether Scoble knows his ass from his elbow. Let me know when this is settled. Hmm... How long before Technorati gives us a snarkiness slider? |
The store and the story
| | After 1.x decades of producing home espressos and cappuccinos with a Starbucks Barrista machine — and two years after giving it a nice review in Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools — we decided we wanted to step up and get a professional-class machine for the new house we'll soon occupy. |
| | We were tempted by the Expobar Brewtus as well, since it's is "the result of a groundbreaking collaboration between the Whole Latte Love tech department, customer service staff and the craftsmen of Expobar", a Spanish company. |
| | But we wanted to try before we bought, preferably from a retailer with an actual store. That led us to North Beach in San Francisco, specifically to Thomas Cara, Ltd.. |
| | Thomas Cara has quite a story, which you can read here, here and here. Christopher Cara, son of Thomas (who brought the first espresso machines from Italy to San Francisco, and set up shop there after the war in the 1940s), is a treat all by himself. |
| | His price is about the same as the online stores, and his service is supurb. Also, he sells coffee selected and roasted to his father's original recipe, brought back from Milan way back when. It's outstanding. |
| | The only drawback was delivery time. We bought it in November, and Chrisopher had ordered a set of ECMs from the company in Italy back in July. They arrived in January. |
| | More are on their way, however. And Christopher has lots of machines that also brew great coffee for less fancy prices. If you love coffee, you should pay a visit to the store. |
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Wigwam Jones - Re: Sunday, March 5, 2006
3/6/2006; 7:08:25 PM (reads: 1509, responses: 2)
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Regarding community wi-fi - here's the story that nobody knows. Take a look at the small town of Rochelle, Illinois. It is situated at the intersection of several railroads, just outside of Chicago - but too far away to be a 'bedroom community' - that's important in this case.
When railroads were the thing, Rochelle had a real set of options, being a hub city. When the railroads started hurting, so did Rochelle.
Rochelle owns their own power plants - they are their own utilities - they even provide dial tone and cable tv to their residents. Unusual, yes?
But in the mid 1990's, they decided to become their own ISP as well. Using the right-of-way on their own power/phone poles, they put up a fiber-optic OC3 ring around the city. Connected to a load-balanced pair of T1's from two seperate upstread providers, with options to buy more bandwidth as needed. They put in a rack of modems and sold dialup to their citizens as a traditional ISP of the time. They offered an attractive package to lure businesses to settle there - lots of low-cost land (many abandoned city-owned buildings downtown), tax breaks, and a fiber-optic cable into your phone closet with high-speed Internet access at a low cost - when fractional T1 cost in the thousands per month (circa 1995).
The goal was to make Rochelle into a town where businesses would want to be located. Close to Chicago - but not paying Chicago real estate prices. Access to railroads to ship and received goods - also major highways. Infrastructure favorable to business and tax breaks. And of course, if the businesses came, the theory was, the town's population would grow. This was a town that was slowly being decimated. Unlike many such towns, the city managers didn't want to let it happen.
When I last did work for them, they were also planning to do such things as video arraignments from jail to courthouse, video/sound streaming training material into their school system for classroom enhancements, SCADA monitoring of their power plants, and so on. I want to stress - this is a SMALL TOWN.
Flash forward, they're doing wireless high-speed access for selected areas of their city, to meet the needs of their citizens.
This is the story - these were the guys who had the vision, and still hold the fire. Not CA - we know that CA gets it. This is a tiny town about 80 miles from Chicago that didn't want to die.
Somebody needs to look at this. What a story. And they were doing this ten years ago. I had a tiny part in it, but it is great to see where they've gone from those days.
http://www.rmu.net/acs/default.aspx
Smooches,
Wiggy
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Doc Searls - Re: Sunday, March 5, 2006
3/7/2006; 12:27:49 AM (reads: 972, responses: 1)
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This is great stuff.
Do you know how they're doing?
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Wigwam Jones - Re: Sunday, March 5, 2006
3/7/2006; 4:14:13 AM (reads: 1077, responses: 0)
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I am not in direct contact with them anymore - I was just a consultant who helped design their IP security way back when. However, from their website, they're doing wifi for their city -
http://www.rmu.net/release03.html
Looks like some success - 20 miles of fiber optic cable, 200+ IP telephony customers - who would not want to live in a city that looks to the future like this one?
Wiggy
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