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Monday, July 23, 2007
Getting over Greenland 
| | Last Saturday morning we crossed the southern end of Greenland at about 61° North, flying east to west. It was the only clear view on the entire trip, but it was spectacular, as only Greenland can be: a small continent covered in ice, with glaciers carving down to the sea through mountains with ages running into the billions of years, shedding icebergs into the cobalt-blue ocean. Click here or on the shot above to see the set I've assembled so far. I have many more to add, but no time to do that, or to label the ones already there. Maybe some fellow Greenland freaks can weigh in with the particulars. |
| | (Gotta say, there's something nicely cool about uploading a Greenland pic and post to one's blog while sitting in a California DMV waiting for one's number to be called. Tech rocks.) |
Moments of exquisite typicality
| | If you're looking for a near-perfect cross section of your fellow Americans (or Californians, or Arkansans, or Wisconsonians, or Whatevarians), get yourself down to your local Department of Motor Vehicles. Sooner or later you have to anyway, if you want to operate a valid driver's license. |
| | I'm in my old DMV in Redwood City. That's where I got at least two driver's licenses prior to the one that runs out on my birthday this Sunday. That one I picked up in Santa Barbara not long after moving there. The face on it looks like a prison photo. Maybe I can do better today. |
| | I doubt I would have noticed that the license was due to run out. That would probably have happened at a car rental counter in Boston later this week, when I'm due to rent a car for a period of time that will go way past my birthday. So here is a public thanks to the alert TSA officer in Santa Barbara, who pointed out what I should have known. She wished me a happier birthday than it would have been if she hadn't brought the problem to my attention. |
| | Interesting to see how they've dealt with the old lines that used to snake around the inside of the facility. Now you take a number, sit down and wait to be called. TV screens post the numbers that are up, and the windows to which they are assigned, while a recorded female voice says "Now serving B, zero, seven, six, at window number ten!" Like it's very pleasant news. Which it is, for the person with the number. Anyway, it's a better system than the old one. |
| | Anyway, I have to make a meeting at noon today in San Francisco. I'll be a little late, I think; but at least I'll be legal. |
Living beginnings
Enjoy multilingual mouth meltdown
Wanted: Local Public Radio
| | Through the thirty-some years that NPR has been around, public radio has become more and more of an American BBC — or about as close as we can get, given that the market and regulatory models are completely different. NPR and the other main public radio sources — PRI, American Public Media (which would rather not go by APM) and PRX — together comprise a mix that sounds to me like the domestic equivalents of BBC Radio Two, Three and Four. Scanning about the lower end of the UK FM band (where most U.S. public stations also live), that's the impression I got. |
| | But I didn't realize how national public radio is in the U.S. until I listened to BBC local stations in London, Oxford and Birmingham. While it was nice to listen to local stuff on the Oxford and Birmingham stations, I didn't catch how well BBC local radio highlighted a hole in American public radio until I heard BBC London during and after the floods that hit last Friday. Reports of closures, floods and outages on the District and Circle tube lines were even more current than what I found on the services' own website (which isn't bad at all), especially since listeners called in with particulars about their districts and neighborhoods. It sounded like local radio in the U.S. before the whole commercial band went to hell in the '90s. |
| | Much of the response to my proposal for lighting a fire for public radio in Santa Barbara centered on how local public radio does not "fit the NPR mold". In London the problem became clear to me: the names NPR, APM (sorry) and PRI contain "National", "American" and "International", respectively. Their scale and scope are nationwide, and wider. None are local. |
| | What we need is LPR. A number of writers responding to my post pointed out that we have a kind of local public radio with KCSB, the excellent station at UCSB. I love KCSB. But it's an alternative station. It's not mainstream, nor should it be. It's mission is to provide "a forum for unpopular, controversial and/or neglected perspectives on important local, national and international issues". That's great. But what we need is to replace the local mainstream station that we lost when KTMS and KIST sold their souls, way back when. The News-Press' station on 1290 fills some of that role, but with almost zero live local news. (And no website, which is downright weird for a news station.) Commercial radio isn't going to step forward here. It's been too screwed up for too long. The public needs their own station. Here's how John Quimby put it on the Blogabarbara blog: |
| | How ironic that in this modern communication age we're reduced to the kind of small town backwater local news coverage we might have expected decades ago. But of course back in the olden days we already had KDB and KTMS! |
| | Tom Storke was licensed to operate KTMS in order to cover the county with local news. His application was, in part, a community response to the 1925 earthquake. He did it. KIST did it. Other local stations have done it. (Hey Dave, I listened to KCSB broadcast the IV riots and the burning of the bank.) |
| | Where is our local news coverage now? I think it's time we asked to have it back. |
| | BBC local radio is a great model. |
| | How can we make something like that happen here? That's a question I'll be visiting over the next couple of days. |
Auctioning the oceans, again
| | I was going to write a long Thing about Google's freshly expressed commitment to open broadband platforms, and its conditional intention to bid on 700MHz spectrum, provided the FCC "adopt rules for the auction that ensure that, regardless of who wins the spectrum at auction, consumers' interests are served". |
| | The FCC has competing goals of maximizing revenue from the auction (suggesting less regulation) and protecting the public (suggesting more rules to force competition). Having open access requirements like those suggested by Google will spur competition and grow an economy around this spectrum. It will also put commercial pressure on mobile operators and broadband companies to reduce the restrictions they have on current broadband and mobile services. |
| | Google isn¹t always not evil, but in this case they are going to bat for all of us against some players with pretty bad history when it comes to offering consumer products. I¹m behind them on this. And to the FCC: please learn from past mistakes, ignore the lobbyists this time, and do what is in the best interests of the public. |
| | I think the chance of that is zero, but I'm still glad to see Google going to bat both for the individual and for a marketplace that includes little more than the one company that wins the auction. |
| | The Net needs to be an ocean that lifts all boats — including countless businesses. Not a network of canals owned by trench-diggers and container cargo haulers. Even if you don't care much about "the consumer", and want "the market" to win, ask what regulatory regime would result in the largest markeplace for the largest number of companies. I think Google's market model looks better than what we already know we'll get from the likes of Verizon and AT&T. |
| | By the way, I'm betting Google will bid regardless of what the FCC does. |
Always blame the phone company
| | Catching up after a record-long trip to the UK. Just went through the phone messages on my Verizon cell phone (which only works in North America) — a backlog that goes all the way to June. The voicemail voice doesn't tell me when anybody called, or what number they called from, which is too bad. The phone filled up, also, with surprisingly few messages. "The mailbox is full", with seven shortish new messages and five shortish saved ones. Kinda under-featured, seems to me. The phone did remember some of the numbers, though, so I'll be going back through those calling people back over he next couple of days. If you're one of them, my apologies for the delay. |
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