Archive for June, 2007

The Senate has just passed an environment bill that includes higher CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that will “…increase average fuel economy by 40 percent to 35 miles per gallon for cars, SUVs and pickup trucks by 2020.”

The auto industry is up in arms about this. They claim this is just not realistic and that meeting the standards will raise the cost of their vehicles by thousands of dollars among other reasons.

But just last night I watched an ad for an SUV that ALREADY gets 35 mpg! If they can make and market a consumer SUV now that meets the standards they have little faith in their own technological abilities to make across the board advances in the next 13 years.

So there I was last Saturday. One of our servers was spinning out of control. I had to stay on top of it. Something on one of our hosting accounts was causing a server load to spike so that at moments the server would become unavailable. But I had to get my daughter to a softball game in Arcata. What to do, what to do?

Then I remembered the Arcata Community Center, right next to her ball field, had finally gotten in Wi Fi access. This had been put in to accommodate the recent Broadband Forum. Hoping beyond hope that the access was still running, I packed up my laptop and got my daughter to the game.

While she was warming up I trudged over to the community center and sat on the bench outside the locked doors. Yes! I was able to shut down the account, test some things and monitor the server. I got back to the ball field for the start of the game. And only once or twice stole off to the community center to make sure everything was running fine.  Thanks to everyone who helped get this resource up and running.

But this is more about my story. Even though this blog is all about me! The fact is, if we want to attract and keep more high tech businesses we need to keep building and improving the telecommunications infrastructure. That means getting that alternate fiber in place. That means creating more Internet access points like the Wi Fi network at the community center. That means getting broadband to the far reaches of the rural areas of the region.

The good news is that this  is happening. There a many people working to get this done one way or another. We will not be left behind.

Last week I gave a talk at the Humboldt County Library about future technology. It’s fun to discuss where things are headed. I tried to stay within the realm of the probable, which means I didn’t project out very far. The further ahead one looks, the more difficult it is to be accurate. That is, unless your someone like Raymond Kurzweil, who seems to have great track record for making specific predictions 10-20 years out.

Anyway, while I was waiting around in my office to go to the library for the talk I did what I always do when I have a few spare minutes at the computer. I started scanning all my RSS feeds and came across a site that is about the future and technology in terms of generations. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about this while working on the presentation. But the information on the site struck a chord, and I ended my talk by reading this quote from the site:

“Digital Natives” are those people for whom the internet and related technologies are givens, whereas “Digital Immigrants” migrated to these technologies later in life (Prensky, 2001). Digital Immigrants know how life existed in the pre-networked society, whereas Digital Natives take networked communication as the foundation of their lives.

My daughter, whom I love dearly, is one of these ‘digital natives’ . I wonder if a schism between digital natives and digital immigrants will radically affect our relationship, no matter how much I work at staying on top of technology. After all, that’s the point. I have to work at it. They swim in it. Breathe it. And don’t think much about it.

Perhaps, on this Father’s Day, my daughter and I should do something purely in the analog world together. Like take a hike along the coast. I better IM her about this.

Of course, local readers know this already by now. But when it happened, many did not and there was no way to let people know. Some radio stations made mention of  the failure, but had little information to go on. Apparently,  some contractor, possibly with a backhoe, broke the line (that used to be the fanciful example we used for what could happen). I really think at&t has an obligation to release information to the public immediately so that radio stations and others who can still communicate can spread the word.

I had newspapers, radio stations and clients calling our office to find out what was going on. Obviously, I had no information. Fortunately, for our  web hosting clients our servers reside outside the area, so even though our local clients  couldn’t reach their own web sites, the rest of the world could.

Savetheinternet.org posted a story and video supposedly of outgoing at&t CEO Ed Whitacre’s farewell talk to the company’s board. The post featured some outrageously candid “quotes” from the talk such as:

“There’s a problem. It’s called Net Neutrality,” Whitacre told the heirs to AT&T’s telecommunications empire. “Well, frankly, we say to hell with that. We’re gonna put up some toll booths and start charging admission.”

And:

“Will Congress let us do it?” Whitacre asks his colleagues. “You bet they will — cuz we don’t call it cashin’ in. We call it ‘deregulation.’ ”

Outrageous statements  indeed! But totally fabricated by SavetheInternet.org. Unfortunately, some news and blogger folk didn’t actually watch the video of the “speech” which was clearly a satirical cartoon, and voiced their own outrage ad Whitacre’s statements. Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud podcast (one of my favorites) was one of them.  Even Andrew Cohill, fell for the joke. Still his comments that follow his references to the speech have real value on what’s coming if the issue of Net Neutrality is not addressed seriously.

It’s interesting that some of us who feel passionate about trying to protect Net Neutrality  are willing to believe the worst of intentions of the mega corporations that control what we see as a crucial piece of the common infrastructure of our society.

The commercials stating that started running Sunday night.

But so what? No one will be carrying it locally as far as I can tell because we have no AT&T cellular service. I called Edge and they confirmed that their network won’t support the phone.

Besides, at $499 and $599, who but a fan boy would get one…ok, maybe me.

BTW, with all the hoopla over being all touch screen, it’s still just a concept machine. The IPhone (which is coming out June 29 but we can’t get one did I say that?) will have touch screen technology in the consumer’s hands.

I upgraded Wordpress the other day (the software that runs this blog). It went pretty smoothly, but none of my feeds were working. It seems it’s fixed now. But it appears as if format has changed. So if you were subscribed to this blog with an RSS reader and you’ve been getting an error, you may have to subscribe again to get the proper xml file. Just click on the ‘Subscribe in a Reader’ link at the top of the left column.