Archive for December, 2007

Starting today the Eureka Reporter has stopped printing papers on Monday and Tuesday, and I feel relieved. While I have enjoyed scanning through the paper each day for news nuggets and the odd odd opinion, I hate having all those blue and clear (from the Times-Standard) plastic bags to deal with. We’re big recyclers (which has cut our garbage total by about half). But I confess I have not been recycling those plastic bags. I think I will add them to my recycle routine. Make it a New Year’s resolution. Besides us, of course, there are all those 10s of thousands of blue bags that are delivered to other homes and the many that I see discarded in gutters throughout the neighborhoods.

Ironically, there is a good My Word column today chastising the Times-Standard’s plastic bag policy in…the Times-Standard. However, I can’t find it anywhere online. There is this opinion piece from Dec. 21 that talks about the evil of plastic bags. But no mention of the ones the newspapers use.

Anyway, getting back to the Eureka Reporter. They recently launched their Flash based e-paper that is supposed to mimic the print version. Like the Times-Standard’s e paper, I don’t get the point of this except to pretend there is some added value for the advertisers to see their ads online as they appear in the print version (when there is a print version).  I find navigating these things awkward and frustrating and basically contrary to the whole purpose of the web (hint: linking). But, now that it’s built, I suppose it’s pretty easy to maintain. I also don’t get their justification for asking all the information to gain access to th e-paper. I can’t imagine any advertiser accepting that kind of user information as accurate. It’s easy enough to create a throw away email address and put in fake information to get an account to access the e-paper.

I do like some things about the new html version of the site, though.  It finally offers the ability to place comments (all anonymously, so no need for an account). They are finally offering RSS Feeds as well. It’s a Drupal site, so one might imagine they will be adding more services as they install and configure more Drupal modules. Will blogs be far behind, now that the T-S has adopted that feature in a big way?

Since I don’t have my Tivo to play with I figured I’d fiddle around with this blog, clean up a few things, change the theme, etc. Besides changing the theme, I finally found and uploaded a bunch of archives from my old radio show “Talking Tech” that I used to do on KHSU.  Maybe I’ll revive Talking Tech here at some point.

I’ve long been wanting a Tivo and finally got one for Christmas. For 3 days we all had fun learning the system, setting up recordings, fast-forwarding through commercials, playing stored programs. Then today it all came crashing down. We turned on the TV and nothing worked. No signal from Tivo, no signal from cable.

I called Tivo support and after checking all the obvious possibilities, they determined that my cable company was blocking access to all channels and that I would have to get them to install cable cards. Well, this seemed hardly possible. In none of the material I read did I see that cable cards were required in order to allow Tivo to work. I asked the Tivo support person if the cable cards would cost extra and she assured me they would not.

So, I stopped by Suddenlink (my only choice for cable service) and talked to them about this. It turns out that yes, after Suddenlink found out about our new Tivo they started blocking access thus requiring these cable card installations. It also turns out that Suddenlink charges $60 to install them and $2.00 per month service charge! It gets worse: Apparently they can’t guarantee the cards will work. Huh? They have a policy to block channel access to Tivo that requires cards that may not work. Is that legal? But wait! It gets worse! Apparently Suddenlink doesn’t have any of the cable cards that are in working order. And they couldn’t tell me when they would have them.

So, after spending hundreds of dollars on the Tivo box, another $130 on the Tivo service I have a lump of useless hardware, that I may or may not ever be able to make work because my only cable company is either totally inept or evil. Perhaps both.

Local entrepreneur and web developer Aaron Antrim has created a system for publishing and maintaining bus schedules and routes. The system makes it easy for riders to find a route and schedule from point A to point B.

Among his first clients is the Humboldt Transit Authority which manages three lines: Eureka Transit Service, Arcata &  Mad River Transit Authority, and Redwood Transit System which runs throughout the county.

Aaron’s system allows riders to  enter departure and arrival information to find appropriate bus schedules. This feature is really a front end for accessing Google’s Transit system. Aaron has done the workof entering the local bus schedules in to Google’s system. It’s a neat idea which should encourage more people to take advantage of our “mass” transit system whenever possible.

Apparently due to the holidays, the deadline for getting $500,000 pledged to Delta Airlines tickets was extended from Friday to this Wednesday. According to this article in the Eureka Reporter, RREDC is very close with $479,000 pledged. That’s pretty astounding in such a short time.

We don’t do much flying, at least not on purpose. So, I couldn’t see pledging even the minimum $2,000 for our company. But apparently there are plenty of businesses that do fly enough to make this plan appealing. And the prospect 0f Delta opening another flight route to Salt Lake City encouraging even more flying seems to have upset some people.

The only place I’ve actually seen this opposition was on the Redwood Technology Consortium’s mailing list (this links to the December archive by subject, you can join the list here). A lot of time was spent over a couple days last week arguing over the degradation of our environment caused by airline travel. Before the argument devolved into grandstanding and name calling (at which point I called a halt to the whole thing), the discussion did raise an interesting larger question. On one side were a couple people who insisted that the only way to save the planet is through personal commitment to stringently reducing our carbon footprint and further, imposing that stringency on everyone through government policy. On the other side was the opinion that such interventions are unnecessary since the market, if left alone, will produce sufficient technological innovations to solve all the global warming and energy problems we now face.

This is an age-old battle that will never be won by either side simply because there has never been a way of testing either theory. Progress has always been the result of a mixture of personal change, government intervention and market forces. In the case of global warming and the energy crisis (I see them inextricably joined) personal commitments will help find new paths and create new markets; governmental leadership will be needed to encourage change and innovation, and the ever pressing need will certainly drive businesses to create new products and services.

The real questions with global warming/energy are: Even with all these forces marshaled to solve the problem, will the effort be too little too late? Can we change fast enough to fend off the worst effects?

The California Public Utilities Commission CPUC) has created an $100 million fund and an agency to manage the fund “…to bring broadband service to unserved and underserved areas of California, many of which are rural, remote, or socio-economically disadvantaged communities.” That’s good for the north coast, much of which meets that description. The money will be dispensed over a two year period beginning January 1, 2008 so it’s clear there is some urgency to getting this state up to speed.

Speed in this context is set at a baseline of 3 Mbps download and 1 Mpbs upload. That might not seem like much for those of us already enjoying broadband, but if all you can get is 56K on a good day, this will be a blessing.

The funding comes at a great time as the Redwood Coast Connect project will be winding up its study of the market deman for the region about the same time as the application deadline for the fund in early June.

You can read the full press release.

Once agai, Congress has shown how clueless it is when it comes to the Internet. Here a quote from a News.com article:

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill saying that anyone offering an open Wi-Fi connection to the public must report illegal images including “obscene” cartoons and drawings–or face fines of up to $300,000.

That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user’s account be retained for subsequent police inspection.

Such a bill, if signed in to law, would cripple the Internet.  Gee, I guess then would wouldn’t have to worry about falling so far behind the rest of the world in broadband development.  but at least the children will be “safe”…

This Wednesday the Redwood Technology Consortium will celebrate 10 years of helping advance the cause of technology on the north coast. The Times-Standard has a great retrospective. Part One was published last Tuesday. Look for Part Two this Tuesday.

The party will be held at the Plaza Grill Plaza Room, Wednesday, Dec. 5, starting at 5:30 PM. There will be some great food, a no-host bar, some chances to win prizes, a PowerPoint history and other fun stuff. Come celebrate the holidays and help us kick off the next 10 years of the RTC’s work.