A cable (perhaps several) cut by one or more ships anchored off Egypt in the Mediterranean has reduced Internet access in to India and other countries in the Middle East to a crawl. The quote in the article from the Register says the services may be out for 10-15 days. With so much work being outsourced to places like India, this could really cause some havoc. We have connections with a company in India...
Monthly Archives: January 2008
A Recycling Bargain
We’ve got a bunch of old computer stuff laying around and I have been lazy about getting rid of it. I want to do the right thing, of course, by recycling this stuff. Among other things we have 3 old CRTs taking up a lot of space. Well, it turns out Staples will accept CRTs for recycling for free. When I first heard about this I called to make sure, and today I dropped...
Open Source Earning Recognition With Real Money
There are a lot of open source projects that are starting to attract big dollars. Drupal has recently pulled in $7 million and MySQL was just purchased by Sun for $1 billion. And now WordPress has attracted $29.5 million. This is an exciting transition for these entities that have produced tremendous software that we have been using for years. This blog is powered by WordPress, we have developed several sites using Drupal and all...
The Best of Macworld…For Me
I didn’t go to Macworld, darn it. But I did read stuff and watched the keynote. The new MacBook Air is cool looking but way too expensive. I don’t own an IPhone so the new stuff for that didn’t hold much interest. I just got a Tivo so I’m not about to switch to Apple TV at the moment. So, was there anything unveiled this year that floated my boat? Well, yes, although it...
You Win Some, You Lose Some
After the City of Eureka postponed acting on a wireless network feasibility study, partly, according to Councilmember Mike Jones, because there was no crowd shouting for it (although several speakers voices very strong arguments and only one person spoke in opposition), a bunch of people turned out at the Planning Commissions meeting to speak on behalf of re-instating a free standing Telecommunications Element in the General Plan Update. Led by Tina Nerat who wrote...
Some Setbacks for Telecommunications Efforts
Last night the City of Eureka put off approval of funds to conduct a feasibility study for developing a wireless network. It’s the right approach in that the study would provide necessary information on what’s possible, how to create it and how to sustain such a network. Due partly to an earlier decision in the meeting that gave Eureka Police and Fire Department employees a raise, the council felt budgetary constraints and asked staff...
OLPC to be Distributed in U.S.
A while back I wrote about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program. Originally intended to be sold in third-world countries, the company has announced they will make the computers available to poor children in the U.S. working with the state governments. Back when the computers were available to be purchased by individuals there was talk at RTC about buying a couple and somehow getting local schools interested in the technology. But since that...
Redwood Coast Connect Final Meetings
The last two public meetings by Redwood Coast Connect willbe held this week. The goal of these meetings is to gather information on broadband usage and accessibility to try and aggregate demand to expand services throughout the region. Tuesday, January 8, the meeting will take place in Redway at the Healy Senior Center. Thursday, January 10, the meeting will be at the Wharfinger Building Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center, next to the Adorni Center in...
I Got My Tivo Back!
It’s sometimes nice to have a soap box. Suddenlink’s head of technology for the western region got wind of my blog post about the problems I had with Tivo and Suddenlink (probably through Google’s News Alerts service). He followed a link to our web site and called my office yesterday. I went over what happened and he promised to look in to it. Sure enough, that afternoon I got a call from Suddenlink local...
Our Walk in the Woods
I was going to write something about our little adventure at the Headwaters Trail yesterday, but my wife Marianne beat me to the punch. Here, in essence, is a letter she sent in to the Times-Standard editor, somewhat in the vein of their Toasts and Roasts format: Toasts to the Bureau of Land Management for upgrading the Headwaters Park trail into a beautiful, accessible and inspiring resource for all ages and mobilities. The wide,...
