Month: June 2003

building the wrong thing

The Man Pushing Faster Internet Access in U.S.

For telecommunications companies, making the investment in broadband access is not without risk. The costs for building high-speed networks are enormous, whether through wires on the ground or through wireless networks. Moreover, the companies must market the concept to consumers who are already paying monthly fees for home telephone, cellphone and cable television service and may not want to pay yet more for high-speed access.

The gripe in this article is ostensibly about the high cost of building broadband networks, but a careful reading — heck, even a cursory one — shows that the industry’s problem is in building a business model, not a network. They’ve got dark fiber (unused fiber-optic capacity) under the streets of most cities. Cable TV passes 95% of the homes in the US. The network is there, but they haven’t figured out how to make people pay what they want to charge for it.

There’s no mention of the costs associated with these technologies from the consumer end. An additional $50 a month for faster email and stock quote access is a hard sell: make it $9.99 and see what happens.

decision time for the STP

It’s getting down to the wire when I need to decide if I’m going to commit to this challenge. 36 miles of training yesterday in 90+ degree heat (don’t sneer, you East Coast dwellers, you have air conditioned homes to go to) and it was hard going at the end. Speeds between 17 and 21 mph, but I’m learning it really helps to ride with someone. I seem to have little trouble keeping up with all but the fastest riders, but my own drive keeps me at 17-18 mph.

I started to get a pounding headache that reminded me of my youth in sunny south Florida. I have since learned that can be a symptom of heatstroke. I don’t think hydration was an issue, as I drank the full capacity of a 70 oz camelback-style water tank, but perhaps it was. I sweat in flourescent lighting, so I’ll need to add capacity or fill up more frequently. 100 miles on consecutive days might require a tanker truck to ride alongside me . . . .

I just scored a Trailabike from eBay this evening so I can make these outings a family affair. Took my son and heir out this afternoon, but his range is only about 3-5 miles and the pace is a not-so-brisk 4 mph (training wheels don’t make for much speed). I figure him sitting behind gives me 60 pounds of additional training weight (groan) but should help him transition to 2 wheels. He’ll get used to the motion and posture of being upright. And I’ll burn some calories.

learning the iPod

This is one of those devices that borders on the magical. I like the design of the intelligence behind the interface: while the the thumbwheel is simple and elegant, the details like it keeping track of what you listen to and allowing the user to rate tracks and preset the EQ for each track is very nice. The custom playlists are nice, allowing you to build a playlist by genre, time period or artist, as quickly as you can ask for it.

Maybe all this has been covered in reviews or I’m the last person to discover these cool things . . . I think it’s very interesting.

I have 204 tracks, 15.8 hours and 1.09 Gb used so far. I’m finding my biggest problem to be finding disk space for the music: I’m going to be limited by that until I can get some space freed up or buy some additional storage (80 Gb FireWire drives are available on eBay as well).

isn’t it all about interaction?

Eric Meyer on CSS: Project 7

We can skip around the web all day long, clicking from page to page, but when you get right down to it, the engine of expansion on the Web is forms. Without them, people couldn’t input their personal information to let them buy stuff– let alone actually tell an e-commerce server what they want to buy.

Doing forms was got me interested in all this stuff back in the day (1994 or so). I had spent too much time collecting paper and rekeying information and when I saw that you could remove that whole process with this new WWW stuff, I was sold. Many ugly forms and bad perl CGI scripts later, I still agree with Eric Meyer.

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

I was forwarded this article and it was chockful o’ good stuff: I’m citing fair use in my copy and paste of it below, but that’s only because the website doesn’t offer any public access to this article.

I’m not going to cite any of the content: it’s worth reading in its entirety, I think.

It is interesting to see how many different views there are. Where some see this as a valuable way to get additional comments on a pending article (“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.), others see it as too great a risk to their professional standing. Some revel in the levelling of the hierarchy, while others are not so comfortable yielding any of their status.
Continue reading “Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?”

market makers

BlogShares – swa lejeune

So I spent some time playing this BlogShares game and successfully boosted my portfolio from the initial $500 and 1000 shares in this fine online property to just over $23,000. Not bad, I thought. Then the game’s minders posted the top players for May: the top player is somewhere well north of that.

Total Real Worth $207,093,803.07

Wow.

if you care, tune in

FCC Audio/Video Events Home Page – Worldwide access via the Internet to live and pre-recorded broadcasts of selected FCC events

The Commission will consider a Report and Order concerning its broadcast multiple ownership rules. This is the first of 2 open meetings in June.

This will be the first of two open meetings in June to discuss the pending rules changes on media ownership or concentration. The bottom-line is that the FCC will be deciding whether or not to strike down or modify the rules on how many media outlets in a community or market — radio stations, TV stations, newspapers — can be owned by a single owner.

Read more here and below.

And then contact the FCC and tell them how you feel about this: it all gets into the record, so exercise your right. They’re your airwaves, after all.
Continue reading “if you care, tune in”