Month: May 2009

What they're reading in the Snowboarding Hall of Fame

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(Second in a series.)

Jake Burton Carpenter, also known as Jake Burton, is the founder of Burton Snowboards and, by all accounts, one of the two or three most significant people in the history of the sport of snowboarding. I know the guy. (How I know him is a story for another time.) The last time I saw Jake, I told him about my plan to ride my bicycle all over New England & interview famous people, and/or interesting people, about a topic of great import to everybody on the planet. (That bike trip, which I *will* do, is another story for another time). Anyway, I asked Jake if I could interview him for my bike/video project. “I don’t want to interview you because I care what you have to say,” I told him. “I want to interview you because you’re famous.” “Not all that famous,” Jake replied. “Oh yeah?” I said. “So, how much did Hewlett Packard pay you to be in that commercial you did for them? How much did American Express pay you?”

If I remember right, it was Peter Krygowski who added, “Jake, for Christ’s sake. Your face is plastered on the side of every public bus in Chicago.” Jake said, “It is? I wonder if I’m getting paid for that.”

(Although the only IMDB link I could find for Peter was related to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Peter was also, before getting fired, the Art Director on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2. Or one of those early seasons. So when you meet him, prostrate yourself.) (Forgive me if I don’t recall the conversations precisely; the three of us were pretty drunk by the time this exchange happened, and for good reason.) (I believe Peter K. currently has something to do with “Guitar Hero”, although Google was pretty unhelpful on this topic.)

Anyway, whatever Hewlett Packard and American Express paid Burton to be in their ads is guaranteed to be a fucktonne more than I paid him to be in the advert below, since I didn’t pay him a thing. The production values of this vid are not exactly up to HP/AMEX standards, but what the hey. I certainly got my money’s worth. My only problem with the bit is that I expressly asked Jake to push the “buy the books” meme over the “download the free books” meme. Oh well. So thanks, Jake, and I look forward to interviewing you for real sometime this summer.

The rest of you, please imagine Jake saying “buy John’s books”, and act accordingly.

Among the BioInformaticians

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Last Tuesday and Wednesday I attended the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, at the World Trade Center in Boston. I was a booth babe for Bioinformatics.org, (“The open access institute”) and also was pimping my books. I discovered the BioInformatics organization about a decade ago while pimping my books (what else) at the O’Reilly BioInformatics conference in Tucson. They started out as basically a sourceforge for bioinformatic software, kind of a reaction to corportization of all things genomic, and have grown from there. I wrote about them a little in my famous Salon article How I Decoded the Human Genome.

Because I’m a total dummy and didn’t look at a map, it took me forever to get there from the place I was staying, one mile away, so I only caught the last twenty minutes of the talk given by Philip Bourne on the occasion of his being named 2009’s Franklin Laureate, by the Bioinformatics Organization — an award named in honor of Ben Franklin, who refused to patent his inventions. I saw virtually none of the show. I attended no sessions, and I didn’t even cruise the exhibit hall. Instead, along with Bioinformtics Organization colleagues Jeff Bizarro and Shailender Nagpal, I staffed our organization’s tiny booth and fielded whatever questions came my way– sometimes fielding them lamely, at which times I was glad to be backstopped by Jeff and Shailender.

Some impressions follow. Because my exposure to the show was so limited, they’re kind of like an image taken by a pinhole camera, so take them for whatever they’re worth. The most interesting part of the whole show, for me, was the discussion with Melina Fan, PhD, founder and executive director of the group Addgene, about which more below.

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Happy Birthday, Pete!

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Sunday afternoon I went to a celebratory sing-along at the Featherstone Art Center in honor of Pete Seeger on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Pete himself was evidently in New York City at a big concert hosted by Bruce Springsteen, peace be upon him, but I am glad that I was where I was.

I’m generally not the sing-along type, but heck, this was a celebration for Pete Seeger! The man’s not only a great champion of liberty, equality, and democracy; he’s also the driving force behind Sing Out!, and who the hell am I to disrespect that? When Pete Seeger says “Sing!”, I sing. I sang as loudly and as well as I was able. Everybody sang. We sounded really good.

The United States of America skated very close to fascism in the 1950’s and 60’s. When most of country was denying or avoiding or hiding in fear from this simple, ugly truth, Pete Seeger was there singing it out to us, standing up to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, accompanying himself on 5-string banjo and smiling like the risen Christ.

It’s not at all clear that we’ve skated away from that hideous “ism” even now. Rather than rant about that, however, (it occurred to me as I was sitting on the floor Sunday, singing like a schoolchild, laughing or crying, or both), maybe I should try to learn a thing or two from the old woodchopping folk singer.

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Republican Bill To Reform FCC Not A Bad Place To Start Discussions.

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There’s an old saying that goes “when it rains, can’t fix the roof; when it don’t rain, the roof don’t need fixin.’” That rather sums up most efforts at government reform. When you’re out of power, you can’t really do anything about it. When you’re in power, it turns out things don’t really need fixing. So no shocker that Joe Barton (R-TX), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, joined by Mr. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), ranking member of the Telecom Subcommittee, have decided to introduce an FCC reform bill now that (a) Democrats control Congress, and (b) Democrats control the FCC. You can find the press release here and the full bill text here.

If political expediency were a mortal sin, however, nothing would ever get done. So it is not enough to simply note that politicians of either party are more apt to want reform when they are on the outside. It is important to examine the bill in its own right. Given that a lot of folks in both parties and in the public interest community would like to see some longstanding issues corrected, and I have opined on the matter myself from time to time, it’s important to consider whether the Barton-Stearns bill makes a good start and a basis for going forward. Remember, we want functional government. If out of power Rs are now in the mood to address real issues and get substantive stuff done, the thing to do is make it easy for them to work together with Ds. Perhaps it will become a habit. OTOH, as Ds have learned over the last several month, agreement for the sake of agreement is not worth doing.

My personal feeling after a quick read is that this bill is not a bad place to start on some long-standing procedural gripes, but that there are a couple of things that worry me.

Details below . . . .

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FCC Announces 2.5 GHz Broadband Radio Service Auction. Who Will Show Up to Fight Over Rules? Or Bid?

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One might think from the press coverage that all spectrum auctions are multi-billion dollar affairs like the AWS-1 Auction in ’06 or the 700 MHz Auction in ’08. But these auctions are the exception rather than the rule. More typical are the steady stream of small auctions like Auction 78, which auctioned remaining licenses in the AWS-1 band.

Which brings us to the Wireless Bureau’s Public Notice of the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) auction. Some of us have followed the adventures of the 2.5 GHz band back when it was “Wireless Cable” and the non-commercial licensees used it to offer closed circuit television for what we now call distance learning. These days of course, we know this as the “Broadband Radio Service” (BRS) and the “Educational Broadband Radio Service” (EBRS), and we care about the 2.5 GHz band as the home of Clearwire and the great hope of WiMax.

You might think that the “WiMax” auction would be a big deal — but only if you don’t know the band, its history, and the inventory up for auction. If you know that, you know why this auction is likely to prove as boring but ploddingly necessary as a run for office supplies.

So why do I consider this worth blogging about, other than my sentimental fondness for the band and my general obsession about things spectrum? Because (a) my cause celebre, anonymous bidding, faces its first post-700 MHz challenge, and (b) 2.5 GHz is the home of the major WiMax plays, and what happens in the auction has the potential to shape the field going forward and influence whether deployment goes more smoothly or gets all bollixed up.

More detail below . . . .

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