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Quasi-muni wireless for Colorado Springs?

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This front page article in today’s Colorado Springs Gazette discusses a proposal for a private company to provide wireless throughout the city. There would be a user fee; it would not be a free service.

This would not be a “Muni wireless” of the kind favored by many of us Wetmechanics, but still, given my recent experiences with Adelphia, (see Wetmachine article below this one (including comments)), I might tend to favor it, on the theory that anything is better than having to rely on the local cable monopoly. Colorado Springs is generally a very conservative town, despite having liberal pockets here and there, and I don’t think a muni wireless would have much chance of passage.

Yesterday’s Gazette carried another front page article about (outrageous?) bonuses paid by the municipal utility company, and the tenor of comments on the Gazette’s website indicates a quasi-religious belief in the virtues of private companies relative to municipalities. And religion is very strong in Colorado Springs.

I would be interested in Harold Feld’s analysis of the proposal for Colorado Springs, and in your comments too-also, even if you are not Harold.

When access to the Internet is a matter of life and death, Adelphia fails it

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I write this hasty note from a friend’s office in Colorado Springs. I’ve been in “the Springs” for going on two weeks, and I hope to get back to my home in Massachusetts some day. I’m staying with my brother and sister-in-law and their young children, trying to help them through a rough patch. Without going into particulars, both parents are fighting for their lives. Think, transfusions and blood counts. Think, paralysis, wheel chairs, emergency rooms. You get the picture.

Last Wednesday, the day after a storm which had knocked out the electricity for ten hours, a technician from Adelphia knocked on the door. “Tech #6” was his name. He informed me that he was going to check things out outside the house. His visit was a little mysterious, since we were having no problems with any service provided by Adelphia, but I said, “fine.” Shortly later he left, after first informing me that he had detected no problem. Ten minutes after the departure of Tech #6 I noticed that the Internet connection no longer worked. I had been working on the internet when he arrived. Everything had been working just fine until then.

Well guess what, friends, the Internet still no longer works at my brother’s house (although cable TV still does). I’ve spent about fifteen hours trying to solve the problem with Adelphia, most of that time spent on hold, and when not on hold, getting conflicting information from Adelphia customer-service people about whether or not there was an outage in the neigborhood, and when we might expect to have our service restored. I’ve been promised “call back within 24 hours” and “call back within the hour” five times. I’ve talked to supervisors and their supervisors. This has been as effective as talking to the wind and its supervisors. We have received no calls back from Adelphia. I’ve explained that there are disabled people in the house who cannot use the telephone and who rely on the Internet for daily consultation with their doctors. I’ve explained that loss of Internet connectivity was coincident with the uninvited arrival of Adelphia Tech #6. Evidently these considerations mean nothing to Adelphia. To borrow a line from Ernestine the Operator, “They don’t care. They don’t have to.” Or as Harold Feld might say, “being a monopoly means never having to say you’re sorry.” Every promise they have made has been broken.

Meanwhile, the loss of Internet connectivity has not only made caring for my brother and sister-in-law downright frightening, it’s made it virtually impossible to keep up with my day job. But, no time to lament that now. The kids will be coming home from school soon, and I better scoot to make sure everything is OK back at the house. But once things get a little bit back to normal, I’m going to investigate what this “filing a complaint with the FCC” business is all about. I hope that it provides a little catharsis, anyway.

Path to 9/11: KMRFSIA

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In re: “The Path to 9/11”, the right-wing mockumentary loosely based on some actual events but with plenty of made-up shit to fill in “the space between the comercials”, I would like to say to ABC, Disney, and to all the political goons of any stripe attempting to capitalize on the upcoming anniversary of the horrible deaths of so many of our fellow citizens– although it must be said that the Disney/ABC goons in this instance are Republican goons — anyway, in the spirit of the Finno-Scots-Irish people I would like to say that ABC/Disney can kiss my royal Finno-Scots-Irish ass.

With a tip o’ the cap to Mike Moran, whose drunken eloquence at the Concert for New York City, which I watched on TV, was so wonderfully cathartic.

Strange Fruit Heartbreaker

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OK I’ll admit that I watch football, NFL (USian) football sometimes, especially now these recent years when my local team the Patriots, also known as the Massachusetts Liberals, have been kicking ass left right and central (and also teams from Texas, such as the Houston Halliburtons and the Dallas Swaggering Ignorami, have generally sucked–an extra bonus).

So I have not been able to avoid noticing that the Rolling Stones will be playing the half-time extravaganza at the SuperDuperBowl this year, because during other NFL games on TV, approximately every three bleeping minutes there’s another “Rolling Stones at SuperDuperBowl” commercial. Which their playing this gig is not a bad thing in itself, I guess, since although the Rolling Stones have indeed intermittently been over the last several decades just what they claimed to be, that is, The Greatest RockaRoll Band inna World, they’ve never been celebrated for their good taste, so why shouldn’t they highlight the world’s largest annual celebration of the aesthetic of kitsch?

But the use of their song “Heartbreaker” to market the SuperDuperBowl is deeply sad and offensive to me. And I don’t mean in the way Led Zep selling Cadillacs or the Who selling whatever, or even Bob Dylan selling investment portfolio management, for the love of Christ, with “The Times They Are A-Changing” is sad and offensive. It’s more as if Billie Holiday were to have used her song Strange Fruit to market Fruit Loops cereal or strawberry Pop Tarts.

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Keep an eye out for Jerry, please

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My friend and former coworker at Laszlo Systems, Jerry Tang, has been missing since the end of November, last seen in his home city of San Francisco. Jerry, a father of two young children, has a seizure disorder and is believed to be without his medications. He has lived in Philadelphia and in Framingham, MA.

More information, including what to do if you see Jerry, can be found here.

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It's beginning to look a lot like Winter Gift Exchange Pretext, and everywhere you go. . .

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Hello-hoh-hoh my little friends! Well it’s that “Happy Holidays” time of year, when folks of good cheer put up the Happy Holidays tree and light the Happy Holidays menorah and go shopping for gifts appropriate to the the function of acknowledging and cementing social relationships that are primarily based on kinship or affection! I love this time of year! Why, just this past weekend my own dear spouse and offspring unit #3 spent two solid days baking Happy Holidays cookies while I dug out the boxes of pagan light-capturing-and-reflecting baubles from their storage spot under the stairs ! Talk abut a cozy scene! And then yesterday it snowed. “I’m dreaming of a White Winter Gift Exchange Pretext” indeed!

In that spirit, let me do a little “Santa’s helper” bit and be so bold as to point out that nothing will brighten up your favorite technoparanoiac’s Winter Gift Exchange Pretext morning more than gift-wrapped, signed copies (more is better than fewer) of my famous , astounding, ultimate hacker, bioparanoid, did I say geeky novel Acts of the Apostles and the metafictional marvel Cheap Complex Devices? You can purchase them from Amazon — but Amazon’s supply is running low and might not be replenished in time for Flying Spahetti Monster day, (or whatever day you celebrate in your house). Why not be sure and order directly from me? (Besides, I make more money this way).

Of if you want to skip the books for whatever reason and just give me a gift to express your gratitude for my hosting Tales of the Sausage Factory, Inventing the Future, and random stuff from the rest of the wetmachiners, include our own Cowboy Neal, Gary Gray, why, just click on the “Give Me Money” button to the left. Or put a check in the mail! That works too. Please understand that selling my books is the way I pay for hosting this site, so if you dig wetmachine I would certainly appreciate the help — not to mention that the books are actually good.

And I’ll be there for Winter Gift Exchange Pretext, if only in my dreams.

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It's the end of the Solar System as we know it, and I feel paranoid.

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Via R Mutt, who posts on Kuro5hin and Husi, I come across this article that postulates that the plutonium propulsion of the Cassini space probe is actually designed as a fission bomb that will explode under atmospheric pressure when it’s crashed into Saturn at the quote, end of its life, unquote.

Since Saturn is all helium and hydrogen anyway, this Cassini fission explosion will start a fusion explosion, and Saturn will become a star (allowing terraforming of its earthlike, Atari-sounding, moon Titan).

The author speculates that Freemasonry may be implicated in this nefarious plot (nefarious in that it’s really not nice to go about rearranging the Solar System without consulting the rest of us humans, espescially since a side effect might be–let’s just say, suboptimal– for Earth), and even quotes Alistair Crowley in his analysis!

Gary, let’s you and I investigate! You handle the space part, I’ll handle the conspiracy part. Everybody else, I suggest stocking up on sunglasses.

Matisyahu Meditation

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I was driving west on the Cross Bronx Expressway, a place that always makes me extremely nervous, with my both hands clenching the wheel, listening to WFUV, Fordham University’s tres cool radio station, when mine ears beheld some wacky dub reggae with a very rock sound and out-a-control singer going on about G-d using very “old testament”-y sounding language. I was quite taken. Three minutes into the song I was screaming, “Yah, Mon! Yah Mon! Rock on muthafucka!” as the guitar solo went stratospheric.

“Who the hell was that?” I asked my invisible car mates when the song ended.

Turns out it was this guy, Matisyahu, nee Matthew Miller, a Hasidic rapper now from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. So I downloaded his album Live At Stubbs, which was recorded at a rock club in Austin, Texas, and listened to it about 10 times yesterday.

Kinda got me thinking about things musical, Jewish, and Brooklyn.

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Get yer Laszlo Mail account

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Sign up here for a free Laszlo Mail account.

I remember the first time I heard of Hotmail. About fifteen years ago a friend of mine mentioned something about her “hotmail account”. This person was known to have a bemused, anthropological, Alfred Kinsey-like interest in social conventions related to sex and sexuality– I remember her photos from the “Museum of Sex” in Amsterdam–so when she mentioned “hotmail” I assumed it was some kind of vaguely kinky service that she used for that part of her life.

In the years since then, web mail has become ubiquitous. Everybody has a hotmail account or a yahoo mail account, or, recently, a gmail account. (I have a yahoo account that I use for this-and-that; my wife lives by her Hotmail account.) Is there a person on earth who doesn’t have a webmail account, or several of them? So why is Laszlo Systems, my employer, introducing Laszlo Mail today? Aren’t we a little late to the party?

The answer to that question, presumably, is that “Laszlo Mail is better”.

If you’re like me, you use your web mail account as a backup. My main mail accounts are at wetmachine.com; I usually use the Apple Macintosh mail client to read them (as well as my mail at Laszlosystems.com). However, if I happen to find myself someplace where I have access to the Internet and I don’t happen to have my Mac with me, I can check my wetmachine mail using the mail client provided by the ISP that hosts wetmachine, I can use Outlook Express to check my Laszlosystems mail, and of course I can read my Yahoo mail the usual way. What these web mal clients have in common is that, relative to the Mac mail client, they suck. Of course, it’s great that I can check my mail from anywhere. That truly is a revolutionary capability, when you think about it. But the user experience — composing, previewing, spellcheckng, managing folders– sucks.

Laszlo Mail does not suck. I’m considering switching to it as my default mail reader on my Mac. Go get yourself an account and see what you think.

Also, and this is the cool part, Laszlo Mail is built using OpenLaszlo, a free, open source platform for making rich internet applications.