Links to cool places or things.
There are 1,530 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 129 of 153).
This is just bizarre:
Fire officials in Bellevue, Wash., have tracked down the apparent culprit in a $200,000 fire to the back of a home and they found that, well, nobody is to blame, KIRO-TV reports.
Turns out that sunshine beaming through a dog’s glass water bowl on a bright sunny day combined to start the fire on the wood deck.
Read more.
Cory Doctorow takes on the telecoms in an article in the Guardian today. Cory talks about the dangers of traffic shaping and why metered billing in ISPs would chill Internet growth. He also reminds us that telecoms are riding high on the public’s dime through the use of public right of way, a point I made here before.
It’s worth a read.
Did you know the City of Raleigh has a wiki page? Neither did I until tonight! Apparently it’s been around since last year. Who knew?
Each department seems to have their own Mediawiki installation, which kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me. If you want to see what’s publicly available, visit the Raleigh wiki site and poke around.
The N&O ran the following story today on the fight to derail H1252/S1004, the [Un-]Level Playing Field Act.
Cable TV fights towns’ fast Web links
The industry backs a bill to impede municipalities offering high-speed service.
By John Murawski – Staff Writer
What started as an experiment in a small tobacco community in Eastern North Carolina has shown how a local government can provide its residents with some of the fastest Internet speeds available anywhere.
Read full article.
Rob Weir provides a great article illustrating how to give a compelling lecture. Very good advice! As an occasional public speaker I will take this to heart.
(h/t Boing Boing)
Fast Company: Time Warner’s Antics in Wilson, N.C. Give Another Reason to Snip the Cable
Alternet: Suck It, Telecoms! Public Broadband Gets Reprieve in North Carolina
Zeropaid: Major Opposition Mounts By Eve of Municiple Broadband Vote
Independent Weekly: Anti-muni broadband bill will go to study committee
Loobin the Tubes: The Playing Field (excellent analysis of the issues and the bill)
Metafilter: The Playing Field
Best Broadband: North Carolina Broadband Bill Shelved – For now — State will study bill’s impact in more detail…
Salisbury Post: Bill to restrict cities’ broadband services sent to study committee
Greensboro News and Record: Municipal wireless bill and studies
Mobilejones: Time Warner Targets North Carolina in War on Consumer Broadband
It’s Samuel Morse’s birthday and in tribute Google has replaced its logo with a morse code version.
As a former Navy code jockey, I appreciate the dots and dashes. Thanks, Google!
While I’ve been blogging about pirates for four years now and have sailed through pirate waters during my time in the Navy, my pirate expertise pales in comparison to the merchant mariners who sail these waters every day.
Below is an email I read last night on one of my email lists. Take it from Captain Bill Doherty, an actual merchant marine captain: this problem won’t be solved easily.
I am an active Merchant Mariner.
Last year I spent the entire year out in those waters on the Maersk Vermont, Maersk Ohio and the President Truman.
It’s very difficult for those who dont have first hand Merchant Marine experience in those waters to get a full appreciation of the situation.
Pirates aren’t new, just their tactics and equipment are. They have better boats, better guns and much more sophisticated electronic guidance systems.
Continue reading
I was checking what programming is available on the satellites and I came across one that caught my eye: The Unemployment Channel.
Think about that for a minute. There is actually a television channel for the unemployed. If there’s a market segment that’s underserved, it’s the people with no money and no job. I imagine only the Prison Channel sells fewer commercial spots!
So who does pay the bills at The Unemployment Channel? Working stiffs (well, non-working stiffs) who pony up $25 for 30 seconds of fame played six times a day for one week. The channel does have a satellite transponder, so theoretically it could reach millions of viewers. But who watches? I can’t imagine a cable provider adding this to their lineup. And why wouldn’t a job seeker just post his or her “video resume” to YouTube, where it can be posted for free and is keyword-searchable?
It seems like a waste of good satellite transponder bandwidth to me. The video resumes they have are fairly amusing, anyway.
Know how I mentioned the Associated Press’s cluelessness when it comes to the Internet? Word comes that the AP threatened a Tennessee radio station when the station posted on its website videos from the AP’s very own YouTube channel. Not only that, the radio station is an AP affiliate!
Going after its own members: there’s a bright business decision. When I said the AP was going to “police itself out of existence,” I didn’t think it would actually police itself!
