Saturday, January 19, 2002

A Hawaiian Slack Key Afternoon: Keola Beamer, Ozzie Kotani and George Kahumoku, Jr.

We went to Borders at Stonestone in San Francisco this afternoon for a delightful concert in the store from these Hawaiian slack key guitar players.

They're playing in Sebastopol tonight and Palo Alto tomorrow night before heading across the US on a tour which ends in New York in February.

I find slack key guitar so relaxing -- close your eyes and you're in the islands! It's truly stress-relieving -- at least for me!

George was a high school teacher in Hawaii and recently moved to Santa Cruz, CA to get his Masters degree. He's also quite a writer. Keola is probably the most famous of the bunch. Ozzie is the precision player -- his just released CD "To Honor a Queen" is fabulous!

[ Comment? [] trackback [] 4:08:26 PM Pacific   ]

ARTS and IXRetail Release XML Price and Digital Receipt Schemas for Retail Industry.

The IXRetail digital receipt XML schema "provides retailers the ability to create, deliver and archive digital receipts using in-store point-of-sale transaction data. The digital receipt is an electronic purchase verification that can be issued by retailers, financial institutions or any other industry that provides consumers proof of purchase. Development of the IXRetail digital receipt standard represents a two-year effort by retail and technology industry leaders through the Digital Receipt Alliance (Office Depot, Home Depot, VISA, NCR, HP-Verifone, Intuit, Microsoft, American Online, and Valicert)."

[ Comment? [] trackback [] 6:49:58 AM Pacific   ]

Grrr! - Broadband in Menlo Park, California SUCKS!

Our AT&T Broadband cable modem has been down for two days. I called AT&T's customer service last night -- they diagnosed it as a problem which will require a truck roll to our home to fix. The earliest they can come is next Thursday morning!

I don't believe this is a problem with our cable modem (which is about 4 years old). I believe this is a connectivity problem someplace upstream from our home and the modem simply isn't getting a signal. The rest of our cable TV works fine (at least, as usual) -- so the cable itself isn't the problem.

AT&T's responsiveness really sucks. But this is a monopoly situation. In our neighborhood, we can only get high speed Internet access from AT&T Broadband. Unfortunately, we live too far from the telco central office to be able to get DSL service to our home. We had ISDN about 8 years ago -- maybe it's time to re-install ISDN -- or to move!

There was an article in yesterday's Wall St. Journal about how broadband is going to be the Bush administration's major tech initiative this year. Unfortunately, I'll bet that nothing is really done about the monopoly environment in which we find ourselves.

[ Comment? [] trackback [] 6:21:38 AM Pacific   ]