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 Saturday, July 5, 2003
Meetup Over 56,000!. Over 56,000 people are now signed up for Dean Meetups, and the reports about the letter writing to Iowa keep coming in. I can't tear myself away from the pictures of Wednesday night's Meetups. As someone wrote last night, "find 10 minutes this weekend and just look through some of these pictures from last night. the bigger cities like new york and seattle are amazing! and the hundreds of smaller cities are just as incredible.
http://dean2004.meetup.com/photos/recap
seriously, find 10 minutes for this -- these pictures are really amazing
and inspiring. it's 1:30am on thursday night and i've been looking for
over an hour now, and i can't stop." [Blog for America]
This is pretty nifty. You can see digital pictures of some of the huge number of people who attended these on July 2. Only in the digital age could technology provide the tools not only for getting these people together but also allow us to see them all. Here are the Seattle pictures. 11:06:33 PM 
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On the nation’s birthday, hope. Thomas Jefferson is on my mind, as he is every July 4th (I wouldn’t be a good Wahoo otherwise, I suppose). I wonder whether today, looking out at the world, and at his own United States, he would still feel the same as he did in 1821, when he penned the following to John Adams: The flames kindled on the Fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them. And there’s another optimistic note that seems to speak directly to today’s nation: The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes. [Jarrett House North]
Why Jefferson is one of my heroes. I may not agree with all the politics of the Founding Fathers but they sure could turn a phrase! 10:35:39 PM
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Total Information Awareness ju-jitsu. In a neat reversal of the government’s proposed Total Information Awareness scheme, MIT’s Media Lab has launched Open Government Information Awareness. As the FAQ notes: The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government. Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government “by the people, and for the people.” Anyone can submit information, and the system is designed to allow citizens to drill down into their specific areas of interest about government and see everything that’s going on about that particular level of government. Or at least it appears to be designed that way; the server has fallen over under heavy load right now. I look forward to seeing how it shapes up. [Jarrett House North]
As long as we can maintain the right to know all the details of our elected government, we will be able to avoid tyranny. Tyranny thrives when ignorance grows.GIA is needed. 10:34:45 PM
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Incomplete Inconvenience. A few years ago, in one of his many books or essays (I forget which), John Updike said we live "in the age of full convenience." Well, some conveniences are more full than others. Indoor plumbing, for example. Paved roads. Electrical service. "Convenience" sometimes serves as a synonym for toilet. The Net needs to join the portfolio of full conveniences, in the nature of electical service, plumbing, sinks and toilets. Internet fees in hotels and other public places needs to become as declassé as pay toilets. Even in ski resort hotels where the idea isn't to be on the Net anyway. We're talking about necessities here. At least for some of us. You know, like wheelchair access or something. At least that's the way I feel about it at the moment, when I swelter in the hospitality business equivalent of a pay toilet: a locked "Internet Lounge" (Open 24 Hours. Key Access at Front Desk") with two crummy PCs in an unventilated room the size of a bathroom stall. Discredit where due: there's a big noisy box fan on the floor, but it sits behind the door, which you need to leave open, or the room turns into an oven. For this I'm paying $2 for every 15 minutes. I'm only on because the two PCs are fed the Net via DHCP. Or so I discovered when I jacked the Ethernet cable into my laptop. Can't figure the mail server, though. It won't let me use my own email server. I get 550 errors. Their email is some kind of Microsoft Exchange thing. Can't find the server address. Arg. Where else can I go? Hmm.... Information comes up negative or incomplete here, here, here, here, here, here and here (no wireless Starbucks at all in Utah?!?)... I think I'll go on a Wardrive. There's gotta be something... [The Doc Searls Weblog]
I muist be having better luck than Doc. While traveling in a loop from Washington through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon and back to Washington, the only stop that did not have highspeed internet access in the room was at the Lake Lodge in Yellowstone Park. But since they did not even have a phone in the room, I was not too disappointed.
All I had to do was connect the ethernet to my laptop and I was off. One of the places was a Residence Inn by Marriott. I paid $4.95 for unlimited use for 5 days. Not a bad price. The most expensive was $9.95 for 24 hours at a Holiday Inn in Provo, Utah. Again, not too bad, and I get a free hot breakfast with the room. I do agree that it should be like shampoo. Access should be free but there is more upkeep than for hair products. The one place that had free access also charged a lot more for a room. $130 for free access vs $66 but pay $10 a day. Easy choice.
Maybe I was lucky but there were two things I was amazed at in my travels. One was the relatively easy and cheap access to high speed internet access and the other was all the free food. All had free breakfast (scrambled eggs, waffles, toasted bagels, milk, the works) and a couple also had free dinners. It brought out the old graduate student in me (i.e. eat as much free food as possible whenever it is offered.) 10:32:08 PM
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U.S. Unsatisfied with MS Licenses. The U.S. Justice Department tells a federal judge that Microsoft still hasn't fully complied with a key provision in its antitrust settlement with the government. The flap is over the price the company plans to charge competitors to view the inner workings of the Windows program. [Wired News]
WHy am I noy surprised. 10:21:53 PM
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