Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
Our latest site, grwifi.net, is now live. The site is an index of wifi locations in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Such a list was previously maintained on a blog, and then a simple text listing. This new version of the site is searchable, and allows trackbacks for comments.
Hot on the heels of Kava House’s Wifi, Common Ground on East Fulton (note the nice new URLs at grwifi.net) has started to offer free connections. For me, that’s great news as it means there are now two cafes with connectivity within ten minutes’ walk. And the connection seems pretty good too. dslreports.com reports 1167kbps down and 269kbps up and in use it’s felt pretty speedy. There is of course the great selection of music (Mermaid Avenue followed by Patty Griffin thus far) and coffee that is (for me) on a par with Kava. That should keep drawing me in for quite some time. Power outlets are numerous. Quite a few are in use for lamps and the lighting behind a few of the stained glass display pieces, but no-one seemed to mind when I started re-arranging plugs so as to get a socket. ...
With a couple of weeks now between us and the election, it seems everyone involved is on a feedback kick. Moveon have just held their house parties and now the Democratic Party is asking for feedback. I’ve spent the past quarter-hour enjoying the opportunity to hold forth on the numerous mistakes I felt like they made. It’s quite cathartic. My main comments were about language (in a nutshell: “be assertive”) and about my perception of their failure to properly take advantage of local volunteers. I offered to help early on, specifying that I was available during the daytime most days, but the calls were always looking for evening telephone support. I mentioned in the feedback that they should do more to use volunteers outside of the traditional door-knocking/cold-calling/fundraising space. It certainly seems to me like one of the reasons moveon has been so popular is that its members really feel a connection and they’ve utilised skills beyond those. ...
Kari has written up a report on our celebration on October 22nd and Matt now has his photos on the web, thanks to the wonders of flickr.com. Our ‘official’ photos are gradually making their way online. One more batch to sift through and I should be ready to admit to the URLs.
this vs. this.
Eastown has been waiting some time for the installation of Kava House’s wireless internet access. First advertising the impending installation back in July, the proprietors had some trouble getting everything set up. But as of this weekend, it’s all in place. And word has clearly spread quickly, with two other users beating me into the place and reports of others who’ve been dropping by. The connection speed isn’t much to write home about. dslreports.com gives reports of around 463kbps down / 334kbps up, but those seem to vary widely. That aside, the connection seems to be usable for simple work if not heavy downloading. ...
We, like many, have found ourselves granting a probably-undue amount of time to thinking about the ‘religious right’ of late. Having looked hopefully for this year’s election to break the strangehold in which right-wing politics has held evangelical faith in the US, it was a considerable blow to hear report after report on how ’evangelicals’ won the election for Bush. My instinctive reaction was denial, and with reflection I still don’t believe very much of the hyperbole that has surrounded ‘moral’ voting. Certainly gay marriage and abortion were key issues for many voters and there are likely many people who turned out to vote simply because it was their one chance to reconfirm Christianity’s bigotted image (though I suspect they’d phrase it a little differently), but Bush’s win was multi-causal and at least as much the result of the failings of his opponent and the national media as his apparent opposition to gay marriage. ...
On a tangentially related note, I hadn’t been aware that American companies are banned from publishing books by authors in Iran, Cuba and Sudan.. The BBC has the story. The BBC are also to be applauded for making this documentary about Barack Obama available as an MP3. Thanks to City of Sound for the link.
It’s hard to avoid trying to rationalise the voting behaviour of the United States’ population. Whoever wins overall, it looks like Bush will take the popular vote, a thing otherwise inconceivable to most of the rest of the world and a good chunk of those living within the USA. No doubt the coming days will be filled with dissections of voting trends, discussions of whether Osama Bin Laden’s tacit endorsement of Bush helped him at all, and such things. But we’ll all be left groping for answers that aren’t easy to find. ...
By midnight I sensed it was time for sleep. Lying awake with the TV on mute watching the middle of the country turn red was a little too depressing and already it was clear that nothing was going to change before this morning. By 5am sleeplessness declared victory and the laptop brought us the news that, unsurprisingly, everything is still inconclusive. I’m sure it’s not long before the GOP start lambasting Kerry for being “a poor loser” just as they did to Gore four years ago. I’m hanging onto a little hope that the Kerry campaign has the strength to stand up to that and maintain their entirely correct stance that all the votes must be counted. Perhaps they could start by criticising the white house for claiming statistical certainties when the number of provisional votes in Ohio are far from clear. ...