andrew burke
dot
me

about

contact

blog

rss

Almost Famous

Posted on: 2006-04-30

Last weekend I actually had people besides my mother visiting this blog, and today I was in the newspaper.

I was sitting at Lulu Carpenter's coffee shop at the north end of Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz getting some work done when a reporter came by and started asking people questions about wireless access. Turns out various groups are planning to set up municipal wireless across Silicon Valley and into Santa Cruz. We chatted a bit, and told her a story about sitting at 120 Union one day and seeing the fellow next to me desperately looking up virus definitions over the open wireless connection, and presumably infecting every Windows machine in the local network, behind the firewall - sort of like sitting next to someone at the doctor's office with spots and a hideous cough.

I actually made it into the article:

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2006/April/29/local/stories/02local.htm

The print version even has a pretty good picture of me working at my PowerBook. Ironically, i wasn't even connected to the wireless - I used to use the connection at Lulu's a lot, when we first moved out to Santa Cruz and didn't have high speed access at home and I had some big deadlines - but now that I'm no longer working in Notes, I run local servers on my machine. I just like to get out of the apartment.

She also left out the quote that I liked the most - in response to the current ISPs that are worried about losing business, I noted that while you can get water at home for very cheap just by turning a tap, people still buy a lot of bottled water. Free wireless is likely to be slow, flaky, and probably insecure - getting your own connection with high bandwidth and WPA and the like would be worth spending money.

Blogging may not replace journalism, but at least it can supplement it for a blogger's own vanity.

Previous: Pop!Tech
Next: Amazon.com Getting Clever