Friday, May 31, 2002

WI-FI access in Berkeley and the East Bay #

I'm excited about the bloggers' lunch we will be having today at Jupiter.  It would have been fun to be able to have CY's virtual presence -- but it turns out that Jupiter doesn't have any wireless internet access.  Surf and Sip provides several outlines in Berkeley.  Lloyd and I were wondering about Starbucks.  I had remembered that Starbucks was planning to wire a lot of its cafes across the U.S.  It turns out that there are quite a few wired-up Starbucks in the Bay Area -- but none in the East Bay!  (See the list and map)  Hmmm.... Well for campus folks, there's always good ol' AirBears -- which is free to us.  We're thinking of gathering at the FSM cafe afterwards to do demos and talk more about blogging. (I'm sorry that Karin, in doing her civic and legal duty, will not be able to join us.)   Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/31/02; 10:38:15 AM from the Unclassified dept. Discuss

Informing friends about the CBDTPA #

Thanks to David Carter-Tod for pointing out DigitalConsumer.org and list of references on the e-clipping mailing list.  I have been following the attempts by Hollywood media moguls to made a copyright land-grab and am deeply worried about it.  I took a look at the Tinsel Town Flash video and thought that it was cute and catchy but wondered whether it really gets the message across to people who know basically nothing about the issue (like most of my friends).  Besides, it doesn't even begin to lay out the issue in a positive way -- which DigitalConsumer.org does.  BTW, I did write to the two California senators about the issue, adapting the letter from the EFF site.  (It's great how EFF makes writing these letters so convenient -- by typing in my address, the website sends me a RTF file that gets loaded into Word.  I just print it out, address two envelopes, stick some stamps on them and off the letters go to D.C.) I'm going to urge my friends and colleagues to take some action too -- but first, I want to get a nice summary of the issue together.  Just sending a link to the Flash video feels a bit propagandistic.   Posted by Raymond Yee on 5/31/02; 8:49:13 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss