Bastille goes back and fixes the happy hour menu, a little

I can’t claim the credit, but they have put some of the favorite back on the HH menu, at HH prices. The portions are reduced, and fries no longer come with the lamb burger, but it’s a step in the right direction.

 

Rick Larsen opposes net neutrality

US Representative Rick Larsen, who represents northwest Washington State, Friday signed the anti-net neutrality letter shopped around by the telcos and cable cos.  The letter was shopped around to Democratic reps in the hopes of scaring off FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.  In the letter,  the signers recite a litany of telco lies and misrepresentations.  For example, they attribute the growth of the Internet on ‘regulatory restraint,’ an allusion to the polices of Michael Powell, Reed Hundt and Kevin Martin.  But those policies slowed and eventually destroyed the growth of the Internet, so that now the US has one of the lowest Internet use rates of any developed country.  And the quality of our service is just about the worst in the developed world (slowest, most expensive) , again, thanks to regulatory restraint.

A least one signer has already made signs of his intent to possibly repudiate his signature on the letter. I guess in this age of the Internet, he had received assurances the telcos would block any comments about his signature. They can do that, right? Not yet, Rep. Jared Polis, sorry.  But we know where you want go, now.

It’s a surprise Larsen would sell out to the telco/cableco sock puppets.  His district used to have dozens of independent ISPs.  Now, there are nearly none, and the nascent high-tech industry that was developing in this beautiful area of Washington State is gone.  Larsen’s district suffers from lack of high-speed Internet service; I know because I’ve met with the leaders in the area.  Lack of quality Internet has hampered job creation and made it impossible to create or relocate the kind of jobs that would permit young people to remain in the area.  And the few success stories (Bellingham’s fiber to the industrial park project, San Juan County’s decision to build it themselves) are public efforts to get around the tail-dragging, dishonest, manipulative telcos.  Thanks Rick Larsen, you outed yourself as a telco sock puppet.

 

Bastille’s Chicken Dinner: Save your Money

I went to pick up a take out dinner of chicken from Bastille’s take out menu.  They don’t just accept an order for take-out.  They had to check to see if I could have a take out meal.  Since they are still skitchy about eat-in meals for un, I was pleased when they deemed me OK to have a take out meal.

First, you don’t actually get a half chicken. You get about a third of chicken.  A small breast and part of the thigh.  I assume they use the rest for sandwiches and stock.  The chicken is tender, and tiny, and extremely dry, and undercooked.  Since it is undercooked, you can’t eat all of it.  Potatoes good; the vegetable consist of a pice of onion.  For $18.   This is their signature meal.  I’ll never order it again.  What a waste.

 

Ballard Arson Fire

Well, Tuesday night was happnin’  I was walking back from the bar after a late night drink on the eve of the hottest day ever.  At about 12:15, I heard a women yelling, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. (Above me, it turns out)  As I passed the last wood frame house on Ballard Avenue, I saw a small fire on the side porch.  I tried to stamp it out, but it was a gasoline fire and my little sandals weren’t cutting it.  The woman, Angelique, came down to the street with the fire extinguisher from her building, and another fellow put the fire out with that.  The fire department and the arson squad soon appeared.  Definitely arson, definitely the FD and police are keeping this quiet.  No publicity, no asking for information.  Do they already have a suspect?

 

The end of Android?

I have used the G1 Google phone from T-Mobile for about a month now.  It sucks.  I’ve called T-Mobile several times to try and get rid of this brick.  They are working very hard to stem the tide of givebacks.  Well-documented problems with the Google phone include the following:

1.  The Android OS is not an open system.  It is very much closed, and built on exploiting (read dependent) the existing Google network and apps.  The entire theory of ‘cloud computing’ cannot exist when the ‘cloud’ is unstable, frequently out of order, gimmicky, and lacking many of the standard elements customers expect (like notifications and reminders in calendar).  Power users know this: they want to build to interact with a variety of environments, both on and off the Web.  You cannot do this with the Android OS.   Using the G1 with a Mac is possible, but just barely and you better understand how to code and some quantum physics to get it all working.  And yes, you have to buy more stuff to get it to work.  Try Busymac. 

2. Android lacks a working email application.  The email application (for accessing mail at your ISP) that ships with the phone does not work at all.  Its inoperable.  There is only one other email application you can use, the K9 email client, also developed by Google.  As you can see here , there are hundreds of known issues and major defects  (can’t address an email, can’t ping your server <broken pipe error>, checking email generates hundreds of duplicate emails on the server, etc.)  These defects aren’t even considered important;  they haven’t been worked on in months, and they aren’t even marked ‘critical.’  OTOH, the Gmail app works fine.  Imagine that. 

3.  Very few applications.  At last count, Apple had I think about 14,000 apps in the App Store, and that is with Apple checking them before they go up.  In Google’s open Market, a couple hundred apps is all you have to choose from.  Like the App Store, many of these don’t work, or duplicate other apps (like the dozen or so flashlight apps).  Too bad no one has built an email app that actually works!  They could charge for that.  Also, you can’t read Word or Excel documents (there is an app for that, but it doesn’t work; same drill for pdfs).   You can’t even move apps to your SD card.  Still haven’t figured out why they have an SD slot when you can’t use it. 

4.  Hardware is shit.  Not enough battery life: maybe.  You can get through the day on your G1 if you don’t surf the web too much or use the GPS too much, like to check the traffic on a one hour car trip.  The phone sold to the public is different from the phone given to Google employees.  The real Google phones can access the SD slot, and can tether.  

I can’t see this experiment lasting out the year.  Android has no other phones coming out.  There are rumors, even demos of new phones, but no delivery dates, no manufacturing schedules, and no publicity.  The G1 is likely to be the first and last in the line.  When other carriers get an idea of how hollowed out and empty the Android OS is, I can’t see them staying with it.  Google is quick to drop loser apps and lines of business, and I predict that this will soon be one.  Too bad, IMHO, because it had promise. Google is clearly not throwing enough human energy at this project.

 

Speaking of nocturnal events

In the middle of the night Dec. 17, while was enjoying a sound sleep, Kevin Martin and his evil henchmen awarded 42 newspaper-broadcast cross ownership waivers.  The purpose was to grant waivers under the old rules, before the new even worse rules are voted on today.  By granting waivers under the old rules, Martin hopes to shield these waivers from the inevitable court challenges.

Where are these grants located?  Get a map of likely red-state battlegrounds, layer it over the grant locations, and you have an answer.

 

Another shoe drops: access is necessary for net neutrality

My friends at Public Knowledge recently blogged about attachments or access to the network by devices. This is the third principle of net neutrality, access. See my earlier post above.

I’m glad to see that the three principles are being understood by a wider base. I did not make up the three principles; they are the principles adopted by the EU as early as 1987. But I have been touting net neutrality with my little elevator speech, and I hope it has, in some small way, helped clarify what is net neutrality, and what it’s not.

If federal legislation, again threatened by Rep. Ed Markey, addresses these three principles, and includes an enforcement tool outside the FCC, then we will be in good shape. I haven’t seen Markey’s bill, which is supposed to drop next week.

 

this is how it begins….

I’m finally fulfilling my vanity promise to myself and dipping my stumpy toes into the blogosphere. I guess its expected that I would make some sort of grandiose egotistical pronouncement about how this blog, and only this one, is going to change everything for me, for you, for everyone. I ’spose that’s possible, but not likely. Instead, let me ask you for a few favors. Post in lots of languages other than English. Make comments. Please try and be polite and clever at the same time. Don’t be afraid to disagree with me or other commenters. I’m going to post about a lot of different topics. As I learn more, I hope to be able to sort out the posts into easily navigable categories. The tentative categories include technology policy, telecommunications law, Seattle politics and its endemic corruption, food and wine of course, travel observations, and spiritual and health topics. I hope its interesting, and I’ll learn a lot in the process of reaching out and learning to entertain and inform.