It's like being in Hawaii with the extended family. Being called "hapa" brings back the memories.

It's been an uphill battle this week with our internet service provider, who has been doing maintenance in this area resulting in major outages for Acorn's Chambana.net datacenter, along with all of the other network services in the building. Between me and my supervisor we've probably spent about 4-5 hours on hold with tech support over the last couple days.

Comment from Rob Heck on July 15, 2007 - 2:17pm

The city of Portland recently paid a private corporation millions of dollars to do something a community wireless project had already been doing for a few years. What a waste of money.. That's great that Urbana is not following along these things of supporting business over grassroots community.

So I just ran across an interesting site, the Librarian's Internet Index. As the name suggests, it is an index of websites organized into categories and then subtopics. Each area contains links and short descriptions of relevant, useful websites. The sites listed have actually been reviewed by librarians and recommended as containing quality information. These aren't just random Google search results. Seems like this could be a useful research tool, especially for folks working with young people in/outside of schools.

The site also offers a "New this Week" email newsletter. Opening of the Oct. 26 newsletter: "This week grow what you know with websites about elections, Halloween festivities, iron ore, invisibility cloaks, federal spending, spider bites, paper cranes, prisons in the UK, and more. Bon appetit from librarians Karen, Wendy, Jennifer, Maria, and Charlotte."

Forgot to mention -

DId anyone catch Moyers on America last week on PBS? It was called "The Net at Risk", very informative. Starts off with what the phone and cable companies promised to do in the 90s with the fiber optic networks. Then proceeds into the net neutrality issue and a whole slew of metaphors to describe the internet and what the phone/cable companies / congress / fcc may do.

Watch for free online!

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/index.html

CUWiN is participating in One Web Day (http://www.onewebday.com), a celebration of the openness and freedom of the Internet and how it has become a major part of our lives. On Friday, September 22, CUWiN will join other community network organizations around the world in celebration and education. CUWiN will be hosting an open house were people can become familar us, what we do, and community wireless network. We will also be designating part of our office space and allowing the use of our LAN for gaming (BYOG -- Bring Your Own Games). The organizers of One Web Day are encouraging people to document their celebration by uploading photos from the day the Flickr, and tagging them with onewebday.

This morning a co-worker placed an article from the July 2006 edition of Communications Engineering and Design Magazine entitled "Net neutrality legislation--my take on it" by Jeffrey Krauss, President of Telecommunications and Technology Policy.

Net Neutrality is an important issue; pending legislation and changing business practices have the potential to dramatically change how we use the Internet. Below I have responded to some of the points Mr. Krauss brought up in the article.

"There's an enormous coalition supporting net neutrality, hundreds of individuals and organizations and companies that I have never heard of. But if you follow the money, you find that it's really Google, Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo! that are behind this campaign."

Yes, there is wide support for Net Neutrality and for good reason. I run several small websites (and am known to browse the web myself), and am happy that Google, Amazon.com, et al are behind the campaign and helping to pay for it. I don't have the money or resources to fight for Net Neutrality as well as they can, so I'm really glad that

Comment from Richard T. Anderson on September 13, 2006 - 9:45am

Wow, that sounds unbelievably complicated. My understanding was this: if those that want net Neutrality get their way then the internet will have two tiers. One you will have to pay lots of money to use, which is where all the useful web content will end up. The other tier will be for poor folk and won't have any thing.

Is this a correct summation? Do I have it backwards?

Also. Would it be possible for us to communicate directly with other CTCVISTA's here. i.e. and email feature. i know you don't want this to get too much like myspace, but it would be convienant to be able to communicate one on one with each other on this site.

Peace,

Richard

Comment from Rebecca White on September 15, 2006 - 7:19pm

yeah, you've got net neutrality backwards: net neutrality means that nothing on the net should have priority; ie, there shouldn't be tiered internet access and networks should treat all data the same, not seperating it into google's data, aol's data, and your data.