Author Archives: ObbieZ

One Laptop per Child

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A friend and reader writes…

I was wondering what you think about the 60 Minutes report in case you missed it

This story has been circulating in the geek press for over a year now. It goes something like this:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is developing a rugged and inexpensive laptop to be distributed to schools around the world, and their goal is to bring the machines’ cost down to 100 dollars apiece. Here is the Wikipedia entry on it. Mainstream America was introduced to the program by a 60 Minutes segment last weekend.

This project is Really Cool for a lot or reasons that weren’t discussed in this report. In a way, it resembles the “put a man on the Moon” project in its stimulation of innovation.

I like the way they’re getting power from hand-cranked generators. I like the use of Open Source software (Imagine if Micro$oft were writing the software for this: it would be expensive and impossible to understand). I like the networking scheme, where the computers all communicate with each other directly, rather than thru a router or a hub.

I worry about what will happen to all of these machines once they get old and worn out. Will they be refurbished or recyled? Or will they end up in dumps, adding to the burden of toxic e-waste? I hope this team is thinking about that.

It can be amazing what people can build, create, or invent once they are provided with adequate tools. That’s why food aid groups hand out things like shovels as well as food. There will be many surprising benefits to come from the spread of these tools of communication, education and invention.

St. Stupid Day Parade video

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Five years later.

Our first “published” video is now out on YouTube. (An iPod-compatible version can be downloaded here.) The St. Stupid Day Parade is an annual event put on by the First Church of the Last Laugh, and it’s a colorful costumed spectacle that mocks consumer culture and the corporate power structure in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district.

Speaking of podcasts, RoZ has been producing a music show for about six weeks now. It’s called Whirling Rainbow, and if you like interesting music that’s new to your ears, you should check it out.

20 inches, with more to come

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Looking at the picture in the previous post, taken early Saturday afternoon, I’m amazed at how little snow there is in the picture, relative to what it looks like now. By Sunday morning, the white canyon you see was filled back up with snow, and the guy with the snowblower only had enough endurance to make one pass down the block, clearing less than half the width of the sidewalk.

By the time I finished clearing the walk, there was nearly an inch of new snow on the spot where I’d started.

And they’re predicting that we get to go thru the same drill Wednesday and Thursday. Sigh.

A Saint Lives in Our Neighborhood

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sidewalk shoveled on our streetNone of this snow was there Friday afternoon. This is what our block looked like early Saturday afternoon.

The saint is the guy on the block with a well-running snowblower. We heard him go by at about 7 am. Most of the time, I get kinda cranky when someone is running noisy machinery that early on a Saturday morning. But I knew what he was up to, and went back to sleep with a feeling of intense gratitude.

This illustrates one of my favorite things about life in small-town Wisconsin: Neighbors look out for each other. Our lots are fairly narrow, so unless one lives on a corner, we are only responsible for about fifty feet of sidewalk. After a small storm, the first one out with the shovel usually clears the neighbor’s sidewalk as well as his/her own.

When the snow is a foot or deeper, clearing that fifty feet of sidewalk by hand is daunting. Mind you, it’s doable, but it’s not the trivial chore presented by lesser storms. But there always seems to be one person on every block with a well-run snowblower who finishes his fifty feet of sidewalk in about five minutes, and decides that it’s not that big of a deal for the well-oiled machine to do the entire block.

As it was, I spent about an hour re-establishing access to our back door, and carving a minimal path to the garage and the alley. So the saint down the street made sure nobody on the block would get fined by the city, but I was left with a lot of work to make our yard functional.

By the way, we woke up to about 12 inches. It let up long enough for the city to pile snowbanks four feet high between our houses and the street. As I write, the weather service has cancelled the Winter Storm Warning. Now we have a Blizzard Warning. By morning, that nice clean sidewalk should have another 10 inches, or the wind will replace everything we moved out of the way with snow drifts, or both.

So the most depressing thing is that tomorrow we get to repeat the shoveling we did today.

What it means so far

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Lightning. Thunder. And eight inches of snow in about five hours.

Never seen summer thunderstorm-type lightning in a snowstorm. Little rumbles, maybe, but not boom-booms like this.

The High Impact Winter Weather Event is far from over.

UPDATE: I was wrong about the eight inches in five hours. I went out with a ruler and measured it, and it was more like ten inches.

A High Impact Winter Weather Event

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That’s what the National Weather Service is predicting for our little neck of the woods.

In a few days, we’ll let you know what that means. Sometimes it’s interesting to read the words that the weather geeks come up with to describe a shitload of wet, blowing snow.

It makes us glad to be car-free.

A Prediction

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In the next several weeks of nooze chatter, we won’t hear about the war, the Libby trial, the dismal state of the economy, the emergency of global warming, or any of the other urgent issues that cry for public attention.

Instead, we’ll incessantly hear about the new soap opera where an astronaut drove 900 miles in diapers to steal the heart of another astronaut from yet another astronaut. If this story involved airline pilots, we’d hear nothing about it except for a little blurb in “weird news.”

This is the new distraction, folks. The infatuated astronaut will dominate the headlines for months to come. Don’t be distracted.

Keep your eye on the ball.

(or, as our dear old friend Molly used to say, “always watch the shell with the pea under it.”)

A Great Progressive Voice is Gone

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Molly Ivins left us today.

I’d write more of a tribute if I had more time tonight. The best tribute I can offer right now is to ask you to click on the link above and peruse some of her columns.

We always looked forward to a new column from Molly. She was fun to read, and she could be amusing, astute and accurate at the same time. She will be missed.

WOW

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That’s the advertising slogan for the new version of Windoze, called “Vista.” The word “Wow” was splashed all over teevee screens, newspapers and web ads on release day.

Wow, as in, “Wow, look how much this software costs!”

“Wow, look how much more memory I’m gonna need!”

“Wow, look how much slower my computer runs with this hog!”

I could continue to write a long series of equally obvious “wow” lines.

I’m sure that’s not what Micro$oft had in mind when their marketing geniasses came up with that slogan.

Hillary, Billary, NOT!

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There are a lot of reasons that Hillary Clinton must not be elected president of the United States. Someone that we read a lot, Bob Harris, presented a laundry list of problems with Hillary, but he missed the most important one: she’s a corporatist.

She’s puts up a progressive facade, but ever since she got elected as a senator from New York, she’s been a whore for Wall Street. Corporate control of our society accellerated during the reign of her husband.

If we end up with another President Clinton, things will not get better for ordinary people. They’ll just get worse a little more slowly.