Got a comment for Bill Davis of the Grovewood Tavern. One of the best spots in Greater Cleveland is… WiFi. Like the beer, wine, food, and jukebox weren’t enough. I never have tried their coffee…

When Eric Meyer isn’t advocating for web design standards, he’s advocating for a different kind of standards - the musical kind from the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s. I finally got to check it out today. You should too.

Got this in an email from the librarian at Lake Erie College:

As part of Speak Up Day 2003, 210,000 K-12 students submitted surveys on technology and education, sharing their ideas about using technology and the Internet for learning and for fun. NetDay�s analysis of the data reveals interesting findings and themes. Today�s students are very technology savvy, feel strongly about the positive value of technology and rely upon technology as an essential and preferred component of every aspect of their lives.

Nothing like droppin’ an f-bomb on your partners. Reminds me of one of Bruce Sterling’s books, where computers are grown organically. I can’t wait for the day when I can run Linux on a nearly free piece of hardware. Now, if we could only do something about the cost of bandwidth…

Dan Hanson was kind of bummed after last week’s panel of old white men put on by NEOSA and REI@Weatherhead:

“Except for Rickert who saw great promise, especially locally, for nanotech, the others were more sobering. It seemed that many of the things that have to be done to make our community, country and world improve the way they could and should are beyond our control. Self-serving and shortsighted politicians have too much power and are reluctant, if not adamantly opposed, to considering the broader vision and hence, the broader good.”

The discussion on regionalism is going strong on the North East Ohio Ryze Network. Tim Ferris posted an opinion on the attitude Clevelanders have compared to other cities. What do you think? Click through the title and post your opinion [if you’re a member. If not, please join!]

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.” - C. S. Lewis

Interesting watching the Free Culture reading project unfold. People are posting their MP3s on their own sites, and going back to AKMA’s original post to leave the link as a comment.

There’s also a few people who are recording the same chapter. It reminded me of Pattern Recognition, where footage enthusaists take the bits of the film, and order them the way they see fit. I can see people picking and choosing amoung the readers to create their own favorite compilation of Free Culture voices.

From Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling:

“There is no gold standard for civilization. You don’t have roots, you have aerials. Henceforth, O children, you are going to live in a world glued together by networks. Networks consist of two things: connections and nodes. Connections are temporary and flexible, while nodes are persistant and solid. You are the node; the circumstances are the web. You should treat the connections with great flexibility and the node with utmost care and respect. Flexibility and patience are the two virtues that best suit those circumstances.”

Did you have any idea one of the final for the world pizza championship was here in Ohio and four of the 2003 team members were from Ohio? Me neither.

Finally got a flash plugin for Firefox on Fedora Core using this rpm.

My thanks to Guru Labs for providing the MP3 plugin that let XMMS play the Free Content MP3s on Fedore Core.

Looking through a google on who’s linking to me, I found 40 minutes of John Ettorre on blogs.

Is not what happens around the BFD household. While most of you wake up and ease into your day - I jump into the thick of things. After a nice, strong cup of coffee I don’t leisurely sit around the house in my jammies waiting for Meet the Press to come on. I pick up Bruce Stering’s Tomorrow Now.

First thought - Northeast Ohio isn’t ready for Bioscience. Why? [This first part parallel’s what Steve Goldberg is saying]

“We are the raw material. Biotech is us, industrialized. Technology always ‘improves’, but the wisest path forward is a path that allows us to keep making fresh mistakes. When we’re dealing with genetics, the stuff of life, we need to shy strongly away from approaches that are irreparable and can work us into a fatal corner: monocultures, monopolies, and the obliteration of alternatives.”

Do you think the region is ready for that kind of flexibility?

Second thought - One of the reason’s the CMSD is broken is because it’s a relic of a bygone era and doesn’t reflect life or work. Bruce Sterling:

“‘Learning’ is not the center of school life. [Schools] are socializing institutions. They teach children to behave in civilized groups… No matter how clever they are, children are always kept in school till the bell rings. This teaches them to behave in large, bureaucratically organized institutions. They’re also kept there in order to free up the productive time of their parents…Today’s schoolchildren are held to grueling nineteenth century standards. Today’s sucessful adults learn constantly, endlessly developing skills and moving from temporary phase to phase… Children are in training for stable roles in large, paternalistic bureaucracies. These enterprises no longer exist for their parents. One they were everywhere, these classic gold-watch institiutions: railroads, post offices, the old-school military, telephone, gas, and electrical utilities. Please where the competitive landscape was sluggish, where roles where well defined. The educated child became the loyal employee who could sit still, read, write, and add correctly - for thirty years.

That is nothing like what my career is shaping up like. I wonder how much easier/better a time I would have had if the education system actually prepared me for what work in the new millenium would be like? What about you?

Remember when Sunday morning was watching cartoons and westerns? That too, like everything else, is a relic of a bygone day.

Valdis is speaking at a knowledge management event happening this coming Friday out at NASA Glenn Research Center called Communities: Next Practices. The event will “examine communities of practice and learning communities in and across organizations. Communities are networks of people within and sometimes, outside of an organization that come together around a particular topic to collaborate, innovate, address challenges, share what they know, and create new knowledge and information related to that topic.”

Uberblogger AKMA posted an idea and other bloggers responded. The results: a distributed network of MP3’s of people reading chapters of Lawrence Lessig’s new book. In a sort time, I’ll be able to assemble the MP3s, convert them to WAVs, and burn a them to CDs so that I can listen to them in my car. I may even post the ISOs when I’m done.

If you wait long enough, it appears on a blog somewhere…

From Netscape Co-Founder’s 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source:

• “The Internet is powered by open source.”
• “The Internet is the carrier for open source.”
• “The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed.”
• “It’s simply going to be more secure than proprietary software.”
• “Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments.”
• “Incentives around open source include the respect of one’s peers.”
• “Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants.”
• “Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel.”
• “Embedded devices are making greater use of open source.”
• “There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren’t software companies.”
• “Companies are increasingly supporting Linux.”
• “It’s free.”

Want to learn something about economic development? Ask Latinos:

The US is the primary source of remittances Latin American and Caribbean workers sent $38B back home from abroad in 2003, the Inter-American Development Bank believes. The sum is probably an understatement, the IADB says, but is still bigger than foreign direct investment and official aid combined.The vast majority of the money came from workers in the US, with Japan in second place… Globally, experts believe remittance flows could be as much as $150B a year.

What do you think the answer is?

It’s hard to believe that a television network would post rules to a drinking game for one of their shows. Maybe there is hope for television? Nah. Link via Grouse.

Jack, Tisha, Deb, Steve, and I had an interesting conversation about RFID last night over dinner at the Grovewood Tavern.

Today, I find the RFID Weblog linking to BFD when I checked Technorati Link Cosmos.