eia-wifi and tsa lurve

there are very few times - really - that i get to say this, but i do love iowa. yeah, it's way out in the middle of frikkin nowhere, but i'm able to blog this thanks to the excellent people at eastern iowa airport who provide for free, that's right FREE wifi access. (in the larger love, every rest-area along iowa highways also provide free wifi - ain't that just the best?!)

in more love news, the tsa folk at cedar rapids airport are damn nice. ok, to be completely accurate half of them are damn nice. the other half play bad-cop very well, and are just annoying. as usual our bags needed to get the anal probe thanks to the 30lbs of vitamins that jonii packed. then the security checkpoint anal probe coz i forget that i had 3 oz. of hair gel, toothpaste, and jonii had half a quart of kefir.

but on the kefir note - the tsa guy who probed jonii happened to be from a foreign country (i'll leave specifics out in case a tsa gestapo individual decides to check up on all this). and he loves kefir apparently and suggested that in future she say it's for medical purposes. excellent :-) i'm glad to know that the tsa agents are not completely moronic and brain-dead. the rules are hard enough, but to have to deal with stupidity would just cinch the cake.

anyway, more at the next stop, which will prolly be delhi.

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lessons: vodka + sanbiter + rj

rj says that yahoo email is just gay, and that he just hates using it. yahoo has become our home of spam, and i have to agree with him. basically it's become the email for all practical purposes what we used to do with hotmail. hotmail, meanwhile, has just become the dried up turd. sterile and really not very stimulating.
on an entirely unrelated note, skype is being liked all round. even donald likes skype. all the other chat bullshit is just way to goddam cheesy!

so if we had to put all these up into the fairfield context,
yahoo is like paradiso - the yuppie, yahoo thing. we want to love them, and the potatoes are great on sunday, but the rest of the experience you really don't want to have anything to do with.
2nd street is what we really want - a good dose of consistent mediocrity. but it's sort of like lycos/mailcity maybe. you're not completely annoyed, and it works pretty well. not a dive, and it has some personality. but you want to take a shower after you're done. it's like walking into archie bunker's place. or maybe mel's diner.
but it seems like in the grand coffee scheme of things we still await something on par with google.

so that's what we're in search of - the google of coffee places.

this is the sort of thing you end up discussing when you mix san pellegrino chinotto, sanbitter and ketel one.

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ted sorensen is da man!

i got a chance to watch ted sorenson on c-span's broadcast from the kennedy school a couple of days back, and was hoping to be able to post the show via youtube (but alas youtube appears to be down as of this writing). i never knew sorensen was the force behind kennedy's (that's the president, not the school) speeches. the interview, conducted by jim leach, made me realize just how far down the crapper the US has sunk. to hear sorensen and his thinly veiled digust for the current administration (and pretty much every administration since kennedy's) said much to me about a different class of public servants back in the 60's.
one thing that kept coming up is that sorensen was only 34 when he was charged with writing some of the most important speeches in recent american history (the 13-day war, bay of pigs, kennedy's inaugural address). sorensen himself is somewhat incredulous that he was given this sort of responsibility.
the speech also brings up the craziness of the politics of the time, which closely mirrors what's going on today. dean atkinson (sp?) was jfk's guy who delivered the letters to kruschev. basically he was a very heavy hawk and if he had had his way there would have been nuclear war.
[btw, youtube is back now - so down for 20 minutes! - 12.10p CST]
sorensen says during the interview that kennedy's ability to provide a way for kruschev to not lose face when confronted with the turkey missile issue was instrumental in allowing for a peaceful end to the cuban missile crisis.

-- update: you can download the talk: as a quicktime, mp3, wmv or real file at

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youtube is down?!

as of 11.50am 11/25/07 youtube appears to be down where i am (in fairfield iowa, on mediacom cable). ping responds just fine, but i get

http/1.1 Service Unavailable

from all browsers. there's a theory at the churchofchai that this is because of the youtube republican debate tonight, and the nefarious powers that be have caused youtube to be hoserized.

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Obama smoozes with the googlers

It's impressive that this is the sort of thing that Google even allows - that a presidential candidate can come and present his technology viewpoints at an open forum at a company. Obviously I wish, along with the 100's of thousands of other techie wannabees, I worked for them for at least some time :-)

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